2228 Melrose Avenue, Supercharged

 

1. It looks almost the same as it did in 1968, at least as far as my recollection (source). Except for the contemporary landscaping out front, the more modern style of kid's bike, and the size of the trees, this could easily be a time machine. Same color exterior paint. Our unit was on the left. The Abels lived on the right. Both units shared the driveway. That was not such a big deal back then as people had fewer cars, usually only one per family. This was the driveway where, at four years old, I rode my bike onto the street without training wheels. It is also where, on a very hot summer day, I spontaneously "helped" my father by filling up the crankcase of our VW Beetle with water from the house on the side of the house. They were going to Des Moines for the evening to see Doctor Zhivago, as I described in this previous post.

2. Back yard of the Melrose duplex, shared by both units, from the current Zillow listing. There would have been a swing set that we played on, with the Abel girls.  
The trees would have been smaller, as this neighborhood had been developed only within the previous decade. I love love love that there is apparently still no fence to the house behind it! This kind of a situation was not uncommon and was a paradise if you were a kid.

3. Our living room and front windows on Melrose (from the current Zillow listing). The television set on which we watched Star Trek, and, presumably, the first Moon landing in July 1969, was located where the two outlets are seen below the windows. This afternoon I was texting with my sister Kate, and I asked her what was the first house of ours she remembers being in.  She said she has clear picture of standing up in her playpen, probably in Melrose she thought. There were big windows, she said, and I was there as well. I sent her this photo from Zillow asking her if it jogged any memory. She said it feels like the right one.

 

4. From the Des Moines Register August 1, 1968. Limited return engagement. All it would need to be perfect would be a mention of air conditioning in the theater!
Before cinema-quality digital projection---a fairly recent innovation--any movie's distribution around the country was limited by the number of prints that circulated, being sent directly from one theater to the next one in a special box and and with special labels by the distributor. It might take weeks for a print to reach a theater in Ames. Typically movies in Ames had a one-week run, but might be "held over" an extra week if it was a big hit. For a movie to be held over for more than two or three weeks was extraordinary. Six weeks was an eternity. It meant the movie was a blockbuster hit and distributor probably had made extra prints.  
It was common for popular and especially Oscar-winning movies to finish their distribution runs with still a remain demand to see it. Often movies were re-released even several years later (in this case here three years after its initial release in 1965).  This is despite any showings on television, which would, in the case of an epic like David Lean's masterpiece of the Russian revolution, have severely degraded it from the intended experience in a cinema. I myself have never seen Doctor Zhivago in a proper cinema, only on TCM, several times, which a least is uncut and letterboxed, and includes the intermission footage and music as well, as one would have seen in the cinema.

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5. "The Holiday Theater, originally known as the Lincoln Theatre, was a neighborhood cinema located at 3400 SW Ninth Street in Des Moines, Iowa. It opened on May 22, 1936, as the Lincoln Theatre and was renamed the Holiday Theater in December 1956. The theater had a single screen and seated approximately 500 patrons. It closed in the early 1980s due to street widening projects and was subsequently demolished." (ChatGPT, based on https://cinematreasures.org/theaters/24630).

6. The engine compartment of a 1967 VW Beetle. Probably it was a 1600cc engine. This is a standard engine and not supercharged, as we had, but the underlying design is the same.  The oil filler cap is the silver lid with corrugated edges on the middle right side. A supercharger is a device sold in the after market that owners could install themselves. It was a mechanical device driven by the engine that forced extra air into the ignition chambers, providing extra power. I took it upon myself to help my father by unscrewing this cap and placing a garden hose into it with the water turned on. Oil...water. You get the result. Years later I did the same thing to a friend's Honda in Fort Collins in high school, but it turned out ok. Ironically VW engines famously are air-cooled, so there is no radiator and no water involved. Why did I fill the crankcase with water? Perhaps I picked up on the garden hose idea from watching my fill the radiator of one of our other conventional cars before this, of which we had many. Dad was always working on cars. Maybe he had to rebuild the engine of our VW after he got it home--he would certainly remember--but such a thing was not the biggest deal in the world. Many years later I myself rebuilt a VW Beetle engine, in the bitter cold of Chicago in winter. How's that for irony? But that's skipping way, way ahead in the story.