As I write about my memories of Richland and going to school at Elco, some folks tell me they’re amazed at all the details that I can recall, that my memory is truly amazing.

But is it?

When I was doing the series on my mother’s years as a beautician, I wrote about my parents buying the house where she would set up her beauty shop.

Here’s what I wrote in Setting Up Shop:

But they needed to find a suitable house.

I remember going along when they took a look at the house half-way up the hill on West Main Street. The house, or half-a-house as we used to call it, as it was a duplex, was owned by a fellow who, if I recall correctly worked for the Lebanon Daily News. He and his wife had a son who I think was my age, Terry was his name, I think. Or maybe not. My memory is exceedingly vague. Except that Terry, if that was his name, was sort of a goofball.

What I do remember for certain is that the owner was selling his house directly without benefit of a realtor, as I remember him and my parents sitting down at his dining room table and he pulled out a pad and pencil as if he hadn’t even thought about the price, and he seemingly worked out the asking price right there in front of us.

I distinctly remember him saying, “Seventy five hundred dollars. I don’t see how I can go any lower than that.” 

As far as I know, that’s what my parents paid for their first house. We moved in by the beginning of November.

That was written entirely from memory, although I tried in vain to verify some of the details before publishing it.

But I never stopped trying.

I wasn’t able to find the real estate transaction in the newspaper archives by searching on my father’s name in the October-November 1957 timeframe of the Lebanon Daily News, so I initially thought the day with the transaction might be missing from the archive. But earlier today, I took another look and saw that every issue of that period was there. So there must be some other problem. 

I decided to try searching on some other terms. “Real estate transactions” was useless as was just plain “real estate”, but then I noticed that one word that showed up in all the listings of real estate transactions was “premises”. So “premises” it was.

Even though that gave me well over a hundred hits just for October. Although some of them could be easily skipped.

But October proved fruitless, so I went on to November.

I had gotten to November 20 when I decided that it was a lost cause because we had moved into the house in early November, or so I thought. Perhaps I should back up to September. But I decided to press on. Still, I was just about to give up when I got to November 26 and I saw this:

I have no idea what that blue square with the question mark in it means, I’ve seen it a few times on archived pages. I was about to move on in disgust when my eye noticed “Richland”. And above that “Arlene”. And before her name was “ur J. and”. Could that be my parents, Arthur J. and Arlene K. Troutman?

Only one way to find out. I downloaded the page, which thankfully downloads without the blue square. Here is the relevant part:

That was the transaction I was looking for!

I think I know why a search on “Arthur Troutman” didn’t work. Because his first name was separated too far from his last name. I hadn’t thought to search on my mother’s name. Stupid me!

So now I can fact check what I wrote. I did I little bit of searching on Edwin K. Keath to verify a few details about him and his family.

I wrote that the owner of the house worked for the Lebanon Daily News. Yes, as a matter of fact he did. He worked in the Composing Room. I even found a picture:

I wrote that he had a son named Terry who was goofball. In fact, he had three sons, although one of them was old enough to be out of the house by 1957, but one of them was, in fact, named Terry. Score another one for me. You’ll have to take my word that he was a goofball. By the way, all I meant by that was that he was a class clown type, sort of like Jeff Christ from our class. But I only knew Terry Keath very slightly from that summer at the playground.

And I wrote that the owner quoted a price of seventy five hundred dollars. My parents paid $7200. Perhaps they negotiated. (FYI, that $7200 would be about $82,000 in 2024 dollars.)

Now I also wrote that we moved in by the beginning of November, but this transaction didn’t make the paper until November 26.

I think we can all agree that there would be some delay from the time the transaction was completed until it made its way into the paper, but over three weeks? Probably my memory is a bit off on that bit. We must have moved in sometime in late November, maybe even the beginning of December.

So how would you grade my memory?

I think I’d give it a solid B. Maybe even a B+.

At least in this case.

BTW, I think my remembering Terry’s name is the most remarkable aspect of this as I barely knew him and it’s been 67 years.