hello so I had this childhood home and
you’re thinking yes I had a childhood
home and maybe you had two or three
childhood homes or maybe like my wife
you had 10 or 12 childhood homes because
their father was in the Air Force
but I only had one childhood home and
I’m going to talk about it today but I’m
also going to talk about growing up in
the 50s and 60s and 70s and I’m going to
talk about my hometown and the middle
class and gentrification and I’m gonna
use my family as an example not because
it was unique but because it was so
typical and not to give away the ending
even though it’s in the title of the
talk but we’ve sold our house recently
and I didn’t art projects where I lived
my childhood over again so in 1945 my
father was coming home from Guam after
World War two and my mother was buying a
1922 beach house in the sleepy town of
Manhattan Beach California and there was
a lot of empty lots around there at the
time because living at the beach was
that nearly as desirable as it is today
and she paid fifty four hundred dollars
for it it was furnished with dishes and
plates and things and I asked her about
it one time and she said we didn’t know
how we were going to make the payments
and I thought that was startling and
then my father told me that when he got
home from the war he got a job in the LA
Police Department and he was making $75
a month so they settled in and started a
family and he rose up the ranks to
Detective Sergeant and he was also the
policeman who took crime-scene
photographs and I’m not sure if that’s
where he became interested in
photography or not but I know that he
became a very serious amateur
photographer so much so that he built
this darkroom on top of our house and
this is where he did all of his
photography and
printing and developing that was my
sister in my bedroom downstairs that’s
me on the stairway there and this was
like the original mancave and so I want
to stress how ridiculously average our
family was there was my sister in me
there was my stay-at-home mom the
grandmother lived downstairs from us we
had a cocker spaniel because by law
everyone in America had to own a cocker
spaniel we went on driving vacations in
the station wagon so it was it was so
amazingly typical but the only
difference that I can see between our
family and so many millions of other
post-war families is that my father had
his camera with him at all time and he
took pictures of every event in our
lives every Christmas every birthday
first day of school Boy Scouts Little
League everything was there was this
hyper chronology of our that’s not even
a word but it’s a hyper chronology of
our family and fortunately he was sort
of on a horror spectrum because all
these photographs he took were organized
and dated and cataloged and permanently
preserved in our dark room upstairs for
decades so now I’m going to talk about
gentrification because gentrification is
a as an issue here in San Antonio and
it’s been an issue in Southern
California for decades and there it’s
it’s Alice in Wonderland they don’t even
call it gentrification anymore they call
it ultra fication and I’ll give you an
example when I graduated from high
school in 1970 the average price of a
house in Manhattan Beach was $30,000
five years later it had doubled to
$60,000 five years after that it went to
$100,000 and five years after that it
doubled to $200,000 so the 15 years from
1970 to 1985 went from $30,000 to
$200,000 and it wasn’t stopping there
and I’ll save you some time and cut to
the chase and today at 2018
the average price of a house at
Manhattan Beach is 2.3 million dollars
like a house like that and I’ll give you
another example the first row of houses
at the beach is called the Strand and
our house is two blocks up from the
Strand
while I was doing this project a house
sold down on the Strand nice house 30 by
90-foot lot sold for fifteen million
dollars and they tore it down to build a
bigger house so so back to reality here
my mother died in 1995 and my father
died in the year 2000 and we bought my
sister up that’s not the same dog by the
way is the one that was in life when I
was Daniel Boone anyway my sister rat
and we’ve been renting it out to a
rotating group of surfers and Beach
types for a long time the house was not
in good shape but we’ve been getting
offers on it from people that wanted to
buy the house and they’ve been usually
like offers in the neighborhood of an
armored car full of money and we we
weren’t going to live there and like I
said the house was falling apart and we
knew my father knew before he died that
whoever bought the house was going to
scrape it and build a McMansion there
because that’s what they’ve been doing
for the last 30 years and so in 2015 a
realtor friend of mine called me up and
told us that an identical lot in
Manhattan Beach had just sold for what
sounded to us like Fort Knox so we had
about a five-minute conversation and we
made the decision to sell the house but
this was not an easy decision to make
this house had been in our family for 70
years and I know that doesn’t sound like
a lot in San Antonio but in in the beach
area that’s what passes for a legacy but
as you can see also my father built most
of the house himself all my childhood
memories were from living at this house
my my grandmother died in the studio
apartment downstairs
and my father died in his bed and so
this wasn’t going to be easy so I had it
written in the contract of sales that I
was going to occupy the house for two
months and I was going to do some sort
of art project with it and I didn’t
quite know what that was going to be but
I wanted to I wanted to pay tribute to
the house I wanted to recognize my
father’s photography I wanted to honor
our family history and I wanted friends
and relatives to be able to come over
and share our experiences of growing up
there together so my first idea was that
I was going to take all of those
photographs from upstairs and I was
going to plaster the inside of the house
with it and then I realized that I was
going to be living there and I really
didn’t want to share that experience
with people so then I got the idea that
I could enlarge the photographs and put
them on the outside of the house
wouldn’t that look cool so I been
working with this giant printing company
that’s here in San Antonio and they have
an inkjet printer that prints onto MDO
board which is a waterproof sign
painters prop plywood and so I got
together the photographs and with the
help of my wife we went over the piles
and piles and we found the photographs
that we felt told the story and told the
story of the house and things and so
this is my studio assistant Zack who’s
the best studio assistant in the world
and he came over and we had them printed
and we loaded them up into a truck and
we drove off to California and once we
got here I wasn’t quite sure where
everything was going to go but I it was
kind of like putting together a gigantic
jigsaw puzzle where there was a lot of
visualization about how these square
photos were going to be broken up into
these irregular shapes and it really
made me wish I had paid more attention
in geometry class but fortunately Zack
was a whiz at measurements and so we
worked on it for six days and finished
off and climbed down off the ladder and
there were
112 family photos attached to the
outside of the house so my father was a
very prominent member of the man had
beach community after he after he
retired from the police department he
opened up Sweeney’s hardware store just
a couple blocks away from our house and
he was started out as like a Cub Scout
Pack master and the PTA president and
anyone on to become a city councilman
for 25 years and he was the mayor three
times during that tenure and he was
involved in every committee and
organization and I don’t ever remember a
time you know he was Citizen of the Year
twice and I don’t ever remember a time
when he wasn’t completely involved in
the city activities and so I just I he
knew everybody in town too and and he
had all sorts of friends everyone loved
him and it was sort of a tribute to him
I just wanted his friends to come over
and see this project it was his photos
and his house and so I settled into this
big old empty house with my sad little
twin mattress and I just wanted people
to show up so I even like organized
tours on Wednesday nights and just so I
would force myself to be there for one
thing and then I would have people come
over and hopefully take the tour of the
house so the first people to show up
were from ABC Eyewitness News and they
came down and interviewed me and they
put it on the news that night and I
didn’t see it because I didn’t have a TV
set but I woke up the next morning and
the entire front of our street was
covered with his fans and reporters and
people and this one young lady came
running up to us with her phone and she
says look you’re trending you’re
trending and I said to my wife look
we’re trending to my wife says what does
that mean I said I don’t know but this
woman’s really excited about so I was
trending and the second thing is that
Reuters news service picked up on it and
it went around the world and by that I
mean it was in the newspapers it was in
the newspapers in New Zealand and Sweden
and the Ukraine which I thought was
great but so my massive fan base in the
Ukraine could see it but but anyway my
favorite story is that I had a friend
there’s a brilliant artist in town named
Jennifer dat Chuck who was over in
Europe and she developed a very severe
stomach problem where she had to have
emergency surgery and she was in a
hospital I had done of course I was
oblivious to any of this but anyway I
got a text from her and and the text she
says she says I’m laying here in a
hospital bed in Cracow Poland dying what
the frig am i doing looking at Gary
Sweeney on television in Polish am i
hallucinating but I can’t believe she
recognized through either it’s like I
was in Duran Duran or something but
anyway so so obviously this was the best
send-off I could ever have hoped to give
I I’m only exaggerating slightly when I
tell you that I saw everybody from my
past that I ever wanted to see I saw
people that I hadn’t seen in 50 years
I saw elderly friends of my parents all
customers from the hardware store
former neighbors my high school had a
reunion there I saw people from Cub
Scouts and Boy Scouts in every facet of
my life my seventh grade teacher came to
it my my English teacher from high
school showed up and those were just the
people that I knew there was of course
scores and scores of people that I
didn’t know because I because of the
great publicity that I got from it but
I’ve met a bunch of people and it it
seemed to really strike a chord with
baby boomers because they all seem to
have the same childhood experiences I
had and and also there was a bunch of
people that I met who had this similar
experience of the bittersweet decision
of selling their childhood home and
turn into condos one sweet woman told me
that she it was the nicest thing I heard
she says you’ve done what we all wish we
could have done and so I the house for
two months the month of February and
after that was done my wife came out a
bunch to help me with everything and
Zack came out and we took the photos off
the wall we loaded them into the trucks
and we drove off to Texas so the long
drive home really gave me a chance to
finally catch my breath and look back on
this final farewell and it struck me on
how much of my life this house
represented and it also struck me how
fortunate I was not just in the family
that I had and the place that I grew up
but how fortunate it was that I was even
able to do such a project like this and
bring in all my family and relatives and
friends to relive our childhood memories
so I want to leave you with a quote and
it says I can remember life can only be
understood backwards but it must be
thank you [Applause]
you’re thinking yes I had a childhood
home and maybe you had two or three
childhood homes or maybe like my wife
you had 10 or 12 childhood homes because
their father was in the Air Force
but I only had one childhood home and
I’m going to talk about it today but I’m
also going to talk about growing up in
the 50s and 60s and 70s and I’m going to
talk about my hometown and the middle
class and gentrification and I’m gonna
use my family as an example not because
it was unique but because it was so
typical and not to give away the ending
even though it’s in the title of the
talk but we’ve sold our house recently
and I didn’t art projects where I lived
my childhood over again so in 1945 my
father was coming home from Guam after
World War two and my mother was buying a
1922 beach house in the sleepy town of
Manhattan Beach California and there was
a lot of empty lots around there at the
time because living at the beach was
that nearly as desirable as it is today
and she paid fifty four hundred dollars
for it it was furnished with dishes and
plates and things and I asked her about
it one time and she said we didn’t know
how we were going to make the payments
and I thought that was startling and
then my father told me that when he got
home from the war he got a job in the LA
Police Department and he was making $75
a month so they settled in and started a
family and he rose up the ranks to
Detective Sergeant and he was also the
policeman who took crime-scene
photographs and I’m not sure if that’s
where he became interested in
photography or not but I know that he
became a very serious amateur
photographer so much so that he built
this darkroom on top of our house and
this is where he did all of his
photography and
printing and developing that was my
sister in my bedroom downstairs that’s
me on the stairway there and this was
like the original mancave and so I want
to stress how ridiculously average our
family was there was my sister in me
there was my stay-at-home mom the
grandmother lived downstairs from us we
had a cocker spaniel because by law
everyone in America had to own a cocker
spaniel we went on driving vacations in
the station wagon so it was it was so
amazingly typical but the only
difference that I can see between our
family and so many millions of other
post-war families is that my father had
his camera with him at all time and he
took pictures of every event in our
lives every Christmas every birthday
first day of school Boy Scouts Little
League everything was there was this
hyper chronology of our that’s not even
a word but it’s a hyper chronology of
our family and fortunately he was sort
of on a horror spectrum because all
these photographs he took were organized
and dated and cataloged and permanently
preserved in our dark room upstairs for
decades so now I’m going to talk about
gentrification because gentrification is
a as an issue here in San Antonio and
it’s been an issue in Southern
California for decades and there it’s
it’s Alice in Wonderland they don’t even
call it gentrification anymore they call
it ultra fication and I’ll give you an
example when I graduated from high
school in 1970 the average price of a
house in Manhattan Beach was $30,000
five years later it had doubled to
$60,000 five years after that it went to
$100,000 and five years after that it
doubled to $200,000 so the 15 years from
1970 to 1985 went from $30,000 to
$200,000 and it wasn’t stopping there
and I’ll save you some time and cut to
the chase and today at 2018
the average price of a house at
Manhattan Beach is 2.3 million dollars
like a house like that and I’ll give you
another example the first row of houses
at the beach is called the Strand and
our house is two blocks up from the
Strand
while I was doing this project a house
sold down on the Strand nice house 30 by
90-foot lot sold for fifteen million
dollars and they tore it down to build a
bigger house so so back to reality here
my mother died in 1995 and my father
died in the year 2000 and we bought my
sister up that’s not the same dog by the
way is the one that was in life when I
was Daniel Boone anyway my sister rat
and we’ve been renting it out to a
rotating group of surfers and Beach
types for a long time the house was not
in good shape but we’ve been getting
offers on it from people that wanted to
buy the house and they’ve been usually
like offers in the neighborhood of an
armored car full of money and we we
weren’t going to live there and like I
said the house was falling apart and we
knew my father knew before he died that
whoever bought the house was going to
scrape it and build a McMansion there
because that’s what they’ve been doing
for the last 30 years and so in 2015 a
realtor friend of mine called me up and
told us that an identical lot in
Manhattan Beach had just sold for what
sounded to us like Fort Knox so we had
about a five-minute conversation and we
made the decision to sell the house but
this was not an easy decision to make
this house had been in our family for 70
years and I know that doesn’t sound like
a lot in San Antonio but in in the beach
area that’s what passes for a legacy but
as you can see also my father built most
of the house himself all my childhood
memories were from living at this house
my my grandmother died in the studio
apartment downstairs
and my father died in his bed and so
this wasn’t going to be easy so I had it
written in the contract of sales that I
was going to occupy the house for two
months and I was going to do some sort
of art project with it and I didn’t
quite know what that was going to be but
I wanted to I wanted to pay tribute to
the house I wanted to recognize my
father’s photography I wanted to honor
our family history and I wanted friends
and relatives to be able to come over
and share our experiences of growing up
there together so my first idea was that
I was going to take all of those
photographs from upstairs and I was
going to plaster the inside of the house
with it and then I realized that I was
going to be living there and I really
didn’t want to share that experience
with people so then I got the idea that
I could enlarge the photographs and put
them on the outside of the house
wouldn’t that look cool so I been
working with this giant printing company
that’s here in San Antonio and they have
an inkjet printer that prints onto MDO
board which is a waterproof sign
painters prop plywood and so I got
together the photographs and with the
help of my wife we went over the piles
and piles and we found the photographs
that we felt told the story and told the
story of the house and things and so
this is my studio assistant Zack who’s
the best studio assistant in the world
and he came over and we had them printed
and we loaded them up into a truck and
we drove off to California and once we
got here I wasn’t quite sure where
everything was going to go but I it was
kind of like putting together a gigantic
jigsaw puzzle where there was a lot of
visualization about how these square
photos were going to be broken up into
these irregular shapes and it really
made me wish I had paid more attention
in geometry class but fortunately Zack
was a whiz at measurements and so we
worked on it for six days and finished
off and climbed down off the ladder and
there were
112 family photos attached to the
outside of the house so my father was a
very prominent member of the man had
beach community after he after he
retired from the police department he
opened up Sweeney’s hardware store just
a couple blocks away from our house and
he was started out as like a Cub Scout
Pack master and the PTA president and
anyone on to become a city councilman
for 25 years and he was the mayor three
times during that tenure and he was
involved in every committee and
organization and I don’t ever remember a
time you know he was Citizen of the Year
twice and I don’t ever remember a time
when he wasn’t completely involved in
the city activities and so I just I he
knew everybody in town too and and he
had all sorts of friends everyone loved
him and it was sort of a tribute to him
I just wanted his friends to come over
and see this project it was his photos
and his house and so I settled into this
big old empty house with my sad little
twin mattress and I just wanted people
to show up so I even like organized
tours on Wednesday nights and just so I
would force myself to be there for one
thing and then I would have people come
over and hopefully take the tour of the
house so the first people to show up
were from ABC Eyewitness News and they
came down and interviewed me and they
put it on the news that night and I
didn’t see it because I didn’t have a TV
set but I woke up the next morning and
the entire front of our street was
covered with his fans and reporters and
people and this one young lady came
running up to us with her phone and she
says look you’re trending you’re
trending and I said to my wife look
we’re trending to my wife says what does
that mean I said I don’t know but this
woman’s really excited about so I was
trending and the second thing is that
Reuters news service picked up on it and
it went around the world and by that I
mean it was in the newspapers it was in
the newspapers in New Zealand and Sweden
and the Ukraine which I thought was
great but so my massive fan base in the
Ukraine could see it but but anyway my
favorite story is that I had a friend
there’s a brilliant artist in town named
Jennifer dat Chuck who was over in
Europe and she developed a very severe
stomach problem where she had to have
emergency surgery and she was in a
hospital I had done of course I was
oblivious to any of this but anyway I
got a text from her and and the text she
says she says I’m laying here in a
hospital bed in Cracow Poland dying what
the frig am i doing looking at Gary
Sweeney on television in Polish am i
hallucinating but I can’t believe she
recognized through either it’s like I
was in Duran Duran or something but
anyway so so obviously this was the best
send-off I could ever have hoped to give
I I’m only exaggerating slightly when I
tell you that I saw everybody from my
past that I ever wanted to see I saw
people that I hadn’t seen in 50 years
I saw elderly friends of my parents all
customers from the hardware store
former neighbors my high school had a
reunion there I saw people from Cub
Scouts and Boy Scouts in every facet of
my life my seventh grade teacher came to
it my my English teacher from high
school showed up and those were just the
people that I knew there was of course
scores and scores of people that I
didn’t know because I because of the
great publicity that I got from it but
I’ve met a bunch of people and it it
seemed to really strike a chord with
baby boomers because they all seem to
have the same childhood experiences I
had and and also there was a bunch of
people that I met who had this similar
experience of the bittersweet decision
of selling their childhood home and
turn into condos one sweet woman told me
that she it was the nicest thing I heard
she says you’ve done what we all wish we
could have done and so I the house for
two months the month of February and
after that was done my wife came out a
bunch to help me with everything and
Zack came out and we took the photos off
the wall we loaded them into the trucks
and we drove off to Texas so the long
drive home really gave me a chance to
finally catch my breath and look back on
this final farewell and it struck me on
how much of my life this house
represented and it also struck me how
fortunate I was not just in the family
that I had and the place that I grew up
but how fortunate it was that I was even
able to do such a project like this and
bring in all my family and relatives and
friends to relive our childhood memories
so I want to leave you with a quote and
it says I can remember life can only be
understood backwards but it must be
thank you [Applause]
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