In the mid-’60s, my husband, Herb, and I lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a graceful apartment building on Commonwealth Avenue in Back Bay. In those days, you could rent for well under $1,000 a month. I think we paid $375. No, I didn’t forget any zeroes. It was $375 a month. Heated. It was an additional $15 a month for parking.
I worked in Cambridge and walked to Mass. Ave. to take the bus to Polaroid, near Central Square. Herb commuted to the North Shore to work at the family business.
Within a few years, there were four of us, and I had left Polaroid, reluctantly, because in those days moms stayed home.
Every morning, I wheeled the baby carriage outside with our firstborn, a girl, sitting on the plank of an improvised stroller. Our son, 14 months younger, would lie flat in the carriage beneath her and rarely saw the light of day. I loved our daily walks down Commonwealth Avenue to the Public Garden, where I would meet other mothers. Sometimes I’d window-shop up and down Newbury Street or picnic by the Charles with my friend Sue and her toddler, Andrea, who lived around the corner on Beacon Street.
One evening, while we were washing dishes, Herb broached the subject of moving to the North Shore and buying our own home. The prospect of giving up city life filled me with anxiety, but Herb was adamant. We started the search.
Every Sunday we dropped the kids off at my parents’ home in Brookline and drove around Salem, Marblehead, Lynn, and Swampscott in our brown 1965 Pontiac. I saw a dozen houses I was ready to buy. Herb was less easily impressed. We argued more than once.
Nearly two years after we started looking, we walked into a turn-of-the-century, four-bedroom, center-entrance Colonial in Swampscott. It sat on a quiet tree-lined street up the hill from Preston Beach. A sunroom bordered the living room, and the ancient kitchen had a pantry hardly touched since its early days. A set of bells over one door waited to beckon the servants who were supposed to be occupying the third floor. They weren’t. There was a half bath on the first floor and a full bath on the second.
It may have been the magnificent turn of the golden yellow gumwood staircase that caught my husband’s eye. Or maybe the gumwood rafters in the living room. He wanted it. It was within our price range, and I was exhausted from the search. We said yes to our realtor, Mrs. Marino.
Unlike how real estate transactions are handled today, we got a chance to sit down with the seller. She was probably in her 70s and wore a lilac blouse with pearls. We sat in the living room. She accepted our offer, and then made a request: “Please promise me you won’t paint the woodwork,’’ she said. She smiled when she spoke, but I could see how much it meant to her.
We hadn’t thought about it, but the request seemed reasonable enough. We agreed.
We moved to the North Shore and never looked back. We didn’t paint the woodwork, of course, and we have never moved.
The preservation of historic properties and the establishment of a historical commission would became my mission in this beautiful little seaside community I grew to love.
Sylvia Belkin, a realtor, lives in Swampscott. Send comments to belkingroup@raveis.com and a 550-word essay on your first home to Address@globe.com. Please note: We do not respond to submissions we won’t pursue.
