Wife Lila and I, newlyweds, watched the moon landing from a bedroom in this apartment at 157-1/2 Morris Ave., in Athens, Ohio. The bedroom was so tiny that the BED barely fit it it. It was cooled by a beat-up old air conditioner that Dad had pulled out of one of his construction trailers.
To call it a dump would be an overstatement. I couldn’t afford a police monitor for the apartment, so I’d park my car where this blue one is, and alligator-clip a pair of wires to the monitor in the car, which was attached to a speaker in the living room.
The area above the garages was divided into two apartments, the two windows at the left were for the living room; the two higher windows to their right were the kitchen. The other two sets of windows belonged to another tenant.
When we moved out, the landlord, a local lawyer, said he was going to keep our damage deposit because of A, B and C. When I complained that those things existed when we moved in, he said, “Sorry, Kid, you should have made note of them.”
About a year later, the lawyer gave me a call. “You shot some photos of a car vs. train crash that could be very helpful to my client,” he said, like we were old pals.
Trust me, I got our deposit back on that deal.
Bob painted the apartment
Photo partner Bob Rogers moved into the place when we moved out. He shot the landlord a deal: you pay for the paint, and I’ll provide the labor. What the landlord didn’t know was that Bob planned to paint the whole interior in a flat black so he could use the walls as photo backgrounds.
I wonder if the person who is living there today ever managed to cover up that black paint?