A favorite family tale goes something like this: In the early 1980s my uncle, the son of working-class Norwegian immigrants, was nervously heading home to Glendale for the first time with his girlfriend, also a child of immigrants, but ones of considerable self-made wealth. My uncle likes to joke that his rich girlfriend (now my aunt) surely felt deflated when, after driving past lovely Craftsman and Victorian homes, they pulled into the driveway of a squat off-white stuccoed bungalow overflowing with multigenerational humanity.
I say multigenerational, because it was first bought by my great-grandparents, and it was my childhood home too, a lifeboat thrown to a newly divorced 20-something mother and her two toddler sons (one of whom was me) at a time when politicians found it fashionable to scold single moms. You’d be forgiven for passing this utterly unimpressive 1,800-square-foot house without a second look, but for decades it was everything to a large family headed by two immigrants who bought it fresh off the boat from Norway (and yes, it was a boat) for $8,500 in 1954.
Today, that house — the one that reeked of cigarette smoke and stiff coffee, with a linoleum kitchen floor, earth-toned walls (or maybe the lighting was just awful) and a shoebox-like addition that heated up to low-oven temperature in the summer — would sell for $1.4 million.
