I had lunch with two dear friends at Jason’s Deli recently. For some reason, our conversation turned to real estate and housing back in the day. My friend Susie married in 1958 at age 16, and my friend Joann married in 1961 at age 18. Their first homes were rentals, either an apartment or a small house.
My situation was different. I married in 1966 at age 22. We moved into a small home my husband, Bob, had owned for three years. He had decided to invest in real estate because of the game Monopoly.
Huh? Well, while he and his friends spent hours playing the game, he learned the winner was the one who bought the most real estate, collected the most rent, stayed out of jail, didn’t go bankrupt and that you gotta have money to make money so collect $200 for passing “Go.” He saw it could easily apply to real life.
So at age 21, he bought a two-bedroom, one-bath house for $3,500 (about what many Wichitans now pay yearly in property taxes). It sat on a slab of concrete on a half-acre of bare land near the southwest corner of Harry and Webb Road. He had the down payment of $350 in savings, and his credit was good; he made the monthly payments on his 1962 Volkswagen right on time.
The writer’s first house after marriage had a block in East Wichita all to itself. Purchased for $3,500, it sold for twice that four years later.
City limits ended at Woodlawn back then, so the property had no city water and sewer system. Water was hauled in by truck and poured into a holding tank. No sewer system meant that I learned what a cistern and sewer laterals were used for. If you’re old enough to remember when land was being cleared for construction of the Canal Route (I-135), you know that many homes were sold and moved elsewhere, and this was one of them.
Bob had the water and sewer thing all figured out by the time I moved in. And in true Monopoly style, he had been renting the home’s second bedroom to a buddy from work, which helped cover his house payment of around $75 a month.
This was a real no-frills house: no water/dryer hook ups, no storage shed (not that we owned a lawnmower or anything else to put in it). No garage, just a circular dirt driveway that connected to the dirt road that was East Osie Street. Our nearest neighbors were all about a block away.
We’d been living there about a year and half when we got a knock on our door late one evening. It was a real estate agent who wanted to know if we would sell our house because he had a client who had offered $7,000 for it. A 100-percent profit in just the four years Bob had owned it! This Monopoly thing was paying off.
We took the deal and started looking for another home. We settled on an 80-year-old, two-story house on South Wichita Street that came with a small rental home in the backyard. The asking price was $10,000, and the real estate agent sighed and looked annoyed when we offered $7,500, but the seller accepted it. That home is another story.
I don’t know if you learned anything from playing Monopoly but having plenty of the play money was one thing that didn’t apply to real life. The Active Age, too, needs real money to pay the bills and continue mailing you a free issue every month. The cost of postage and printing is currently about $26,000 per month. If you enjoy reading this paper and can help us continue publishing it, your donation will be very much appreciated.
Diana Wolfe is a former board member of The Active Age.
