“I was nine in 1954. We had moved into a beautiful new 4000 sq. ft. home that my father designed and built. The majority of the money for the house and lot came from money that my parents had saved from high school age up through their first eleven years of marriage. It was mortgage free when we moved into it in 1952.”

4,000 sq. ft. mortgage free! Who ever heard of such a thing in 2009? The rest of your post makes me miss my own grandfather who was an engineer, who I never knew, and remember what was lost before I was even born.