I bought my first house in NC in 1980, I had just made Corporal. It was a 3br 1 ba on a 3/4ac corner lot in Jacksonville. It was halfway between Camp Lejeune and the New River Air Station where I was assigned. I paid just over $20,000. The Pie Shaped lot was inside a Dead Man's Curve, and I rented the two extra rooms to two of my shop mates from the Avionics shop who had been renting a really terrible single wide trailer in a noisy trashy trailer park. Their rent, (At half their rate in the trailer park) was 2/3 of my house payment. They paid 2/3 of the utilities and food and we had it made. I was NOT a party animal, they WENT to parties, we didn't throw them. Our neighborhood was a quiet residential neighborhood and we fit in.
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My 65 T-bird is in the carport, the roommate was washing his car in the grass. My other roommate was dating a Colonel's daughter and was gone a lot, until the Colonel found out. Then he wasn't.
In 1982 I got orders to a Search and Rescue Squadron at Kaneohe Marine Corps Air Station in Hawaii, and sold the house in less than a month. I made about $3000 since I priced it to sell. Not bad for the time period.
Funny thing, because of the curve, you could stand in my yard and see these signs.
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They were visible from either leg of the curve. The old retired block layer across the street had the hedge row, and a low decorative brick wall with an intricate pattern hidden in the snow in that pic behind the signs. Two or three times a year, someone would MISS the curve, jump the ditchline, and plow through the hedge row and take out a section of the decorative fence line.
Rather than get upset, the old man would smile.
He would go out and count the hedges he had to replace, measure the length of the brick fence line, and pull out the insurance forms and start filling in the blanks.
The insurance companies were familiar with the process and would cut him a check. He'd drive to the garden center and buy the new plants and plant them. Clean up the busted section of bricks, mix up the mortar, and go behind the house where he had two pallets of brick, and rebuild the decorative fence.
Then deposit the check, and wait for the next 2am crash.
He MADE a decent amount every time it happened. The wall wasn't strong enough to cause injury, but ... he made money and enjoyed the work... so he kept rebuilding the wall.
