Hidden Plainfield: 'I Remember Mama'

This well-maintained older home reminds me of the TV show.

I love this well-maintained older Plainfield home, one of perhaps hundreds like it scattered around town, because it reminds me of a favorite childhood TV program, 'Mama' (also recalled as 'I Remember Mama').

Set in turn-of-the-century (20th!) San Francisco, the series chronicled the adventures of the Norwegian-American Hansen family. Each week, Mama would open the family album as daughter Katrin's voiceover would say she remembered 'the house on Steiner Street'.

It may have been big to a child's imagination; in reality it was much like the one pictured above, which in their thousands filled immigrant and working-class neighborhoods across America from the 1890s to World War I.

Our example above is quite typical except for one thing: instead of being set cheek-by-jowl with its neighbors (as in Katrin's family album and elsewhere in Plainfield), this one sits magnificently plunked in  the middle of a double lot, making it even more striking.

Dagmar, Nels, Momma, Aunt Jenny and Papa Lars. Katrin, chronicler of the family is missing.

My other memory of the show is that Mama was always taking down a canister of Maxwell House coffee to brew a pot. The Hansen family seems to have run on the stuff, as did our own.

Is that the reason I still drink Maxwell House today, in spite of the glut of blends, grinds and roasts available to the modern upscale tongue?

Do you know where this home is? Answer tomorrow.

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• 'Mama':  "Article" | "YouTube videos" | "FiftiesWeb: Your Retro Source"
  

-- Dan Damon [follow]

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