1973 - Taylor McMillan

Interviewed by Liz Lindsey on February 17, 2011

My name is Taylor McMillan and I purchased my house at 511 East Jones Street in 1973. So in 2013 I believe that’s 40 years. I just can’t quite believe it. That came home to me just a few weeks ago when a friend of mine from England who I was in graduate school with said he was coming to the United States celebrating his 50th anniversary tour. It seemed incomprehensible to me because I just don’t think in terms of that length of time. Anyway, he came and we celebrated the fact that we had both entered graduate school exactly 50 years earlier. So entered Oakwood almost 40 years ago, not quite. 1973. And we were just talking about the fact that Bill and [Hildred] were my neighbors across the street. Mrs. [Bullard] was my neighbor directly to my right next door. She was a [married] college graduate and basically had lived there all of her life, and I had the good fortune of knowing Mrs. [Bullard] for a few years during my initial residence here. On the other side of me, to the left on Jones Street was Miss Norwood and she was a--, what do we call ladies that never married? Spinster. Anyway, she had--, like I’m an old bachelor. Miss Norwood had had a career in civil service in Washington DC and she came home and remodeled this house next door and made it so--, or her brother helped her, made it so she could rent an apartment or two and support herself in that house. And she was a great neighbor. Some people might call her a busybody but I don’t necessarily subscribe to that position. If one of my tenants inched over and parked in her yard or any of my tenants did something that she did not approve of, she would leave the sweetest note on their windshield of the car. So those were the good old days. When I bought my house I was counsel for the administrative office of the courts in the justice building directly across from the capital. A colleague was just getting married and he was looking for a house, and so at lunchtime one day I rode out with him somewhere--I don’t remember where--to look at houses and we were coming back to the office, and just the day or two before there had been a little article in the paper about Oakwood. I knew nothing about Oakwood. I was living in some awful apartment complex. I think it was called [saw-soo-see], and I said, “Let’s drive through Oakwood. I’d like to see it.” I guess it had been an article about it was undergoing some degree of gentrification or whatnot, and we rode down Jones Street in his car and we came to my house, what I call my house now, and I said, “Stop.” And I felt the house was very striking and by the next day I owned the house. So it was a totally spontaneous, spur of the moment decision…

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