ANAHEIM : Old Homes Tour: Portal to the Past
Gazing wide-eyed at the overflowing collection of antique furniture, a porcelain-face doll, books and knickknacks in the dark, cool parlor of a Victorian-style home, visitor Alma Metz was awash in happy memories.
“They just are blowing my mind,” said Metz, a 39-year Anaheim resident, as she walked through one of the homes on Anaheim’s Vintage Lane, whose owners hosted a house tour this weekend. “I grew up in places like this. It takes me back to my younger days.”
A few dozen people milled about four of the homes on Vintage Lane on Sunday, laughing at the memories of bygone eras and remembering friends and neighbors who originally owned the homes years ago.
The homes are some of Anaheim’s oldest and best-preserved, and many belonged to residents known for their civic activism. Most of the homes had gone into disrepair in the years before their current owners came along.
The owners of some of the homes toured this weekend displayed pictures of the dilapidated structures they bought for almost giveaway prices a few years ago and then transformed into the tributes to history.
Some of the owners paid as little as $50 for their massive two-story houses, which were scattered throughout the central city area, and then relocated them to the historic street which the city set aside for the collection of restored homes. But moving expenses and the costs of renovating the old houses pushed the cost for most owners to well over $200,000.
“I’ve never had the nerve to put pen to paper and add it up,” said Margaret Atkins, who owns an 1897 bungalow-style home in the middle of the block. “I’d rather not know. It’s astounding, and it’s better not to know.”
Ron and Sarah Waltz live with their children at the end of the street in a majestic yellow Colonial Revival two-story house that was built for Ferdinand and Louisa Werder Backs in 1902. Louisa Backs was a member of one of Anaheim’s founding families. Ferdinand Backs was a carpenter and mortician from Germany who opened an undertaking parlor in Anaheim.
Last year, the couple helped Ron’s parents, Ron and Betty Jack Waltz, move a turn-of-the-century Classical Revival house from a central city neighborhood next door to theirs, and the father-son team is now restoring it. For his own home, Ron said, he has tried to collect furniture from families in town, such as the piano from the Hilgenfeld’s, a family that still operates one of the city’s older funeral homes, and the emerald-green parlor couch and chair set from the office of a town physician known only as Dr. Johnson.
“Oh yes, I knew him,” said Dorothy Bradley, a 50-year Anaheim resident who listened as the young Waltz couple brought up names from the past. “I’m an old-timer here. It was 7,500 (population) when we moved here.”
For their own reasons, each of the homeowners has a bent for the past and a desire to preserve it.
“I’ve always been interested in old homes, even as a child,” said Alan Clendenen, who owns one of the homes with his wife, La Del. “One of my favorite quotes is something like, ‘He who is ignorant of the past is blind to the future.’ Maybe this house will have a very small influence on the people who see it.”
