THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 27, 1994 TAG: 9411240219
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 03 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Town Talk
SOURCE: - Janelle La Bouve
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
All that's left is memories
For his fellow Chesapeake firefighters, it was an important training exercise, but Eric Reddeck didn't want to watch.
For him, it was the end of his boyhood home.
More than 15 firefighters and Emergency Service personnel converged at 1440 Tintern St. well before 9 a.m. on a recent Saturday. The professionals at the scene set the condemned house on fire to practice their firefighting skills.
Although Reddeck wasn't present, his wife Sheryl was. She spent the morning watching and making snapshots of the house she had heard so much about.
The house, only one block from North Battlefield Boulevard was built in 1911. In 1957, when Reddick was 3 years old, his family bought the house and owned it for nearly three decades.
A group of three fire engines, a ladder truck and two Emergency Service vehicles stood by as Reddeck's 83-year-old home, the site of his boyhood memories, was destroyed.
Several times during the morning, the firefighters, working in groups of three, used kerosene to restart the practice blaze. They went through their exercises, then extinguished the fire.
When the firefighters began to tire, the order was given to ``let it go,'' meaning the house would be allowed to burn unhindered.
For nearly an hour, the fire chewed, coughed, spat and popped like a bonfire. Firemen sprayed water from two directions to slow the process and prevent embers from sparking fires across the street at the Cedars Apartment complex.
By 11:25 a.m., little remained of the house other than charred, jutting two-by-fours and a brick chimney.
But it wasn't the destruction of the actual building that really bothered him. It was the passing of the neighborhood that held such memories for him.
``It was home for us,'' said Reddeck. ``Living in the area was more than that, it was like having an extended family. The people who lived in the four or five homes around there were just like family. I could walk into some houses without even knocking on the door.
``It was a rural type of growing up, like it was back in the '40s,'' he said. On their nine acres, Reddeck's family raised cows, chickens and goats.
``We had indoor plumbing, and that was unusual at the time,'' he recalled.
There was a field on the north side of the house, but there were no houses to block the winter's north wind.
``Behind the house there was a little airfield owned by Richard Todd,'' Reddeck said. ``Piper Cubs flew in and out of there. They held air shows, too. The Navy Seal team would come in for parachuting contests.''
``The area was totally different then,'' Reddeck lamented. ``Putting in the interstate during the mid 1960s was really the downturn of that whole area as far as farming was concerned.''
It marked the end of a rural lifestyle that now exists only in memories. ILLUSTRATION: A condemned house on Tintern Street served as a practice site
for firefighters recently.
by CNB