Assets

 We had a really excellent presentation at the first of our Wednesday evening Lenten lecture series.  We also had an excellent supper brought in from Casa's.  But, about the program.  Pastor Javier Mondragon explained the work of his program 'Bridge of Grace Compassionate Ministries.'  He explained how, over the last 15 years, since he founded a little church in the SE part of Fort Wayne, he has gotten the Mount Vernon Park residents involved in fixing up their neighborhood. What I really appreciated about his program is the very positive approach he took to getting everyone in the area on board. He has been so successful that in 2019 he was named Person of the Year by the Journal Gazette.  You can Google Bridge of Grace for details.  But what really stirred my interest was that the neighborhood he was talking about was where my parents bought their first house when I was two years old, and my father was a foreman on the building crews that built all the new little houses in that area 75 years ago.  They were pre-fab homes with walls and roofs brought in on flatbed trucks.  My father told me that, once the basements were in, they could put up two houses a day.  And they sold fast.  Young families, eligible for the GI bill, were buying like crazy.  Dad's favorite silly remembrance was the day he was finishing the trim work on the side of a house, glanced in the window, and saw a woman on the toilet.  People were moving in fast.  Many years later I listed and sold a house on the same street where we had lived and I was delighted at what good condition it was in.  Those little pre-fabs were built to last.