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To the Editor,

About your recent "you might be a JC native if you remember" a house where the PEC building is now". I thought you might be interested in a little more background about that general area.

I’m a little fuzzy about the exact dates, but in the 1920s or early 30s my grandfather, Albert Rose, either traded or bought the whole block in front of the LBJ Building (which at one time was the old hospital and doctor offices when it was first built). He and my grandmother, Alice, live in the red house across the street from the LBJ boyhood home.

My grandpa love to build houses, so first he built the Rose Tourist Court. Which consisted of individual cabins (one bedroom and bath). They were in front of where the hospital was built. He operated them for a while, then he started building houses in earnest! He built on the other corner at the far end of the block across where the Old Mill was located. His daughter and her husband, Mae and Fritz Arrington (my parents), lived there for a number of years. Then he built a house for us where the parking lot of the hospital was located. It was either torn down or moved when they built the hospital.

He was involved in the building of every house that was built on the block. I think the red house, now part of the LBJ compound, was there when he got the block. Most of the houses are still there. A couple may have been moved or torn down as the years have passed.

The last house he had built was one for my folks on Avenue Q in the mid 40s, where they lived until they moved to the JC nursing home in the mid 80s.

Seems, I remember a while back you had a "you might be a JC native if you can remember the Rose Tourist Courts", those of which where my grandpa’s cabins.

Corinne Arrington Bohl