Eleanor Vance
“We didn't have much, but nobody on our block ever went without a meal somebody else could spare.”
Eleanor Vance grew up on Elm Street in the 1940s, one of six children in a house two doors down from the Chen family’s corner grocery. She recalls a childhood defined by rationing, radio serials on the front porch, and a neighborhood where every adult on the block had informal permission to send a wandering kid home.
After marrying in 1951, she stayed in Lynhaven for the rest of her life, eventually serving on the block association that organized the neighborhood’s first community garden in the early 1970s.