LITTLE ROCK — For a house that had sheltered newlyweds, newborn daughters and newborn grandchildren, a house that had harbored souls happy and sometimes not-so, Rebecca Hochradel’s home didn’t make much of a pile.
Ricky Mitchell needed, in fact, only an hour and five minutes at the controls of a 20,000-pound track hoe on Tuesday to knock down the house, witness to 37 years in the history of one family.
Ricky was finishing what a Waste Management truck started May 25 when it rolled backward down Alvin Street in Little Rock and crashed into Rebecca’s garage.
Rebecca, who was 22 when she moved into the house with her husband of a year, stayed away, but Angela and Jessica, the daughters who grew up there, watched the demolition with Karl Hochradel, their stepfather.
“It was real emotional for them,” Rebecca said on Wednesday. “I knew I wasn’t going to be able to be strong for them. They each kind of did little videos on their phones. I could hear the crashing.
That was plenty for me.”
Rebecca and Karl, who are settling into an apartment to await construction of their new house, took the girls out for dinner Tuesday night.
“We wanted to talk about the good times we had in the house,” Rebecca says. “It was too tough, everyone dealing withtheir own memories, their own thoughts.”
Ricky, an employee of C.W. Edwards Construction and Excavation, spent Wednesday transferring rafters, studs, shingles and cabinets into steel bins.
Once the rubbish is gone, he will dig up the driveway and foundation.
The Hochradels salvaged all the stone from the massive fireplace, most of the rocks from the front yard, and on Monday, before the track hoe arrived, Karl saved roses and lilies of the valley, which he moved to the backyard.
They salvaged some doors and windows, which are leaning against the mobile storage unit that holds most of their earthly belongings.
The towering sycamore, which Rebecca planted when she took newborn Angela home, survived the demolition.
“I do have so much to be thankful for,” Rebecca says. “We have the good memories. And I’m going to - sometime in the near future - be living in a brand-new house.”
On demolition day, Angela’s daughter, Isabela, was fretting that Karl hadn’t cleared this with Rebecca.
“Papa,” Rebecca reports Isabela asked as she watched the house falling down, “does Oma know you’re doing this?”
Once that was settled, the 3-year-old segued to the more important matter: “Are you building it big enough for me to live in?”
Arkansas, Pages 7 on 09/23/2010