SCHOOL ZONES:
Victoria Avenue School, Remuera Intermediate School, double grammar.
CONTACT:
Verena Ryan, 027 522 0773, or Lisa MacQueen, 021 221 8622, Barfoot & Thompson.
AUCTION:
May 10.
*PLUS CARPORT
It was nothing for the family of legendary NZ Herald sports journalist D.J. Cameron to answer the phone at odd hours.
Someone had to do it and whether it was his wife Val or any of their three children, that phone became a vital lifeline, especially when he was overseaswith a touring sports team.
In France with the All Blacks in the days before email, he once phoned home around 2am because he couldn't get through to the newspaper.
His daughter Fiona Cameron remembers someone grabbing a pen and paper and taking down his copy "probably hoping they'd got the French names down correctly" before phoning it through to the Herald's copytaker.
Of her father, she says, "He was terrible with time zones, although he did get better."
Such was the somewhat unconventional life of Don Cameron, with his national and overseas travel and working hours that included weekend cricket, rugby and yachting coverage.
"We lived at Eden Park and Cornwall Park," says Fiona, who remembers him in the press box and waiting with him outside the changing rooms for that exclusive post-match quote.
For Fiona, a librarian, and her brothers Mark and Adam, family life was one of vibrant creativity.
Don bought this home for his bride-to-be four months ahead of their wedding in October 1958 and they lived here all their married life until ill-health required Val to go into fulltime care.
Don continued living here for some months with Fiona's support before his hospitalisation from ill health and his death in September last year.
Set back from the street down a long driveway, the home is in an established family neighbourhood with trees perfect for children keen on climbing and building tree huts.
"One of the things mum loved about this house was the trees and the privacy," says Fiona.
Val and Don extended, reconfigured and redecorated the original 1924, two-bedroom house as the family's needs changed, retaining its simple layout with the bedrooms along one side and the living areas along the other with the kitchen and bathroom at the back.
They opened out a front bedroom and porch to extend the lounge and the fireside dining area out to the enlarged, covered veranda.
At the same time they added on their front bedroom and Don's home office, known as "The Den", at the top of the front steps.
His books were always within reach of his roll-top pedestal writing desk.
On the top sat his much-travelled portable typewriter, which came in handy as part of his back-up kit during a cricket tour of Zimbabwe when there was no power for the journalists' laptops in the tent that was the press box.
Back home, this front office is where Don wrote several books including his 1998 memoir Someone Had to Do It.
Throughout the years, Val was busy putting her creative stamp on her garden beds and creatively designed paved brick courtyards.
A keen artist, sculptor and craft potter, she worked out of the studio beneath the stand-alone front garage that was built in the 1970s.
