The Jenkins House
What I Found in a Closet and What It Taught Me About Legacy, Imagination, and Making a Home
Home has always been more than a roof over my head. My childhood home doubled as a classroom, a training facility, a design project, a living dream. A dream not deferred but a dream creatively reimagined. This Father’s Day, I find myself reflecting on my dad, Willie Lee Jenkins Jr., and the lessons he taught me about both building a home and a life.
In an earlier piece, Through My Lens, I wrote about how photography revealed an unexpected connection between my own artistic instincts and my father’s long-buried aspirations. He had once wanted to be an architectural engineer. After graduating from North Carolina A&T State University with a degree in architectural engineering, he couldn’t find work in the field—“None of the white firms would hire me,” he told me. Ultimately, he would continue his education at New Jersey Institute of Technology and become a software engineer instead. Steady, practical, secure, but not his dream.
That dream resurfaced when I discovered a trove of his old architectural plans in a closet—community blueprints, sketches of homes, schools, entire neighborhoods he had once imagined into existence. I had them digitized. Then rendered. And finally, brought them to life on a screen for him to walk through with his grandkids. Watching him light up, narrating the designs and the long-silent blueprints he hadn’t spoken about in decades, reminded me that dreams don’t die, they just wait for oxygen.
And that’s exactly what our home provided him and us — oxygen.
The house I grew up in, nestled in Piscataway, New Jersey, is the same house my father was raised in. Bought by my grandparents in the ’60s, it has welcomed four generations through its doors. That home didn’t just shelter us, it shaped us. It raised me, my two brothers, and now our kids. And it trained us.
Literally.
My dad took a backyard with a tree, a swing set, and an old clothesline post, and turned it into a makeshift football training facility. Not with money, but with imagination. He coached me and the other neighborhood boys there—and from that single block emerged three NFL players; myself, Dwayne Gratz, and Steven Miller. That’s the real power of home.
It’s not the square footage. It’s the intention. It’s the design. The possibilities seeded in every corner.
Now, when I look at my dad’s old blueprints, I see his priorities clearly: sustainability, protection, beauty, resourcefulness. Decades before “eco-friendly” was trendy, he was sketching homes that worked with nature, not against it. His vision included green materials, natural energy sources, modest footprints––all tucked away, in the dark, in tubes, in a neglected closet, unseen.
Isn’t that a metaphor for so many of us?
How many dreams have been shelved? How many brilliant ideas are decaying in basements, because we have forgotten their value?
How much intellectual waste do we have mounding around us as we look at other genius with envy?
This Father’s Day, I’m honoring my Dad not just for all he provided, but for the vision he held. I’m committed to breathing life back into those neglected aspirations. His and my own.
Because legacy isn’t merely what we leave behind; it’s what we choose to pick up again.
If you’re sitting on a dream, yours or someone else’s, don’t let it rot away. Tend it. Share it. Reimagine it. Above all, remember it.
Share it with someone who’s helped shape your idea of home. Or drop a comment: What dreams are you trying to pick back up?