"As a child, Terrellita Maverick would ride around San Antonio in streetcars. As a great-grandmother, she can still enjoy the view from inside a San Antonio streetcar. Only now, the scenery doesn't change.

The view through the windows of the 94-year-old vehicle, which she calls home, is of a rustic, 6-acre hilltop near Inspiration Hills. It's part of what was once Sunshine Ranch, owned by her Maverick grandparents. Her father, former congressman and San Antonio Mayor Maury Maverick Sr., bought the 42-foot steel car for $25 after its last run in 1932.

"They dragged it up and put it on the rails, and Daddy had men with an acetylene torch cut a hole for the fireplace," she recalls. "My greatest memory is hearing the explosions when they were dynamiting holes for the pecan trees and the oak trees" that surround the streetcarturned-residence.

Inside, seats were removed, wood flooring was installed and the car was wired for plumbing and electricity. Two fluorescent lamps, still in use, were hung from the ceiling. The conductor's and motorman's booths at either end were converted, one into a kitchen and the other into a bathroom. The exterior was painted brown.

Except for the size of the trees and a different color scheme, the streetcar now looks much as it did when it was first converted into a house. Native limestone rockwork still wraps around the lower half of the car, and a 5-foot apron roof still extends over the red concrete patio, which is bordered by wrought-iron fencing taken from the old Maverick grave site and painted white.

Terrellita, a widely traveled videographer, moved into the car she co-owns with her brother, Maury Maverick Jr., in the mid-1970s. Preferring brighter colors, she painted the portion above the rockwork yellow and the projecting porch ceiling blue. Inside, she left alone the domed ceiling and upper windows - painted white to cut down on the light - but painted the walls a warm brick-red and the kitchen shelving blue.

The focal point of the interior is the fireplace that required blowtorches to install. Faced with native limestone, it has a concrete hearth into which are imbedded large commemorative coins of some of Maury Maverick's presidential heroes: Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Roosevelt.

The fireplace and hearth are cluttered with a collection of rustic implements of an earlier day: a copper kettle, an iron stew pot, a ceramic butter churn, a trivet made from horseshoes, a metate and a couple of long-handled metal bed warmers.

Above, on a faux-wood mantel, Terrellita has arranged an eclectic collection of objects ranging from a wasp nest and a shell she found in Greece while scuba diving to a silver powder horn and a decorative tile painted in La Villita while her father was mayor. Similar juxtapositions abound throughout the space.

Though Maury Maverick Sr. has been dead nearly 50 years, he is still very much a presence in the streetcar house that he used as a weekend retreat and place for political gatherings. There is the photograph of him with Franklin Roosevelt. There are his books. And on a small slab that connects the back of the streetcar to a World War II surplus hutment added as a bedroom, there is even an impression of his bare foot.

The slab also has impressions of the bare foot of the house's contractor and of Terrellita herself, signed and dated. Imbedded in the slab are a key to the city, a metal griddle symbolizing hospitality, a horseshoe for good luck, a metal profile of Franklin Roosevelt and pieces of china that belonged to Terrellita's mother, Terrell Maverick Webb.

Terrellita has converted the hutment into a guest room for visiting children and grandchildren and enclosed a small back porch for herself. But most of her time is spent in the streetcar, which serves as sitting room, bath and kitchen.

"There's no feng shui here," she says, amused, of a furniture arrangement that by necessity runs against each wall. "When you live in a streetcar you're up against the wall, redneck mother."

Other than a contemporary sofa, the streetcar furniture is antique, inherited from both sides of her family. It includes a Victorian-style armchair draped with a rebozo, an Empire style two-drawer stand topped with a large antique coffee grinder, sundry straight chairs and an antique table with twisted legs and claw feet. A large brazier, brought from Spain by Terrellita's great aunt, sits on the table. Above the furniture, at window level, Terrellita has solved the problem of too much light coming in too many windows by covering them with an assortment of family photographs and paintings by herself and others. She also has hung a collection of Mexican carved masks, several of which belonged to her father.

In the bathroom, Terrellita dealt with the window situation in a different way. "We didn't want to have curtains, so we just painted the windows," she says, pointing out designs done by herself, her mother and her daughter. Some are abstract, others are floral. Additionally, she has painted a life-size, Gauguin-like nude woman on the wall inside the shower, which has its original talavera tile floor.

When she speaks of the car's folding doors at either end that still use their original pull chains, she marvels, "They still work perfectly. Think how many millions of times they've been opened."

Another door that has seen a lot of action is at the front. It features a custom wrought-iron screen door protector with a longhorn's head.

Just a few steps outside the doors are three other small dwellings, one rented for 35 years by writers Claude and Barbara Stanush, one occupied by nonagenarian Suzie Rodriguez - whose family worked for several generations of the Maverick family - and another used as a short-term rent and guesthouse." (Mary M. Fisher, San Antonio Express-News, March 25, 2006)