Just a Small Corner

Recently I wrote of our house at the shore. The purchase of it was a drama in itself. The original owner started out with a double lot, side by side lots. When his sons got older, he split the lots in two and gave the original house and lot to his sons. He built a ultramodern place on the extra lot. Unfortunately the sons' wives did not get along and sharing the house led to more fights than sun tans. They stuck with it until they could not stand the bickering any more. They put the house on the market.

We came along, and said we would buy it. All went well and the closing date arrived. We sat happily at the closing with the bank's lawyer and the sons. When the paper signing was over, the lawyer asked if the sons wanted to give us the keys. They did so along with the obligatory hopes that we would have many happy years, etc.

Then followed a long, awkward pause. I didn't know what was going on until one of the sons asked if they didn't get the money then. Calmly, the lawyer folded up his files and casually said, "No, not until you can give the L-s a clear title". It seemed that when the old man gave the kids the house, the garage was one foot by 6 inches over on the father's retained lot. The father was so angry that the sons were selling his gift to them that he refused to sign over the little corner to them so they could sign it over to us.

Stalemate ensued. We got to stay in the house weekends, but we dared not touch or move a thing. The boys had been given 60 days to clear the title and it was soon apparent they couldn't do it. As the deadline approached one Saturday afternoon, the original builder of our(?) house arrived with a crew. In no time they had sawed one side of the garage free. They moved it over six inches, nailed it back, and sawed off the overlap on the adjoining wall.

Like magic, a surveyor appeared and found that our house was no longer on the wrong lot. The sons got their money, we got the house. And the lawyer patted himself on the back.

My Theatrical Successes

In my very young, youth, I fancied myself something of an actor.
Starting in high school, I played the father of Emily in the "Nine Lives of Emily". Emily was played by a beautiful girl named Nan Bowes. She went on to be a successful model and actress. I went on.
Later I played in:
Arsenic and Old Lace
Over 21
The Man who Came to Dinner
and many others I have forgotten - such was my success.

Amateur theater was to suburban life then what soccer is today.

A few notes about my Pop

My father was a quiet man. But his mind was always working. He was a electrical engineer and worked for Bell Laboratories from the time he graduated from college until he retired. His interest was electronics and he spent long nights in the basement putting together radios and phonographs from scratch. Pop never could hear high frequencies. When his interest turned to HiFi he had meters all over his bench which told him if he was successful or not. During the war (II), he didn't anyone what he was working on. He couldn't tell, so he just didn't. Years later I learned that it was the miniaturization of radar so it could be installed on airplanes and such uses.

Although Pop didn't show much emotion, he knew how to have a good time. He was active in the Boy Scouts and enjoyed the hikes. (I have written about the time the snake wrapped itself around his ankle on a hike on the Appalachian Trail.) He would sit on the committees that gave the oral tests for advancement or for merit badges. He was on all sorts of committees and quietly got a lot done for the town.

Nothing discouraged Pop. There is good evidence that he was part American Indian. I used to tease him that I was proud he got his picture on the 5 cent nickel. He would just turn and show his profile. I think that nickel has been out of circulation for years.

Fire Whistles

I'll tell you something that is missing these days - fire whistles. Back in the days when communications were simpler (but after the days of the Indians waving a blanket over a smoky bonfire), there were loud whistles mounted on a telegraph pole outside every fire house. The town was divided into many areas and each area had a unique signal. For instance, ours was 3-pause-3-pause-3. They would toot the "area code" several times so all the volunteers were sure to hear it. This saved them going to the fire house to find out where the fire was. Every year the would publish a list of all the "codes" and areas. Thus, chasing a fire was a much easier and bigger recreation than it is now. Besides, going to a fire didn't interrupt any TV show since there were none of them to interrupt. Now, if ten or fifteen minutes went by and you heard the same signal repeated, it meant "Hey!, this is a big one. All you volunteers who haven't responded, get your butts out here"

At that point, my mother, always the sport, would throw on some clothes and hop in the car and head for the excitement. She would take me if I got to the car in time, but she wouldn't wait for a laggard. I was always embarrassed when my pajama pants showed below my trouser legs. Those were the days!

Cedar Closets

Do they still build houses with cedar closets? In fact, only one of the homes I’ve ever purchased has had one and that was a shore cottage. I think it was older than I was and all the aroma of cedar was long gone. For you of the younger generation, one of the plagues of “olden days” was the wool-eating moth. In Northern climes, wool was the primary fabric for winter clothing. During the warmer parts of the year when woolens were stored, they were vulnerable to moths (or the larvae of said moths). The first lines of defense against the holes caused by these hungry, mini-beasts were mothballs and flakes. Both were typically naphthalene and moth families disliked their odor. They usually found other quarters. This was not an altogether satisfactory solution to the problem because come fall, many folks were required to go to work or church in clothes that smelled strongly of something like cold medication.

The elegant solution was a closet lined with cedar wood planking. Apparently, moths were also put off by the somewhat more pleasant, fragrant (to people) odor of cedar.

Modern science has never proved decisively whether the demise of wool caused the demise of moths. In any event, a famine struck the moth population. Despite its best efforts, science has never succeeded in developing a moth species with an appetite for Orlon.

Herculean Strength - One Day Only

Recently I wrote about the brook that was doing its babbling on two sides of our house and mentioned that in addition to being toxic to our lawn, it also went amok at one time. The rest of the story -- I was at work one summer day when I got a phone call from my wife who was at our shore house. She said she had just received a call from a neighbor who knew her number, but not mine at work. The neighbor wanted us to know that the creek was rising and water was well up in our back yard and approaching the house. I knew it had been raining all day, but I found out soon how hard a rain it was. I left quickly, but ran into road flooding and had to take a circuitous route to get home. It took a while and by the time I got there the water was getting very close to the house.

This to me is the part of that story of that day that I can’t believe even though I know it is true because I was there. With no one to help, I carried all of the furniture out of the room on the ground floor across a hall and up the four steps to the second level of our split-level house. There was a large sofa, two large easy chairs, two large bookcases full of books (I can’t remember how the books got up), our TV (a big old tube type) and the old phonograph-piece of furniture the TV sat on. Also assorted lighter stuff like end tables, floor lamps, a box of children’s toys, etc.

By then the water was coming into the utility room between the wall and the foundation. All my tools were in danger of a drowning, but I had only gotten most of them up to the top of the workbench when I decided there had to be a better way. I slammed the door to the utility room and the rec room and stuffed towels along the door bottoms. (This latter did no good at all.) Then I open the front door and finally the back door. Quickly, water was flowing straight through the house and back to the creek bed out front. However, at least six inches of dirty water did take up residence in the utility room and the rec room even after the storm abated. I hadn’t thought to try to save the rugs and they were a total loss. The next morning I carried them out to the curb for the trash men. I broomed and squee-geed muddy water out of the ground floor all day. Along the way I figured out that it was safe to turn on the furnace fans (no heat). These stayed on for a couple weeks until things dried out.

The downstairs furniture didn’t all get back where it belonged until my wife and kids came home at the end of the summer and helped. I found it too heavy and awkward to handle alone. Our day will never even be a footnote in the history of storms, but it gave me a mystery I never have resolved.

PS. I will not be able to blog for the next week or more. See you soon, I hope.

Justice Can Smell - A Not Nice Story

I believe it was around 1958. I was involved in the formulation of laundry detergents. Some one had the brilliant idea that what the world needed was a detergent with a special deodorizing ingredient. This brainstorm ignored the fact that the simple act of washing soiled fabrics would usually improve their odor. No, we had to have an ingredient that made this product better than any other. To test the product we needed some really stinky something to wash. So each morning a bunch of employees with young babies had to wake the poor baby, change its diaper and take the soiled diaper to work with them where it became a tool of performance evalution.

So I left for the job at 6:30 in the morning with briefcase in one hand and a securely wrapped diaper in the other. On the commuter train the package went into the overhead rack. When the train got to Hoboken, I was half way through the station when I realized I had left the package on the rack. I hurried back to the train, but there was no sign of the diaper. Asking the conductor yielded nothing. Lost and found had no package turned in that morning.

I continued on to the office wishing I could see the thief's face when he found out what he had swiped.