EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

BACK DOORS

It was the evening watch and I had only been sailor in the United States Navy for a few months. It was a small but important base located on a former hotel complex. The fleet admiral housed there. I served with a young Ensign on quarterdeck duty in what once been the hotel lobby. My job was to assist and run errands. That’s when it happened.

A message came in for the Admiral. The ensign took it, folded it into an envelope, wrote the proper note, and told me to take it to the admiral’s quarters.

I did. Right up to the door I went and knocked on the door respectfully. A steward answered and I delivered my assignment.

He took it, looked at me as if I had just crawled from under a kitchen cabinet and said, “In the future, you should use the back door.”

No big deal but I took my time walking back to headquarters thinking. I was a grown man, a white one from a middle-class family. In my entire life, I had never been told to go to the back door of any home.

No big deal, but it made me feel small and think of people I had known, including shipmates, whose parents and grandparents had been told this for their entire lives.

I guess that’s why I don’t hold the town of Savanah, Georgia with such religious ecstasy as my friends and colleagues do.

Oh, I think it must be quite a beautiful place in its central core. I can see why some people make their friends and families travel there for a wedding. It must contain a plethora of significant homes.

But I would always wonder, as I worshipped, if the slaves who made the bricks, produced the lumber for those homes, and built them for whatever pay their owner saw fit had ever been allowed, socially, to use the front doors. 

Living With The Stink

This house we set out to restore on South Broadway in Little Rock originally boasted two bedrooms, a kitchen, and dining room. Oh yes, of course it also had a parlor. I think all houses had a parlor back then. The L-shape embraced a back porch and that created a problem for us once, a real stinking problem.

Mr. and Mrs. Fox, I suppose after the birth of their second child in 1898, must have decided they needed more room. They solved this problem by adding a hallway over what had been the back porch and building an extra bedroom adjacent to it. I’m sure that they saw no need to remove the porch and open the hallway substructure to access from the crawl space.

Fellow preservation nuts: does this sound at all familiar?

Years later, along came Jimmie and Brenda. Then along came a family of rats, rather large rats. I won’t say we resorted to poison for I’m sure that’s not politically acceptable in today’s non-forgiving climate. Why don’t I just say that our thoughts and prayers, among other remedies, resulted in the decision of the last rat standing—the largest one—to make the decision that his final resting place, ere he rose on silver wings to Rodentium, would be in the space between the old back porch and the new hallway.

Call it revenge. Call it immortal payback, Call it our just reward for wishing an evil end to a creature who didn’t fit our concept of a happy world. We simply called it “The Great Stink.”

Having been dispatched into the darkness of the house’s crawl space on numerous occasions, I finally convinced my life’s partner to accompany me. Together, we realized, to our resigned disgust, that the space wherein lay the body of Rattus rigormortus was quite inaccessible to human endeavor.

As all mentally challenged historic preservation people are accustomed, we decided that we must live with the problem. We noticed that friends avoided visiting during meals. Sales people shunned us, as did the religious pamphleteers. Our dogs preferred the backyard, even on chilly days. The city building inspector approved projects based only on our word.

There were disadvantages as well. Meals became sullen affairs, avoided if possible. This was before we discovered Fabreze, so I could only guess as to whether Rattus Odiferous clung to my attire at work along with the plaster dust. Odors create bad dreams as well as other nighttime vexations. Oh yes.

German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, in typical Teutonic eloquence said: “Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich stärker." That, of course, translates into, if I remember my college language class: “That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.”

All I can say is that Friedrich Nietzsche probably never had a dead rat stuck in an inaccessible spot next to his kitchen. Hell, I’ll even bet he never tried to renovate an old house. If he did, that may account for his own death.

A lessor quote by the man maybe fits us better. He said once, “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.”

Well, as another great philosopher, Jethro Bodine, once said when he dropped a boulder on his foot while pursuing a sculptor’s life, we “commenced to suffering.” Suffer through it we did. The rats never came back. Some, not all, of our friends did. What about us?

We learned, that the burdens, trials, and embarrassment of a rat in your life require patience, lots of disinfectant, better regard for future blowback, and the knowledge that “this too shall pass.”

If I've told you once,
I've told you a thousand times:
think before you act.

Monday Memories

Did I ever mention that the 1898 cottage we were restoring back in the late 1970s had 12-foot ceilings? Well it did. I guess you had to when you didn’t have air conditioning. It made for some pretty funny scenes as we look back on it now.

I’ve told you about my pith helmet and how I would don it to hold a sheet of plywood in place on the ceiling long enough to get a nail or screw in place. That pith helmet got me a couple of laughs. I remember I was wearing it once while we worked on a bay window out front. The hat was good for shielding the afternoon sun, something the British colonizers understood well.

This afternoon, as I scraped away layers of nearly a century, I couldn’t help notice two teenage girls walking north on our side of Broadway, enjoying ice cream cones. I stretched out to my full six-feet and struck a manly pose. I heard a snicker and I knew it was Brenda, scraping alongside me. I ignored her and continued to act manly. “What do women,” I thought, “understand about the need to garner and retain respect?”

I sensed that the girls had stopped and were watching. “Here’s a good teaching chance,” I thought, “an enterprising young couple, led by the man of the house—ordained as superior by no less an authority than the Apostle Paul himself—saving a historic house from despair.” I offered a bit of advice to my workmate and then made a long reach, demonstrating my youthful athleticism to the world.

“What’s that?” I heard from the sidewalk. A vague thought passed through my head that, perhaps, it might further their education if one explained the process of removing old paint prior to applying new, so as to lengthen its serviceable life. It could be a “This Old House” version of “The Sermon on the Mount.”

Then I heard it. “Why, that’s the Rhinestone Cowboy,” followed by giggles and footsteps continuing north. I peeked and saw dark legs flashing in harmony with swaying hips. More humiliation followed, a nearer snicker from my own wife, in a blatant mockery of the pater familias. I sullenly scraped, scraping silently as the summer sun settled cruelly over the streets of South Broadway. She snickered sarcastically. “Rhinestone Cowboy,” she said. “Did you hear that?”

Though it’s been over 40 years, I’m still she remembers that insulting sobriquet should I ever suggest that she, as Paul commanded. “keep silent in church or any other situation.”

How I saw myself

How others saw me

Take Time for Repairs

Saturdays remind me of working old houses. We spent enough weekends doing that in our younger days. For some reason, we decided to be exacting on the inside of our little cottage. That required time, patience, and a skill that came with practice, but the greatest of these was time.

That’s why Bob and Maria made us feel so bad. They didn’t take much time at all. They would swoop in, buy one of the historic homes, spend a month on it, and have it ready to sell. That made us feel like a couple of losers. What were we doing wrong that our progress was so slow?

Maybe we were being too careful. We decided, for example, to keep the plaster intact or fix it best we could whenever we could. Replacing it with sheetrock was a pain in the rear. There was a finish layer of plaster, a base layer of plaster, wooden lathes to which the plaster clung, and two by fours that were really two by four. It was hard to make sheetrock a seamless fit. We tried to save as much plaster as we could, but in a few spots, we had no choice.

I wish we could have filmed our little method of putting four by eight slabs of sheetrock on the ceiling, though. I can’t remember exactly how we did it, but it involved a homemade t-support made of two by fours, a tall ladder, and a pith helmet. I found that I could press said helmet onto the sheet while the brace held one end, my young wife held the middle, and I got in a few nails. Jeez.

Anyway, while we were sheet-rocking a ceiling, taping and securing sagging plaster, or breathing the dust of such labors, Bob and Maria (not their real names) would renovate an entire house, sell it, and buy another. People would look at us. Their mouths would not speak. Their eyes, however, would scream, “What’s taking you two so friggin’ long?” We would patch a spot of spalling plaster and smile.

What’s spalling, you ask? Spalling — sometimes incorrectly called spaulding or spalding — is the result of moisture entering the plaster. It forces the surface to peel, pop out, or flake off. It's also known as flaking. It can be fixed fairly easily, but it takes time. How others did it so fast, we had no clue.

Until, that is, we were invited to one of Bob and Maria’s “House Finished” parties. Their secrets for historic preservation on the fast track were revealed to us. Does the term, “half-assed” mean anything to you, as in “half-assed historic preservation?”

I’ll swear there were places where plaster sagged from the ceiling under a fresh coat paint, the designer colors attracting attention away from the lack of basic repairs.

Spalling? They didn’t mind no stinkin’ spalling. A super thick coat of latex paint covered it over to all but eyes that had spent hours skimming and sanding a bad spot so nobody would know it was there.

I still wonder how the buyers of those houses felt when the butcher’s bill came it. Did the sound of a chunk of plaster falling from a ceiling terrify them at night? What happened at locations where receptacle boxes had been placed in holes ripped open with reciprocating saws? Those left plaster lathes unsupported and the plaster “keys” that were to extend through the lathes and hold the plaster in place lying on the floor of the wall cavity.

Who will ever know? Bob and Maria left town after half a dozen of their highly-lauded renovations, their reputations as master builders still intact. I think their legendary status remains in the minds of some folks to this day.

Meantime, we patched, sanded, skimmed, sanded again, primed, painted and cussed. We got good at it all, especially the cussing.            

This won't take long, not long at all.

Saturdays in the City

Saturday mornings were special in our South Broadway neighborhood in Little Rock back in the 1970s. The afternoons waited for more anguish in renovating homes, but mornings were a time for a soft, gentle re-entry into life.

Our neo-hippie neighbor across the alley would start things about the time the last family started moving about. Majestic tones of a symphony would drift through the area, something beautiful but largely unknown, like the piece composed by Edward Elgar for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. That’s when you knew he had coffee ground for visitors, deep, dark, rich coffee he ordered specially brewed from a small, obscure, company in Seattle called Starbucks. The thought of it would draw one like a tractor beam.

Weekends were also a prime time for discarding unwanted junk. You just put it in the alley and the city would haul it off come the new week. Unless …

Unless our neighborhood scavengers saw it and deemed someone’s else’s junk could be a treasure to a person possessed of high degree of imagination. Brenda and a resident of the last house to the south were the pilferes très excellent. They would meet in the alley to inspect the discarded items that each had placed in the alley and those of other neighbors as well. Sometimes their chatter mixed in the air with the sounds of Mahler.

“Why, the metal in it alone is worth keeping,” one would say.

“It has to be good for something,” the other would say.

“You want it?”

“Yeah, but you can keep it.”

“You can have the next one.”

They were courteous hoarders, these two. During a recent visit nearly 40 years later, a spouse and I agreed that both families still stored items rescued from destruction in that old alley.

Back to Saturdays, sometimes the lady at 22^nd and Broadway would stroll by in her Sunday best, white gloves and all. In all likelihood, she would hand you a present that she had just prepared that morning. It might be an empty chewing gum package wrapped in yarning twine, a tree’s twig with a ribbon, or something equally imaginative. All her gifts were assembled from items picked up during her morning walks. She’d hand it to you, smile with pride, and move on.

Another alley resident was true free-spirit, a nonconformist who, had she thought in those terms, might have considered herself an early feminist. She’s a grandmother now, and writes editorials for a statewide newspaper in what may be the most conservative state in America, no doubt causing waves that reach tsunami level. Good for her.

A couple from down the street might walk by and nod. I’m not sure what the younger did, but his partner was, for a tragically short period of time, the first openly-gay music director at one of the city’s oldest and most prestigious churches. We never knew where they went after the congregation of Christians voted to terminate him after hearing the news.

At the end of the block, north, was a brick apartment building built behind the house facing Broadway. It was government-subsidized and boasted a diversified group, including a family who spent weekends travelling, with their young children, to far away churches where they spread their form of Christianity. The upper-floor occupants were more transient and sometimes deposited products of their weekend euphoria-spells in the alley. They never bothered anyone, though. “Like Mack and boys,” they tended to their own adventures.

That describes our life pretty well. We had our own little “Cannery Row,” which was nothing more than an obscure alley in a neglected part of town in a City that had been cruelly treated by those who create history. We were simply trying to preserve some of the better remnants of its history.

We’d start back at it just after lunch.

You know there's a dead
rat under the kitchen.
Ain't historic preservation fun?

Happy Hour

Why do people tackle the job of restoring an old home? I don’t know. I plan to write a song about it someday. I’ll call it A Special Kind of Crazy. That sure describes Brenda and me back in the 1970s. Did I ever mention that we were young, dumb, and full of fantasies?

Oh, I’ll confess, there were some bright spots mixed in with all the plaster dust, like the time it rained.

See, I promised once that I would tell you about built-in gutters. For the more sane and fortunate readers who have lived in apartments in adulthood, gutters and downspouts refer to systems that are built into or attached to a structure (or auxiliary structure garage, canopy, etc.) to facilitate the orderly conveyance of rainwater or melting snow from the roof.

Nowadays, gutters are simply metal troughs attached to the eave of a building. They are ugly, functional, almost impossible to keep cleaned, and fairly— son I say “fairly”—easy to replace.

Back in the day when our cottage on South Broadway in Little Rock was built, gutters were built into the roof structure. They were elegant, functional, unobtrusive, subject to deterioration in time, and frighteningly costly to repair, even more so to renovate. Here's sort of how they looked.

This was before the days of purists, so some folks simply put plywood over the gutters, roofed over it all, and then used modern gutters. That would cause an epidemic of apoplexy amongst the “History Police” these days.

At any rate, we were undecided when we called the most prominent roofing company in the Little Rock area to come out and examine the old roofing on our little cottage and provide some cost estimates. Then we would bring our own “experts” in, buy them some beer, and get the benefit of their experience on their own renovations. There would be plenty of time for lengthy discussion over the coming weekend, as two days of heavy rain appeared in the forecast.

Something happened. I’m sure it occurs in the best of companies or families. People failed to talk to one another. A crew from the roofing company appeared Friday morning, removed a section of roofing whereupon they noticed that it was that magic moment in Arkansas when the forces of the Dark One invade the minds of workers and wreak most of the heartbreak that disrupts normal, happy lives. I’m talking, of course, about “quitting time on Friday,” Satan’s Happy Hour.

With a whole section of wooden planking exposed, the crew left and the rains came. By Monday, the floor below, and Brenda’s piano, were soaked. She was looking for her pistol, and I was frantically calling the roofing company.

After much explanation, recrimination, apology, and allowing of “the coffee to cool,” a solution was reached. The original estimate on a new roof would stand, but the work would include, at no cost—son I say “no cost”—to the homeowners, the complete restoration of the built-in gutter system.

That’s how we got the replaced on our home, much to the envy of our friends and neighbors. We never told them the whole story, just let them think we were prosperous and possessed of the purest propensities in preservation. Our motto was, “If you’re gonna do it, do it right.”

Right.

Sometimes I wonder if those gutters still work.

Into each life,
 a little rain must fall.

Old homes. Old friends.

If you’ve ever tried restoring an old home in your spare time, you know about some things. For example, you know about being halfway through a business meeting and realizing that your suit coat has as streak of plaster dust on it. You know how hard it is to do drafting with a thumb that had been assaulted by a hammer the night before. You know the anxiety of wondering if yesterday’s patch job will hold for the day, or will you find it on the floor that evening.

We learned all those things, Brenda and I, at 2107 South Broadway in Little Rock, Arkansas back in the 1970s. What a time.

Perhaps the most comforting thing was to know that your new friends, your neighbors, were going, or had gone through, the same thing. Ah … the neighbors. There weren’t enough “different drummers” for them all to hear. They danced to tunes normal mortals couldn’t fathom. They saw things in their heads that would “make the horses bolt.” They shared two things, though. They all cared very much about old houses and very little about what the world thought of them. They were the types that would never belong to a country club or a “young ladies league.” They were the types that shunned society’s mandates like cats shun baths. If their neighbors were different, they dropped anchor instead of sailing to paler ports. They were the ones who got stared at during family reunions.

We fit right in.

Our home backed onto an alley, a leftover from when cities were designed properly. It was our connecting nerve, the spine that made us neighbors. I won’t describe our new friends individually, as some have evolved by now into what could be classified as specters of respectability. Some, unfortunately, succumbed to the short life span we enjoyed with one another—face-to-face—ere the “cell-phone” era separated folks prematurely. Some moved away and a few became somewhat prominent. The last thing resembling a reunion occurred years ago when our resident “neo-hippie” died and several of us gathered once more at a small apartment in “The Quarter” to rejoice in having known him. His ashes rested in his daughter's car, awaiting transport north while we drank wine and laughed a lot, the way best to remember a departed friend.

We recounted memories. Some talked of his artistry. Someone mentioned his hundreds of phonograph records and his joy at filling the neighborhood with their “wonderfulness” on Saturday mornings. Some recalled the young women from the Arkansas Art Center who would cycle (dual meaning here) through his life in a steady procession. Some recalled his gentle ways and generous manners. Some remembered his simple and complex soul.

I recalled the time I was sitting on the front porch of his house with him. His hair and beard made him look like a happy gnome who had just walked up Masonic and turned west onto Haight, headed for Ashbury instead of enjoying the view of Spring Street in Little Rock. Up the street lived a professional musician who looked more like Charles Manson than did Charles Manson. Across the street was the neighborhood’s elderly grandma who enjoyed sweeping her sidewalks of a morning in her housecoat, never bothering with the inconvenience of buttoning the front. Down the street lived the block’s junk collector and hoarder who kept the alley cleaned of any semi-useful object that had been discarded. There was a halfway house for the "functionally different" near, the neatest and quietest property in the area.

Then there was me, no doubt a psycho from the late war, living with a woman who treated Elm trees for disease with needles, rubber tubes, a strange liquid from Sweden, and a bicycle tire pump.

At that moment, as we enjoyed coffee that my friend ordered back then from some small company in Seattle, a young police officer walked up.

“Have you,” he asked, “seen any strange characters walking the neighborhood?”

“Those were the days, my friends.

We thought they’d never end.”

- Gene Raskin

Good neighbor.
Good friend.

Connections

We had been working on the Victorian cottage on South Broadway for a year or so. It goes without saying that it was more of a job than we’d ever anticipated. But heck, we were young. Invincible. Bulletproof. Indestructible. Undefeatable. Nothing could discourage us, not even the evil vagaries of plaster.

Yes, of course the interior of the house had been plastered, except for a few modern applications. We,  being purists, decided to maintain as much of the plaster as we could. That posed all sorts of problems. In places, the plaster had separated from the lathe work, was loose and near collapse. At other places, cracks let us know of ancient pressures too great to resist. In the corner of a bedroom ceiling, a spot nearly three-feet-square had been damaged and repaired in rather amateurish fashion.

That brings about an interesting story. About that time, someone left a message on our front door stating that a woman who had been born in the house was still alive and living in a Jewish retirement home in Toledo, Ohio. The note included her telephone number. She had been born Brunhilda Fox, raised in the house we now owned, and was delighted to receive the call I made to her the next day.

It was as if a ghost had stopped wandering the house and settled down to visit. She told us about when the house was built, “out in the country.” She mentioned her father’s old suitcase and wondered if it happened still to be in the attic. It was. She told of many things, like getting their first telephone. Her mother had demanded it. She even told us where it had been attached to the wall in a hall. She told us where her father worked and how his boss, Mr. Gans, had chided him for not building a home “in town.”

She told us about the spot in the bedroom ceiling. It seems that her brother and she had been exploring the attic when he stepped through the ceiling and made the spot. They repaired it, but not very well. Sad to say, she reported, her brother died in World War One. But the marks of his youthful over-enthusiasm remained for us to see.

Those “discovering moments” are what makes the trials and tribulations of old-house restoration worthwhile, if only for a moment. The ebb and flow of past lives speak to you as nothing else can. It is invigorating to be a part of it.

I think about that sometimes in a house we own now. In a walk-in closet, marks on a rear wall illustrate the growth in height of the two girls who grew up here. One can see the march of life as their measurements march upwards in the path from childhood to womanhood. I wouldn’t paint over those marks and numbers for anything.

Crazy? Yeah I suppose so.

Nominal, Actual, and Who Cares?

 Before starting to renovate an old house, I wish there were some things we had thought about as to what we were getting into. These were things that we knew full well about, reality things. It wasn’t that we didn’t know about them, we were just to excited about being in the “in-crowd” that we didn’t think. Maybe it was like teenagers having sex.

I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t on the football team.

Anyway, take the size of 2 x 4s for example. I knew all about that, from college. The size of one, back when this house was built, was 2 inches by 4 inches, no big surprise there.

But wait. Somewhere along the line, someone decided that was too simple. Maybe it was due to shrinkage. Maybe not. Here’s one “school answer.”

"Eventually evolution created high production building and high production sawmills. High production builders demanded smooth surfaced lumber to work with, rather than the rough sawn lumber primitive mills had been cranking out. About the same time, dried lumber became popular for its dimensional stability and resistance to mold.

Running the formerly rough cut 2×4 through a planer (to create smooth surfaces) and the drying process created a finished piece of lumber which measured 1-5/8” x 3-5/8”.

In the late 1970’s today’s standard sized 1-1/2” x 3-1/2” dry 2×4 was created. Besides ½ inch being easier to measure than 5/8 inch, we can only assume some brilliant bean counter in a sawmill office determined this would allow the recovery of one extra 2×4 board out of every log."

If it all sounds like bullcrap, welcome to the world of carpentry. Thank goodness we’re not in the restoration “bidness” these days. The 2 x 4’s sold, say, at Home Depot, are planned by trained apes and dried 20 minutes in a modified convection oven. If you can find one that ain’t warped, and you can wipe all the water off, the size can be about anything, another reason to walk carefully.

So what was the problem back in the 1970s when actual friends and neighbors ran lumber yards? Get the picture. You have a nice wall, built by good honest workers back in the 1800s. They are all probably dead by now so you can’t seek their help. You need to replace, say, a ten-foot section. You have braced up the section missing the studs and now you want to “toe-nail” (a particularly demanding and dehumanizing technique developed in Hell by the Forces of Darkness) a few new studs in. No problem, right?

Problem. Right.

How do you line up studs 1-1/2 inch by 3-1/2 inches with studs that are 2 inches x 4 inches? That’s why when you see these “take a sledgehammer to the good and install the cheap and gaudy” TV shows, there are sometimes waves in the walls. They don’t care. We did.

There are several ways that one can make a new 2 by 4 that has that as an actual, not nominal width. None are fun. None contribute to your love of history. None contribute to a stronger marriage.

Sad to say to all my Christian friends, but none make you love the Galilean more.

Now. That was just the simple 2 x 4. Some morning when I’ve had my nerve medicine, I’ll tell you about built-in gutters.

Just a little fixer upper they'll tell you.
Some touch-up here and there.
That's all. Saving history!

Demolition Day

Last time we talked, my young wife and I were selling our suburban home in midtown Little Rock and planned on restoring an 1898 Victorian cottage on South Broadway. The idiocy of youthful enthusiasm combined with the unwariness of the inexperienced had us hoisted sky-high.

Then we had met the Skippers, a lovable and adorable old couple who still had a ton or so of trash in the cottage we were buying. The property closing provided them 60 days to remove their belongings. It presented no problem until we received a nice offer on our existing home.

Drats.

Long story short: we managed to delay the closing on our home until the Skippers’ 60-day period had passed. At the last moment, they enlisted the aid of a nephew, who seemed less than amused about the task, to haul the junk to an undisclosed location. Relations had become a little frayed by then I’m sorry to say, so we never saw this interesting couple again. They never even returned, as they had promised, to place a marker over the grave of their beloved dog “Wiggles.” I can only suppose that the custom-made metal casket still lies buried in the back yard.

Anyway, we moved enough belongings to live in the best bedroom, the bathroom, and kitchen. We stored the rest with the parents-in-law. Fortunately, we had little to worry with in those days, those wonderful days.

A few weeks after moving in, we experienced one of what we now call a “Pepsi Commercial” days. Older readers will remember the series of Pepsi Cola commercials that featured a band of friends showing up to help carry out some onerous task amid much laughter, camaraderie, and, of course, swigging of Pepsis.

That was the day that fate had saved for us. We sought to tear out the walls Skipper had built to convert the dining room into a movie studio. Friend after friend arrived with sledge hammers, crowbars, and other implements of destruction. In no time, the material flew amid wild swinging of hammers, walls collapsing, and the companionship of mutual fun. Piles of debris and clouds of dust filled the room. Time arrived for a “Pepsi Break,” before starting to clean the mess and carry it outdoors.

Actually, it was more of a “Budweiser Break,” but who was keeping score? You could have made a TV commercial and called it “Demolition Day Fun.” We served the beer, led in the happy dialogue, and collected the empty bottles. After bagging them for disposal, we returned to the room full of debris to organize our friends for the cleanup.

“Hello … hello." Oh dear. There wasn’t a friend in sight. We slumped, little realizing at the time that we had learned one of the first lessons in historic preservation. We would know it well before long. It runs as follows.

- Swinging a sledge hammer at walls is fun.

- Ripping out cabinets is fun.

- Scattering plumbing around the floor is fun.

Cleaning up after a day of demolishing walls and fixtures is a pain in the ass, a consummation much to be avoided.

From that day forward, as the two of us stood amidst piles of detritus, some of it still emitting clouds of dust, we followed what those in my profession used to call “The Draftsman’s Rule.” It stated, “Never draw more in the morning than you can erase in the afternoon.” As applied to our situation, “Never destroy more in the morning than you can dispose of (without assistance) in the afternoon.”

Historic preservation was shaping up to be more then we imagined.

Happiness is an Old House

Here we were, my young bride and I. We had just talked a doubtful bank into loaning us a little money on an old Victorian cottage on South Broadway in Little Rock, Arkansas. Did I mention that it was in what planners called “a neighborhood in transition?” That is to say it was transitioning from benign neglect and blight to strip commercial, a major downward trend. At the time, it was characterized by many rental properties, alongside a few homes being loved and cared for by a courageous, but foolish, band of young couples who saw the area as worth preserving.

“Worth preserving? Hah.” I can imagine those words echoing in the cigar-smoked rooms where decisions were made back then. “Tear ‘em the hell down and build gas stations.” How many gas stations and used car lots did Little Rock need? According to the good old boys, it needed a bunch.

That was one problem with which we had to deal. Fortunately, that courageous band of historic preservation nuts stood like the Spartans at Thermopylae against the destroyers of the area’s historic legacy. We stood on the shoulders of those brave giants and dared the dozers to come any closer.

Meanwhile, we were dealing with a lovable old couple to whom we had given 60 days to clean out their junk from the cottage we had just purchased. No problem. We still had our house in Leawood subdivision, though it was on the market. The first day the sellers of the cottage came to start cleaning it out, we met them on site. Straightaway, we discovered two things.

One, Skipper loved to talk.

Two, he was a master of what we call, in the South, “branching.” A typical conversation might run like this:

Skipper: (Holding up a painted, burned-out light bulb). “I used this for a commercial I did for a furniture store out on University. It’s not there anymore. The owner died of cancer not long after we made the commercial. My nephew died of cancer about the same time. He lived out Markham past the old Tijuana Club. We never went there but it was a popular place back then. A couple we knew used to go there all the time. He worked at a bank so they got a free membership. The bank is in one of those new high-rises now. Back then it was down near Fourth and Louisiana. They tore it down for the urban renewal project. Another couple we knew had a restaurant next to the bank. The city tore it down and built them a new building out off Cantrell. He liked to play golf, and the golf course was nearby, so he liked it. I went with him once to play, went with him and another friend who worked at Bruno’s Little Italy. It used to be out on Asher, but they’ve moved. Hey Nila, where is Bruno’s now? She liked it better than I did. She’d always order … “

You get the picture. After a three-hour branch, he wouldn’t have discarded a single item, but would have disclosed a lot of the history of Little Rock if you could keep up with him. Oh well, we had plenty of outside work around the cottage, so we weren’t in a hurry. It was true that there wasn’t an inch of vertical surface that wasn’t stacked with junk. There must have been over a hundred years of National Geographics alone. We didn’t care. We were young, dumb, and full of self-assurance.

Then we received an offer, a good offer—an offer we couldn’t refuse in fact—on our house in Leawood. Yeah, the one in which we were living. The offerors wanted to move in as quickly as possible.

We were almost always
happy then, I think.
(Apologies to Dylan Thomas)

Artists and Hoarders

Back to pouring your life and savings into an old house. We were owners of one back then. I think it was in late ’73  or early ’74. We’d been married a couple of years, long enough to have known better. We had bought a house in what is now “mid-town” Little Rock. We were well on our way to a place in Suburban Heaven. But no, we sought a warm corner of “Restoration Hell.” We had put the nice little house on the market and bought an old one for very little. We were young and ready for … for … whatever. We had hammers, saws, youth, and enthusiasm on our side.

Then we got to know Skip and Nila, the late Skip and Nila: Irving and Nila Skipper were the sellers of the Victorian cottage we were so hot to attack.

“Not so fast,” they let us know.” Therein we met the first roadblock. Here’s the background.

He was a heck of a nice guy. I had known him for a spell. He was a photographer, see, an expert in still and motion-camera work. In fact, he had converted the dining room of the old house into a movie studio with a camera station installed and everything. He claimed to have actually shot movie scenes therein back in his younger days.

He was also an illustrator who did “still-motion” work and advertising. Some old timers may remember the old AP&L ads featuring “Ready Kilowatt.” They might remember the promo where Ready started with a map marked with directions, in capital letters, for North, East, South, and West. He would give the map a whirl and the letters would fly off to form the word “NEWS.” Yeah, Arkansas Power and Light sponsored the evening news, starting off with the Ready Kilowatt ad.

Skipper did that one. He was some kind of genius.

As I say, I had known him for some time. He called his home a “studio,” but by the time I knew him, he didn’t do much. What he did do was develop color slides overnight. You could call him, meet him in the alley behind his house, (later to become then nerve center of our universe) and he would meet you, take your film, develop it, and bring it to you in the alley the next day. My work called for frequent trading with him.

Did I mention that he was a heck of a nice guy?

Well he was.

He was also the worst hoarder I’ve ever known. Uh, wait one … let’s just say that he was one of the worst hoarders I’ve ever known.

Know those little aluminum containers that film used to come in when you bought it? Well he had never thrown one away. He didn’t keep them for salvage value, or to sell to pot smokers, or to keep spices in, or any useful thing. He just kept them because he couldn’t bear to throw them away. He had bag after bag after bag of them, stored alongside the bag after bag after bag of burned-out light bulbs. He kept those because he might need them to make an ad. He never specified the use. Hoarders don’t. They put you off with a simple, “I might find a use for that someday.” Or, use the back up excuse: “It’s got to be good for something.”

That’s why husbands find 30 empty butter tubs stashed away in a cabinet, having no knowledge of them until they fall out in his face while he’s looking for his Swiss Army Knife he got for his 12^th birthday, the one with no blade left, just the corkscrew. Uh, I think that’s all for the day. Better close. More tomorrow.

Oh, before I leave: did I mention that we had given the Skippers 60 days to clean their junk out of the old house after we closed the sale?

I think it may be good idea
 to ease off about the hoarders.

New ground. New adventures.

Last time we visited, my young wife and I had just decided to purchase a Victorian cottage at 2107 South Broadway, built by a man named Fox for his family in 1898. It is now considered be quite a part of the “downtown” area of Little Rock. Back then, Mr. Fox’s employer, a Mr. Gans, accused the Fox family of “moving out into the country,” rather than building a home in town as would have any normal family.

Anyhow, we now wanted to own it. Oh, the bank didn’t want us to. Back then, they hated loaning money for homes in this area. Rumors were that somewhere, in the secret lairs of the banks’ deep caverns, they had big maps with red circles drawn around specific areas of town. The property was in such an area, and should have been untouchable. Two things worked for us, though.

First, the powers that be had decided long ago that South Broadway would be a commercial corridor from the Arkansas River to Roosevelt Avenue. The old houses would have to go. They added nothing to the potential commerce of the city. When commercial came, the properties would be valuable enough to absorb the paltry cost of the residences. If the property sold twice when commercial showed up, what the hell? Progress was what they called it.

Second. We were white.

White people were fleeing such neighborhoods, even fleeing cities that had such neighborhoods. But the couples who had been buying properties therein were working-class professionals and excellent at paying their mortgages. Further, the couples purchasing the properties wanted to live in them. They didn't seek to convert them to apartments, an act that sometimes created near-instant slums. So, these stupid kids would keep the area stable until the developers showed up with their deep pockets.

It was what we now call a "win-win." Back then we called it, "Play along. Get along."

Anyway, if commercial developers showed interest, the banks could pull the mortgages. They had threatened that before, both to induce sales, and to squelch protests over the demolishing of what the youngsters (laughingly in the eyes of prominent businessmen) called, “historic properties.”

It had worked. Commercial development was working its way north from Roosevelt. A block south of our property, the lower half of Broadway had transitioned to commercial. A used car dealership spread over the south half of the west side. The story was that thugs would show up at the house remaining on that portion of the block after midnight knocking on the door and asking if the owner wanted to sell. She was an elderly lady from an old Little Rock family and was beginning suffer the effects of old-age. They must have terrified her. She faced them off, but time was on their side, or so they thought.

That was life in the old days. The traffic counts on South Broadway overrode any love of history.

We were young and dumb and full of optimism. We didn’t care about all that. We just smiled and signed the papers, beginning the rip-roaring, and damndest, adventure a young married couple ever set sail on, and we had no idea what was coming.

Next: our first road bump.

None of our future neighbors
belonged to a country club. Should
that have told us something?

While my neighbor and I were training for a marathon, my wife and I were working on an old Victorian cottage we had bought in the old part of Little Rock known as “The Quapaw Quarter.”

I don’t know what got into us.

It just seemed like the fashionable thing to do the time. Our friends were restoring old homes. There was a defined little gang of “downtown people” who had bought cheap property in the old neighborhood around Downtown and were busy, and happily it seemed at the time, restoring them to their once sparkling beauty. Yes, all our friends were doing it.

Not a soul appeared, not even my sainted mother, to mention jumping off cliffs.

The house had been built in 1898 by a man named Fox, who worked for a Mr. Gans. The Gans building were they worked after it was built in 1903, still stands on Second Street. Our house, located at 2107 South Broadway, had been remodeled a couple of times. The last remodeling had removed the Victorian porch and replaced it with a 1930s monstrosity.

Like a couple of idiots, we decided to restore it back to its original luster.

It was to be, as they later said about military life, not a job, but an adventure.

Our little cottage.
To the left of the big house.

My Redacted Life: Chapter 35 (Con._4)

A growing movement started in Little Rock as I waited for my wedding date. A small but dedicated group of young couples, crazy by most standards, were buying homes, in of all places, the old section of Little Rock known as the Quapaw Quarter. They could buy one of the old mansions for a cheap price. Who wanted them, after all? Many served as apartments, having been divided by their estates to provide some income while the structures deteriorated. Couples with some cash and lots of energy saw something. What?

I learned much about it from working with our architect-on-loan, Charles Witsell. He had become a part of the pioneering group of couples who descended on the area, purchasing historic structures and dedicating a portion of their lives to saving those structures. He and his artist wife, Becky, owned the so-called “Hanger House” on Scott Street and filled their spare time loving and restoring it. He became a legendary expert on the history of the area.

It wasn’t always easy for those dedicated to historic preservation. Many lending institutions had “redlined” the historic area, along with minority neighborhoods, as not the best places to lend their depositors’ money. Also, powerful forces in the real estate community had decided, for example, that South Broadway no longer served the most useful purpose as residential and should convert to a commercial corridor. In most cities in Arkansas, that would have spelled the end of the fledgling movement. This time, though, the young pioneers stood their ground.

The case that brought things to the attention of the public involved plans to remove a grand old historic home at 18^th and Broadway and replace it with a 7-11 Store. A group calling itself the Broadway Neighborhood Association formed a resistance movement. In order to destroy the home for commercial development, the developers had to convince the city to change the zoning. The young folks came to the planning commission hearing with their Battle Flags hoisted. Why destroy the heritage of a city, disrupt an improving neighborhood, and lose a beautiful structure to satisfy the commercial needs of the traveling public? The case made good newspaper copy.

The BNA lost the battle, but started a movement that would lead to partial victory in a war that still rages at times. Old, monied interests assured the planning commission, and later the city board, that there was no historic value to the neighborhood and that commercial development always translated directly into progress for a city. If these young fools wanted to waste their time, energy, and money, that was fine, but don’t encourage them by stopping progress. The young folks spoke their minds, argued, lost, and went home.

By that time, the phone calls had started. A family, enjoying an evening in their beloved old home would receive a phone call. The mortgage company didn’t appreciate their actions. More attempts at interfering with economic development might cause a re-evaluation of their loan, just some information they should know. It was time for his historic preservation silliness to stop. Don’t make them call again.

It proved too late, though. The publicity had awakened a dormant dream. More young couples considered a life of historic involvement and sweat-equity. More older couples decided to stay where they were, despite the despicable efforts by thugs to initiate a tactic known as “block-busting. The public began driving through Little Rock’s Quapaw Quarter District to see what the fuss was all about. A group started a real estate company designed specifically to promote the sale and rehabilitation of historic home in Little Rock. The bullies retreated, as bullies often do.

Weekends, Brenda and I would join the sightseers. We wondered what it might be like to tackle the job of restoring one of these old classics.

Little did we know.

South Broadway before the Arkansas
Highway Department noticed.

My Redacted Life: Chapter Seven: (Cont._4)

As the spring of 1971 drew to a close, I enjoyed my first great triumph in the professional world. We met our deadlines—all of them. I spent the week before the “due date” delivering big boxes of planning reports while the staff furiously completed the mapping and assembling the remainder. Soon, smiles seasoned with relief showed all around the office from our success.

True to our pact, the two Bobs at the printing shop and I had become true friends. They taught me much about the techniques of printing and I gave them due credit. In addition to learning about printing, I also learned a lesson that is indispensable in the professional world. Great projects, most often, require a team effort, and you had better know and respect your teammates.

That’s all I have to say about that.

We each received a hundred-dollar bonus for getting the jobs out on time. Since I had never received a bonus of any sort in my life, I hadn’t known what to expect. I didn’t think it was a lot for all the extra hours we had pulled. I also thought maybe I deserved a little extra for saving my bosses butts, so to speak. But, I figured it was their money and they could dole it out as they pleased. It was best that I accept the fact. I think I had read that somewhere.

Besides, I had also read somewhere that I should not be anxious about anything, but let my requests be known elsewhere. It was good advice that has gotten me through many a jam. I’m sure there are many throughout history who have performed greater things and received less gratitude. Further, too much focused concentration on ingratitude can burn one’s soul like the sun’s rays focused through a magnifying glass burns an ant. Ask any Vietnam War veteran.

Anyway, I took my bonus with a smile and went on my way. I repaid some small debts to my father with part of it. Then I bought a good bottle of Scotch whisky and drove to Fayetteville the next weekend to party with my friend, Mike Dunkum. The rest I spent on silly stuff.

May came, and we tenants learned that we best be looking for new quarters, as the grand old structure in which we lived faced imminent demolition. That was my first encounter with the strangely American custom of demolishing the elegant and grand to make way for the cheap and gaudy. There’s a shabby parking lot now where that handsome building stood. Ironically, Americans spend billions each year traveling to see cities where they don’t demolish old structures, except for purposes of waging war.

Some would say that we are fortunate in not having our cities destroyed by bombs but by peaceful neglect, avarice, and worship of the automobile. Who can say?

Knowing the city better now, I could search for a new place to live with more confidence than before. I knew that the Capitol Hotel was a whorehouse and was no option despite continued jokes that I check it out. (It is beyond interesting to know that it was one fine old building they never demolished and that it is now one of the city’s brightest treasures.) I knew it didn’t make any sense whatsoever to live any great distance from where one worked. I knew I still couldn’t afford much. I knew that I was beginning to like Little Rock. And I knew that I’d best find something soon.

Something drew my attention to Carptebagger Hill. Stretched along the north side of that portion of Cantrell Road known as Lincoln Boulevard was a large house converted to apartments, along with three separate apartment buildings. The easternmost proved the most expensive. The westernmost was the oldest and cheapest. Moreover, it offered furnished units with air conditioning.

Not far from Downtown, the apartment building stood on land previously occupied by a Methodist school, so perhaps there was a bit of holiness remaining. I thought maybe I would take a look. Maybe there was a future awaiting me atop that hill.

Little did I know.

What the hell are
you thinking about?