The folks in my family tree aren't generally known for being long-lived. I've written about the indominable Elizabeth Calder, who lived to be 102, but she was definitely an outlier. However, it occurs to me that there is a "character" whose long association with my family had enormous impact on a lot of us: nurturing but limiting, definitely spurring us to explore our potential yet offering support when we faltered:
The Little House
The Assessor website says that the house on "Colton Block 25, Lot 5" was built in 1920, but my great-grandmother, Dora, bought the house for $1100 on February 2, 1914, so perhaps they were estimating. She and my grandfather, Shug, had somewhat inexplicably moved to Ames from Woodward after the death of husband and father, George Calder Thomas, in 1905 and Shug graduated from high school there. George's posthumous biography, published in 1914, said "His widow now resides with her son in a well-furnished home in Woodward and she also owns a well appointed residence in Ames." The move back to Woodward made a great deal of sense, as Dora's family as well as that of Shug's paternal uncle, Harvey, all lived there. Dora took out a $500 mortgage to purchase the house. Despite the rather grand prose in the biography (to which I feel certain Dora contributed extensively and which absolutely sounds like something I would have written), I suspect that funds were very tight and that having a place to live, let alone two, was not the luxurious excess that the biography made it seem. Dora's mortgage was extended by a year, I know, and she rented the house out while Shug was serving during WWI.
While it wasn't the house in which my mother, Dorothy, was born in 1924, it was the house in which she grew up. Dora cared for her while her parents, Shug and Inez, were at work and she remembered Dora peeling an apple for them to share as Dora read to her. The original house was a 768 square foot box with a hip roof that was utterly impractical for Iowa winters. It was the only house on the block that had neither basement nor second story. There were three tiny bedrooms, a kitchen with coal stove and ice box and a "parlor" with another stove for heat. The house was wired for electricity from the very beginning, though, as well as being connected to the telephone exchange early on. The phone number was "11." The outhouse was in the back yard, along with a cistern for water. In 1935, Dora enclosed the front porch and added indoor plumbing, with a water closet beside the kitchen. The pipes meant digging underneath, so a cellar was created, too. The rotting wooden post foundation was shored up with bricks. An electric refrigerator replaced the ice box and a gas range took place of the coal stove. The small parlor stove gave way to a monster operated by heating oil. The total cost of the renovations was $480.57.
Dora died in her bedroom in 1938. Shug inherited the house but died only three years later. In the late 1950s, Inez was married to her third husband, John Daniel Smith, when she commissioned the most extensive renovation, including doubling the size of the back bedroom, knocking through from the parlor into Dora's bedroom to make an L-shaped living room, and adding a small dining nook off the kitchen. The house was now 1056 square feet. Inez had the roof replaced with a normal peaked one that actually shed snow, moved the big picture window from the front of the parlor to the new "ell" and put French doors in the space between parlor and front porch. Inez loved the color pink and, in addition to painting almost every room in the house that color, had the top pane of the big window replaced with cranberry glass.
This was the house where we spent every summer while my dad went to graduate school. In my memory of that time, it's always evening or night, as the lightning bugs came out and the summer storms flared. Inez was terrified of storms and I now understand why. All the huge trees surrounding the house were elms that were either dying or dead from Dutch elm disease, and most storms saw one or more crashing down around us, but not, amazingly, on us. We never went to the cellar during these storms, which was fine by me. It housed the washtub and laundry mangle, which I had managed to put my hand through, causing no damage but scaring me half to death; I'd been warned so thoroughly of its dangers that I was sure the hand would at the very least just spontaneously fall off. The cellar was also home to the temperamental fuse box and whenever someone did something reckless like turn on both a lamp and the electric skillet, one of us kids would generally be sent down to identify and unscrew the problematic round glass fuse in the box and fumble among the spider webs to find the correct size to replace it.
We lived with Inez during the fall and winter of 1969 when Patrick was born until my Dad found a teaching job in Des Moines the next spring. We were living in a rental house a few blocks away when he died in November of 1970. Inez died a week or so after slipping on the ice outside that damned cellar door and breaking her hip, and Mom thus inherited the little house. At 46, she had lost both husband and mother within three months time, and had two children to raise. On the one hand, she was devastated by the loss; on the other, the house provided a real safety net. I am sure she had vowed never to end up in that little house again, and the love/hate relationship she had with it was always evident. Mom used money from the sale of our California house to have a washer and dryer installed in the kitchen, a shower rigged up over the tub, and the house sided in aluminum. She replaced the fuel oil stove in the living room (that melted any polyester garment you were wearing if you weren't careful about proximity) with baseboard heat during the week that I was quarantined with mumps, something the installers must have just loved. She painted the interior in the modern colors of the 1970s -- avocado, pale celery, harvest gold, sunshine yellow.
After I went to college in 1979, 9-year-old Patrick finally got his own bedroom instead of half of the larger one in the back. During his elementary school years, Mom had advanced from her volunteer Santa's Helper position to head of the payroll department at the State Hospital. She remodeled the kitchen and bathroom, pushing the refrigerator out of the kitchen doorway and into space knocked out of the back bedroom, also adding the first real closet she'd had in a very long time. She replaced the lovely but threadbare floral carpet with a soft moss plush that showed dirt like nobody's business. The gas range whose pilot light had never stayed lit and which had singed off everyone's eyebrows more than once when we applied the match to light it was yanked out completely, replaced with an electric cooktop and convection and microwave oven.
Mom died in May of 2000 and since Patrick had a real job and I didn't, I stayed in the little house to pack up and dispose of things. Everyone who had remodeled the house had added storage spaces to it -- drawers and cupboards in the front bedroom, the floor-to-ceiling "fibber" in the nook (a cupboard named for the radio character famous for a disorganized hall closet whose contents assaulted anyone unwise enough to open the door). There was only one closet in the original house, but it was 3 feet wide by 11 feet long and actually had a little window in it. Perhaps it was intended to serve as a tiny nursery? In any event, that space was full of things as well.
There was a lot of stuff, not hoarding, you understand, just the accumulation of four generations. There was Dora's china cupboard and Inez's china closet and eleven boxes of antique glass; a trio of four-stack barrister bookcases and sixteen boxes of books (none of which were published any later than 1936), Dora's quilts and Inez's embroidered linens, a rack of iconic clothing that spanned decades, So Many Christmas decorations, and the usual detritus of a household. Sorting and boxing was a heart-wrenching task. But every time I felt overwhelmed or despaired, the house would dole out a parcel of family ephemera that I didn't know existed -- Dora's memory book, Mom's scrapbook, my father's slides and papers, Inez's files, Shug's letters to Dora during WWI, and lots and lots of pictures.
Someone asked how I can possibly have so much information about my ancestors. To a large extent, this is the reason.
I'm not sure it's possible to gauge the effect it has on your life when you grow up in the little town that never got much bigger than it was when your great-grandfather was postmaster in 1888. My mother, my brother and I all walked to the same school where our graduating class photos are still displayed. We walked "uptown" for groceries, to the bank, to the post office or to the doctor. The doctor that delivered Patrick lived next door to us, and the funeral home where services were held for my father, my grandmother and my best friend from high school was just across the street. In the cemetery, in the marvelous centennial book community members created in 1982, and in the census records -- those names are more than familiar; their families' lives have been intertwined with those of my family for the last 150 years or more.
Nobody knows why, but when I wake up in the morning, my first instinct is to drowsily tell the maid to have the fire lit in the Morning Room, as we'll be breakfasting there... until I remember that I have neither a Morning Room nor a maid. There's no question that, as ancestral homes go, I would have preferred a Manor or Castle. Nonetheless, our family has a great deal to be grateful about when it comes to the little house in Woodward. It was a good place to be "from."
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