This Old House

This Old House By Tom Slattery This old house was built in 1923 as a summer vacation cottage on the eastern side of what would later become Bay Village, Ohio. In those days, an electric interurban train ran out to it from downtown Cleveland and continued on to the city of Lorain. The electric train put the cottages within reach of summer vacationers. Cars, mostly of the Model-T variety, were still considered a luxury. The cottage was built as part of a development of vacation cottages on the oldest paved side street in Bay Village, a street, when it was new, of twelve cottages stretching from Lake Road to the shore of Lake Erie. An iron stairway went down the cliff at the end of the street to a concrete platform. All around the platform was a mixture of rocky and sandy beach. This was before home air conditioning. Cool breezes off the lake offered relief from the intense muggy summer heat. A dip in the lake from the beach also helped.

This was also before television, and radio was so new that many still used crystal sets. Vacationers would have played parlor games or would have told stories and engaged in conversation. It would not be until September 7, 1927, four years later, that Philo T. Farnsworth would create the world's first television set and transmission device in San Francisco. Shortly that would remarkably change how people lived and how they understood the world. That was not so long ago, and many people still alive today remember a world without television images. And yet it was a very long time ago. This old house stood through the entire analog television era and a few months into the digital television era. Farnsworth won a long patent battle with giant RCA, but by the time that he won it, the patent had all but expired. He was forced to make quality AM-FM radio-phonograph sets, including a quality console that my parents bought several years before they bought their first television set. It was more than the quality of sound. My father had followed the long patent case and his heart was on the side of Farnsworth. That Farnsworth console sits in the living room of this old cottage as I write this. My mother brought it here after a long bitter divorce case, a case in which both sides lost almost everything to lawyers and related legal costs. Forced by the settlement to sell their jointly owned and large and proper house for the minimal equity in it, my mother bought this old former summer vacation cottage near the shore of Lake Erie because that was all that she could afford. That it was, especially in the summer, an enchanted small cottage by the shore of Lake Erie, and in addition that it looked out on nothing but woods from large estates behind it, did not affect her choice to buy it. She really had no choice. It was the cheapest house she could find and near Bay View Hospital where she had gotten a job as a nurse. Its price of $7000 (roughly $70,000 in today's money) was all that she could afford to make payments on. And that is why she bought it.

She had moved temporarily to an apartment, and at the moment that she bought this old house she had only enough money for either the down payment or for the next month's rent on her apartment coming due in days. She took a big chance and bought the cottage. As part of the divorce arrangement, I was living with my father and stepmother in Columbus. So I only heard about this years later. My mother, my brother, and my sister arrived for their first visit at this drafty and not insulated summer vacation cottage in mid December 1953, days before the rent was due. The old cottage may have been condemned and then released from the condemnation order. My brother discovered a large red and black CONDEMNED sign while snooping in a pantry as they made their way through the house. My mother was horrified, horrified as if she might have known the story behind the sign. She grabbed it from my brother, folded it, and stuffed it into her purse or concealed it under her winter coat. And that was the last anyone ever saw of it. Whatever the case with a possible condemnation, the old small summer vacation cottage was all that my mother could afford. She plunked down literally all that she had on the down payment and closing costs and a few days later moved in with snow and wind blowing outside. There were problems fitting furniture that had been in a large two-story real house into the small single-story vacation cottage. One of the pieces of furniture that she had brought from the other house was a black-and-white Muntz TV. And she put it, ironically, on top of the Farnsworth radiophonograph console. And for the next almost fifty-six years a series of newer television sets replaced the old ones on top of the walnut-finished Farnsworth console as they burned out. And the console was never moved from the original spot where it had been placed on that cold December day in 1953. The radio still worked last year but only as a test. The phonograph motor became gummed-up from lack of use.

In the last fifty of those fifty-six years the console was only a stand for television sets. The television set on top of it became the focal point of the living room and also of the house as a whole. As in most houses in the country and then in the world, the brief historical time of the analog television era had arrived. Never a twenty-four-hour day went by in the old cottage in those fifty-six years when there was not a working television set on top of the Farnsworth console, first blackand-white screens, then color screens, eventually with added UHF capacities. Finally in the summer of 2009 a digital converter box was added to the existing old 19-inch color television set to mark the end of the analog era. 2 That first winter of 1953-54 was a The old vacation cottage was drafty and furnace that had been installed to make survivable all year around and had come not work well and eventually failed one night.

singularly bad one. the small inadequate the vacation cottage with the house did bitter cold winter

My mother found a way to buy a new Moncrief furnace, but after that trauma she worried about the furnace failing every one of the subsequent fifty-three winters that she lived in her old cottage. At least once every one of those fifty-three winters she would get up in the middle of the night and listen to the sound of the furnace, sometimes even opening the furnace door to hear it better. As it were, it continued to faithfully chug away for three more winters after she passed away for a total of fifty-five winters. In her desperation and due to her innate trust of people, after that first harsh winter she was conned into purchasing storm windows for her cottage. In reality they did very little good. The problem was less the windows than the fact that only a single layer of wood shingles was nailed over thin boards that had large gaps in them and there was no insulation between the inside and outside. Moreover, she did not have enough money to put storm windows on all of the windows of

the cottage. So there was only one layer of glass on a number of windows. The small Moncrief furnace thus had chug away excessively to heat some of the outside in order to keep the inside minimally warm. Unlike most furnaces that inject hot air into the bottoms of rooms, the Moncrief's three small heating ducts ran from the top of the furnace to the tops of the rooms. Hot air that normally stays up stayed up. Sometimes ice would literally form on the bedroom floors on severely cold winter days. Snow trudged in by kids remained unmelted on the floor and on shoes and boots all night. In short, this old cottage was an unlikely place to try and make into a home. And yet with spunk, creativity, tenacity, and hard work, my mother made it a home for well over a half century and came to love and cherish it for all of its shortcomings. It became her success story, her security, and a place of refuge that she offered to her kids from time to time. The original cottage construction was similar to a modern manufactured home. The cottage walls were pre-made panels that were then bolted together at the site. The roofs also seem to have been pre-made and erected on top of the walls on site. But there were no foundations as such. The original cottages stood on bricks and even oak-tree logs and stumps. After some decades other cottage owners on the street installed proper foundations and even basements. But it was never done to this one. In this one there was just the crawl-space through which winter winds blew hard and cold, even after it was blocked off with sheets of brick-patterned asphalt paper to give an appearance of a foundation. The outside walls settled unevenly and gave the cottage "a little crooked house" appearance. The inside floors sagged as the non-foundation supports settled into the soft ground underneath. Moreover, while the original cottage construction was fairly sound, various previous owners had added on to it. A poorly constructed side addition had been lengthened out to the property line. This included a back room that

additionally extended out into the back yard. And one-half of the front porch had been blocked off to make another partial room next to one of the bedrooms. In the case of the back room, its untreated two-by-four wood floor beams had been laid directly on the ground and floorboards nailed to them. To add to the dampness and moisture-caused deterioration, my mother used the back room as a storage room and a laundry and utility room. It had its own sink, hot and cold water supply, and sewer. While her kids were growing up the clothes dryer was dry-rotting the wall behind it. The floor that had unwisely been built in contact with the ground was slowly rotting through. Through the 1950s and 1960s the back room held together. She was too busy trying to make a living working odd hours as a nurse and raising kids to notice anything troubling. Things deteriorated slowly, too slowly to ring any alarm bells. And through the 1950s and 1960s I was just a visitor to my mother's old small cottage. In the very first days in 1953 I had a moment of acute awareness of the poor-quality of the old cottage when I attempted to adjust a spring-loaded floor lamp tighter into the ceiling. It began to bite a dent into the paperboard ceiling that I had assumed was plaster. My mother shouted a warning and I stopped before it poked through. In fact, all of the walls and ceilings were then made of pressed paperboard or a heavy-grade cardboard building material. It crossed my mind more than once that the place was a firetrap. But my mother had grown up in poor quality houses in mining towns before electrification when oil lamps and candles were used for lighting and pot-bellied iron stoves were in the centers of rooms for heat. She knew how to be careful. On those visits to my mother's cottage in the 1950s and 1960s, the cottage was really too small for an extra guest like me. In the summers I had to sleep on a sofa-sized swing on the front porch that had vinyl-covered outdoor cushions. In the winters there was a foldout couch-bed in the living room.

It was not until I returned from Japan in 1970 and began living in the old cottage that I began noticing its makeshift construction and condition. In 1970 I replaced the paperboard ceiling in the kitchen with wood paneling. The roof had leaked some, and the water-damaged paper was sagging directly over the stove burners. It might have sagged and fallen into a burner and pilot light and caused her cottage to burn down while she was either sleeping or at work. So in 1970 I began to be aware of the poor and even risky condition of this old house, the finite risk that all of us who lived in it faced. In 1972 the floor in the back room rotted through in several places. Not realizing that the beams under the flooring had been placed in the ground, I carefully took the floor apart, too carefully and spending too much time and energy on it. Who would have thought, though, that it had been built in contact with the damp earth? It was an eye-opener. I spent the summer of 1972 replacing the floor and dry-rotted walls, repairing a badly needed shed in the back yard. My mother had either deluded herself about her old cottage being "well built," or she had said it often to give us kids a sense of security. But after 1972 I knew that it was in terrible shape. My mother retired from her long hospital nursing career in 1973. Fearing the pinch of a reduced income from Social Security, she immediately paid off the final several payments of her mortgage. Thus from 1973 on, her little cottage by Lake Erie was hers and hers alone. She was proud and happy with it being hers. I was concerned. The house was not in good condition. My feeling at the time was that as soon as I got a degree I could get a good job and save up enough money to massively repair or even replace the old cottage. That kind of a good high-paying full-time job never materialized. But I went on for years doing amazing and creative temporary repairs until that magic day might arrive. In 1975 my mother's bedroom floor partly collapsed. I came back here from California that summer of 1975 and spent the summer fixing that, replacing rotten wood under the toilet, and painting the house.

In December 1977, after finishing up some final things for my degree while living in a free room in California on food stamps, I came back to my mother's old cottage to live. That January, 1978, I got a temporary but full-time job, the first full-time job that I had had for a decade. That year of 1978 thus turned out to be a good year for both of us. She sold some land in Florida that she had bought to please a friend and never expected to be worth much. It gave her security. She put that money in a low-interest bank account and never took a penny out of it until her last day on earth in 2006. If it did not give her much interest, it did give her security, and that was all that she wanted from it. In the past she had to borrow money on her house to pay for urgently needed repairs to her house and her series of old cars. She never had to do that again. But that small amount of money in the bank was never enough to permit needed massive repairs to the house. And by 1978 her small crew of trustworthy repairmen had begun to succumb to old age. Her reliable plumber and furnace person retired and then passed away. Several handymen moved away or passed away. All of these people were left over from the old semi-rural days and just fixed things without getting building permits We had reason to suspect that the city building department would not let us do major repairs. So after these people were gone I did all of the large and small inside and outside repairs and avoided the need for building permits. And for the next twenty-eight years until my mother passed away, I did what I could to try to keep up with the deterioration of the cottage that had never been in good condition. And she sometimes pitched in and helped. 3 This old unlikely house was more than shelter and a refuge. From 1976 on to even now in 2009 it was the place where I did literally all of my writing. In 1976 my mother set aside the small room that had been created by walling-off half of the front porch as a writing office for me.

It adjoined my bedroom and thus I could close my bedroom door and be a minimum of disturbance in those days before personal computers when I clacked and clattered away on typewriters. And in the summer it was a pleasant and well-lit place to write. It was half of a porch and two sides were windows. But in the winter it could be uncomfortable. The bedroom had one very small heating vent from the duct from the furnace. It was the most distant vent and therefore blew out the least warm air. The former porch area had no heat from the overworked furnace. Only series of small electric heaters made writing in it tolerable, albeit while often wearing a coat and with very cold fingers and toes. The first major piece that I wrote in it in 1976 was my so-called "undergraduate thesis" (199 thesis), "Amerasians in East Asia." A student group at a different university thought so much of it that they published it in a 1978 publication called The Timberline Press. My thesis takes forty-two pages of the 127-page book, from page 56 to 98. The one-time publication is catalogued in the Kelvin Smith Periodicals Collection at Case-Western Reserve University Libraries (OCLC # 3978453). It was an unlikely room in an unlikely house to have done any significant writing. But I wrote or rewrote virtually all of my novels, screenplays, nonfiction booklength texts, short stories, and a play in it. Four novels, a short-story collection, and four nonfiction books that I self-published using iUniverse (www.iuniverse.com) and that are listed on book sites on the internet (including iUniverse's own) came out of this unlikely writing office. An additional novel, stage play, book-length piece on the JFK assassination, two feature-length screenplays, documentary screenplay, and a number of shorter but significant pieces, are published on Scribd (www.pdfcoke.com). More remain unpublished. While I wrote a few of these pieces elsewhere, including my first novel Norikaeru (in Japan in 1968), I rewrote everything in this minimal writing office. In other words, this writing office that my mother set aside for me in 1976 in her old cottage by Lake Erie allowed me to write or put into final form everything that I have written.

And even more important than the writing – because writing is only an end product of thought processes – was the thinking. Because I had this house for shelter, this writing office for composing and rewriting, and my mother and her house for a sense of security wherever I was in the world, I was able to think, to think thoughts that I would not have thought otherwise. Some of those thoughts became my writing. From 1976 until 1992 this writing and rewriting was done on old typewriters, one found in mint condition in the rubbish, another left to me by a great aunt who was a poet. In 1992 my (still living but divorced) parents chipped in to buy me a personal computer, an Emerson with a green monochrome screen. I got it cheap from a company now no longer in business because it was a floor demonstrator. And because it was a demonstrator computer, I found that someone had left partial Word Perfect software on it for demonstration purposes. So I was able to just take off and write. On the day that the computer was delivered, my mother went out and bought me a six-foot-high set of gray steel shelves to use as bookshelves and a four-drawer steel olivedrab filing cabinet for my papers, software disks, and other writing conveniences. She wanted me to make a success of it and did the best that she could do to allow it to happen. On my part, I built a workstation for my new computer out of scrap wood and plywood. And as artists and writers do, I tried mightily to make a success of it. I not only wrote novels, screenplays, booklength nonfiction, a play, and articles, I wrote thousands of individualized query letters, hundreds of individualized cover letters, and spent countless hours in local libraries trying to locate markets, publishers, producers, and agents. And while sometimes it seemed that I might be close to succeeding, I never actually got a sale. What I did get, as writers all get, was a variety of con artists and various proposed scams. And I bit at one or two that were not costly and seemed to show promise. And as a result, I learned lessons in life. Between 1992 and the day my mother passed away in 2006, four different computers were upgraded onto the workstation that I had used hand tools to construct out of scrap wood.

From 1999 on, the second, third, and fourth ones had enough memory to allow me to connect to the Internet. Frequent and costly trips to the post office to mail queries as well as packaged writing and cover letters slowly diminished. Trips had not only been costly in money, including bus fare, they had been costly in time because each one took a day of my energy. In late 1999 I finished a last novel for a while and began using the computer to prepare and edit writing for self-publication by iUniverse.com. And until mid-2001 that was how I used my precious writing office. It took a lot of my energy and time, but I got eight of my nine iUniverse books published in that period. 4 In late 2001 my father passed away. At about that time I could see that my mother's health was slipping. Her eyes had become too bad to pass the eye test for a driver's license. And I became her lifeline for medications, food, and necessities. From 2001 until she passed away in late 2006, I only used the precious writing office in the unlikely old house to write short articles for Internet publications and to search for markets for my old writing or potential buyers, reviewers, and interested parties for my self-published books. Looking back now, it seems a waste. I had to give it up this year. The old cottage was in poor condition on the last day of my mother's life when I promised her that I would try to live here for another year. She knew the condition of the house and she did not press me to stay. Some of the issues that were present when my mother had purchased the old cottage more than a half century earlier when my brother found the CONDEMNED sign were still there. More accumulated due to poverty-caused neglect and fear that hiring contractors who would have to obtain building permits might lead to condemnation. One of the original cottages that had stood diagonally across the street had been condemned by the city and razed in the early 1960s. My mother was both horrified and traumatized

by it because the cottage was not significantly different from hers. She and I thus shared a real and reality-based fear. Work that should have been done was put off. From 1970 until 2009 I did all of the work on the house, garage, and shed that had to be done, usually with hand tools so as not to attract attention. But I was never able to do professional-quality work. And deterioration progressed at a faster rate than I could correct it. That last summer of her life I had to prop up the eaves or the back roof. Some were sagging. The wood under back roof itself was rotted and sagged. Even in her partial blindness my mother could see the damage. In the first twelve months (2006-07) after she passed away not much happened. I lived all alone in her old cottage with my grief and sorrow slowly ebbing. I used the writing office that she had set aside for me to write a rambling account of dealing with that grief and sorrow that I titled In the Year After Mom Died and then self-published it as a physical book with iUniverse. At the same time, I also used this unlikely writing office to turn my old screenplay that modernized and adapted Mary Shelley's novel The Last Man into a modern novel that I titled The Last Human (now published and posted free on Scribd). While both of these book-length pieces were still incomplete a fierce and dense rainstorm caused a bad leak in the rotten back roof to get worse. That in turn caused the ceiling of the back room under it to collapse. And indeed some of the roof itself collapsed into the back room – my mother's old bedroom – and lay in debris piles on the floor. I was desperate to have this house for a little longer. The minor catastrophe struck almost exactly a year to the day after Mom's last day of life in that room, and thus the year that I had promised her that I would try to continue living in her old house was over. But the book about that year was far from complete, and the additional novel that I had started was not finished. So as a last major project among many that had shored up the old cottage and stretched out living in it for a while longer, I spent most of August and September 2007 constructing a temporary fix to the roof. After that was

finished I made a temporary ceiling so that heat in the winter would not escape out into the open air through the unsealed attic. Thus I saved my unlikely house and my even less likely small writing office for yet one more year. The following year, 2007-08, I rewrote and polished several pieces for posting and publication on Scribd. A city house-appearance inspector was breathing down my neck to replace the roof. But I was successfully putting that off. So into the winter, with a small electric heater keeping my toes from freezing, I continued to write at my old computer in my old writing office. But following a heavy wet snowfall in early January 2009, a new section of the back roof gave way and created a large hole in the roof. A friend and I struggled in snow and below-freezing weather and made a temporary fix. But in an even heavier and wetter snowfall in midFebruary the props that I had constructed under the back eaves gave way. They collapsed. The same friend helped me fix gaps that were letting the below-freezing weather and snow into the house and pull down the half-collapsed eaves, saw the fractured wood into chunks that could be hidden in plastic bags, and take them to the curb for the weekly rubbish collection. It was all over then. I knew that I could not stretch it out much longer. Having, however, survived the exceptionally bad winter, I was determined to get one more summer in the old summer vacation cottage by Lake Erie. I waited until late spring to put the property up for sale as a building lot. To my surprise, it sold quickly. If I had been one of those one in a million, or perhaps more correctly one in a billion, famous writers or even well known writers, it might have been saved as the place where the famous writer did most of his significant writing. My mind wanders to the Carl Sandburg house or the Eugene O'Neill house. But I might note a word of caution about this for all of you unknown and little known writers out there. In my extended family there were two well-known writers whom I met and talked to. One was and still is referred to as the greatest modern playwright. There may or may not be an effort to preserve his house in Connecticut.

The house in Brooklyn Heights that my aunt received in the divorce settlement has a bronze plaque on it, but not for the famous writer. It merely tells the reader that the historical house represents the Federalist style of architecture of the time following the American Revolution. The other extended-family writer created and wrote a long-running radio and then early television series built around episodes in Ohio history and was not infrequently called "Mr. Ohio" at the time my mother bought this old house. A half century later hardly anyone is still alive who remembers the radio and television series, and there is no house with the writer's name attached to it. Fame or not, eventually nothing of any of us remains. Nothing lasts forever. There is, for instance, no house in Africa where the first mutated modern human lived over two hundred thousand years ago. And from that time on there have been extremely few markers for vast numbers of individuals who were born, lived and influenced, and departed – so few that anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians delight in discovering them when they turn up. It is all over for this old house now. It had its time and probably served much more of a purpose than it had ever been intended to when built as a pleasant little summer vacation cottage. It was my good fortune to have had it as long as I did and have my mother live as long as she did. This summer, 2009, I sold the property, but not as a house. I had to sell it as a building lot. The new owners intend to demolish the eighty-six-yearold vacation cottage and the concrete-block garage built later for a Model-T. Bay Village had become a wealthy outerring suburb of Cleveland in the fifty-six years since my mother had bought a cheap inadequately winterized old former summer vacation cottage to make her home. The new owners apparently plan build a proper house on the small plot of land. I intend to post and publish on Scribd this one last item written in this old unlikely writing office in the even less likely old cottage home for many decades. End