I Loved To Teach

These pictures bring back a lot of memories. When we moved into this house in 1972, we put all the furniture for these rooms into the middle of the floor and covered it. There were rags hanging out of the fireplace meant to keep out the draft because the damper was open. A huge slab, about four feet by five feet, of the ceiling over the fireplace was hanging down with about a six or seven inch gap toward the center, exposing lathe. The chandelier had one bare bulb and no globes. One corner of the main room was a kitchenette, the wall butted against the fireplace. The once-wide doorway had been closed up and replaced with a small door into what was then a very long, narrow bedroom. The kitchenette had a dropped ceiling, and we had hoped the woodwork under it would be intact—our hopes were shattered. To make the kitchen a bit larger, someone had removed the walls to the right of the original opening and under the small window and let the room ‘bulge’ into the bedroom. The refrigerator was in the wide part of the bedroom.  The woodwork was gone.

I tore down the dangling ceiling piece. If you look, you can see the scarp from my patch—no plasterer we contacted would touch any of the defective ceilings in the home. I used drywall to replace the missing walls and took the woodwork from the kitchen side to make what you see in the photo to approximate its original appearance. If you look on the kitchen side, you’ll see that the woodwork is rather plain wide planks and a little trim molding. The huge pocket doors were also gone, leaving gaping holes where they had been. This I concealed with masonite, selected to resemble parquet panels. There were enough hand-carved oak pieces in the attic so that I could imagine what the fretwork in that wide doorway had been like. Ben Markley, in Joplin, Missouri, gave me a piece of fretwork he had that was about two feet short. I had master carpenter Jim Padgett add a piece to either end that curved somewhat like the original had. I also had to hang drywall on the kitchen ceiling from the chandelier to the outside wall. On the unsightly chimney in the kitchen, I used fake brick, applied one brick at a time, the back, unseen face is the original look, retained for historic purposes. This home is on the National Register of Historic Places, as the home is in the downtown historic region, one of the diminishing number of buildings left.

It was built, I believe, in 1868 by a doctor who saw his patients in this home. Stella Pratt, who lived in one of the apartments until her death at age 99, told me that this man had hanged himself in the barn at a time when the property included much land. We once had a visit from two people who told us they had grown up in this home as children when their father, Simon Koin, had owned a department store, probably in the Masonic Building which is now an art gallery.  Another lady, a Mrs. Widvey, asked us if the painted canvas was still on the ceiling.  It had been beautiful.  I had found narrow gold, very ornate trim molding with tiny pink roses in many small pieces in the attic, and when the ceiling paper had been stripped off, I could see small nail holes that showed where the trim had framed the canvas in a very complicated zigzag fashion.

Next, all the woodwork, including the fireplace, was stripped and  stained—the Baha’is of Greenfield, especially Ruth and Jim Alewine, came at odd times to strip the wood. The pillar capitals of the fireplace were ivory and were very resistant to the oak stain. The light switches were twist knobs—I left one in the hall near the front door. Chiseling into the plaster (the walls are all double brick and very thick), I buried the wiring and put in modern switches. An electrician came and rewired this apartment so that we could use modern appliances without blowing fuses. He put outlets on the wall in the kitchen and 220 for the stove. There is crawl space under these two rooms, which made changing the plumbing for the kitchen sink pretty easy.

I used vinyl wallpaper on the ceilings to resist further damage to the ceiling plaster. The globes I found in shops in Indianapolis, a few here and there, and the bottom one is what I call squat (not quite a globe), but they all match the etching on the glass of the chandelier. The kitchen globes are antique also, but as there were only four, we found some that looked ‘kitcheny’ with painted morning glories on etched lattice. The light fixtures in each of the suites in the house have matching chains. We made a special point of purchasing the living room chandelier from the former owners. It was in their basement across the street on State Street. We wanted the original in part because it had nine globes. Some of the globes had been removed, and I put finials in there temporarily. I purchased the lighting parts to restore it completely, but never got that job done.  The chandelier has since been removed.  Those owners had replaced the fixture in the master bedroom with a cheap one and hung the original milk glass beauty in their dining room.  That home is now a law firm, and I bet that fixture is still there.

The numbers 9 and 19 are significant in Baha’i history. This was our ninth home. It was on highway 9, and there were 19 steps to the second floor. The ceilings in the downstairs rooms are all 11 ½ feet (called 12-foot ceilings). Only the one apartment at the top of the stairs has lower ceilings and interior walls that are not brick. This is because this apartment was the servants’ quarters, and it featured a stairway that at one time opened into the large, original kitchen at the bottom (There are five kitchens and five baths in this large home). There has been a door added in the exterior wall to open the back staircase onto a back porch, which we changed into what we called our summer kitchen when we added the back deck and put a large greenhouse above this kitchen—later changed to permanent walls with skylights.  Incidentally, the iron railing around that porch was purchased in Indianapolis when the Black Curtain Dinner Theater went out of business in 1980. The summer kitchen cabinets were purchased from Dean Weatherall in Shelby County when he replaced them in his upscale house there.

When we were nearly finished with the original decorating job in this apartment, the carpeting was ‘bright berry’ red, and the draperies were the red antique satin ones I had Margaret make to use in my first production of Hello, Dolly! at Eastern Hancock High School, and the huge vinyl sectional sofa, snuggled into the bay made by those three windows, was a wet fire engine red. When the two elderly Pratt ladies who still kept their apartments saw this apartment, they were accompanied by a friend from up north who appeared to be Amish. Somewhat in awe (or shock) their guest said, “I bet you call this the Red Room.” And you know what, after that, we did.

We still have a sample of the wallpapers we used somewhere, also many pictures.  Several people asked us if it was the ‘original’ wallpaper because it fit the feeling of the place really better than its replacement a few years later (which is what you see in these pictures.)  Margaret’s father, Walter Goldsmith, then mayor of Harlem, Montana, helped me put up the bulkhead over the cupboards.  The company that installed those early cupboards (now in an upstairs apartment) said it would be the tallest bulkhead they had ever installed.  It was so high that we could not run the drywall lengthwise—more than four feet.  These cabinets were installed later by Jim Padgett, who let me help him and didn’t charge us for his labor—a really good friend.