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 radio-
phonograph 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 black-
and-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.

That first winter of 1953-54 was a singularly bad one.

The old vacation cottage was drafty and the small inadequate
furnace that had been installed to make the vacation cottage
survivable all year around and had come with the house did
not work well and eventually failed one bitter cold winter
night.

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.

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 book-
length 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.scribd.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 olive-
drab 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, book-
length 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.

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 mid-

February 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-year-

old vacation cottage and the concrete-block garage built
later for a Model-T. Bay Village had become a wealthy outer-
ring 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