A Hundred Year Story, Part 9

More about the home place

By Elton Camp

All acclaimed my grandmother to be an outstanding cook, although she always

protested that dishes hadn’t come out right. Tommy often told her, “You condemn it [the
food] and we’ll execute it [eat it].”

Breakfast featured the normal fare of the day. The yard eggs were home raised
and the butter freshly churned from milk provided by a cow kept in the barn up the hill
behind the house. After breakfast, the family read the daily text and then a chapter from
the Bible. Usually they read the chapter from which the daily text was taken.

Typically, Josie would have, at the evening meal, three different meat dishes,
several vegetable dishes, and a dessert or two. The best dessert was an iced walnut cake
made “from scratch,” but the recipe has been lost if it was ever put into writing to begin
with.

The usual practice was to eat breakfast, a light snack in the afternoon, and then a
large family meal around 8:00 p.m. This eating pattern was partly due to Tommy’s work
schedule as a rural mail carrier, but that alone didn’t account for the relative lateness of
the meal. Perhaps it took that long to get things ready. After the evening meal, the entire
family remained at the table to talk for an hour or more.

“I hate sitting around the table like that,” my father fumed. He’d grown up with
the necessity to wolf down his food and leave the table. Slow eaters in his family
would’ve found nothing left within minutes. Time couldn’t be wasted. Work had to be
done after the meal.

For simple convenience, Josie’s place was at the head of the table to the right.
Her husband sat to her left. That made it easy for her to get up and see to things. After she
died, he moved around to her place without comment. None of the family expected him
to do that. He never mentioned it, nor did anyone else. He took her death very hard so it
surprised us that he didn’t want her seat left vacant. I suppose it was his way of saying
that he had to move on with the remainder of his life.

The formal dining room featured dark wood furniture with a table that hid extra
leaves underneath. It could be expanded to quite a large size. When Tommy, decades
later, converted the dining room into a bedroom for himself, he gave my mother that table
and chairs. She didn’t want it, but felt she couldn’t refuse. Because it was a gift from
him, she kept it for years. It wasn’t practical for daily use and took up space in her house
that was needed for other purposes. Eventually she sold it to a used furniture store in
Russellville.
 The centerpiece of the dining table, when it was in Fayetteville, was the orange
carnival glass bowl and cups that are now on the shelves in our living room in
Russellville. Most likely the glassware was a premium given when they bought
something else. Only four cups remained, but we’ve managed to complete the set from
antique stores. The bowl had a base, but it was broken long ago. I found a makeshift
base, but still hope to find one like the original.

Bowl from Dining Room at Fayetteville

Over the dining table hung a large brass and glass chandelier with many light
bulbs. In addition to the table and chairs, furniture included a matching buffet on high
legs, an unattractive, too-small wall-mounted framed mirror above it, and a matching
china cabinet. The furniture was shiny because my grandmother gave it periodic coats of
shellac. That was a common housekeeping practice, done because it was thought to make
the furniture appear new. The buffet and china cabinet, in 2005, were sold with my
parents’ house in Russellville. We simply had no room for them and they weren’t quality
pieces.

The dining room featured a brick fireplace with a top-quality white marble
mantle, although it went unused for decades. An interesting old Oriental-type rug partly
covered the wooden floor but it was faded and worn.

Heating the house without using fireplaces created significant problems. At the
initial conversion to gas, they put in unvented heaters which were not only unsafe, but
created horrendous moisture problems inside the house. Water from condensation
trickled down the walls. Pieces of furniture began to come unglued. Mold appeared. To
eliminate those conditions, they inserted a large gas space heater and vented it through
the fireplace. Venting solved the humidity problem. Since the dining room was near the
center of the house, that heater served as the main source of heat. It wasn’t adequate to
the job. Only the seldom-used dining room was actually sufficiently warm, but comfort
standards were lower then.

The heating situation would’ve been even worse had it not been for the many
layers of the walls. Over time, whenever Tommy decided to improve the appearance of
the walls, he added to whatever was already in place. This made them grow in thickness
as building material accumulated.

Nothing, however, could overcome the lack of attic insulation. The floor of the
attic was completely bare. If fiberglass insulation had been added, it would’ve
revolutionized the heating and cooling of the house. It was a job easily accomplished in a
couple of hours. Tommy listened when that measure was suggested, but didn’t act on it.
It was a procedure with which he was unacquainted. Most of the heat was wasted as it
penetrated upward through the thin ceiling.

In the mid 1960s, the Morrises installed a large air conditioning window unit in
the dining room. The unit did a surprisingly good job of cooling the house–much better
than the performance of the space heater in warming it. They added the air conditioning
mainly because of Josie’s failing health. “I feel lots better during the summer with the
house being cool,” she reported. “I hardly know when it’s summer.”

In the 1960s the aging windows became so loose and drafty that they literally
cried out to be replaced. They generated loud whines and roars when the wind blew.
Tommy removed the regular windows and replaced them with flimsy storm windows.
They weren’t designed for that use. “I got a good buy on the new windows,” he boasted.
“I never knew you could get windows that reasonable.” When the family tried to point
out his error, he became indignant. “They’re not storm windows,” he asserted. “I want
y’all to quit saying that.” He’d made a mistake, but in an all-to-human inclination,
wasn’t willing to acknowledge it.

When my mother inherited the house, she was able to sell it without being
required to replace the missing windows. Strangely, the real estate agent even
commented favorably on the presence of storm windows in such an old house. He
seemed blind to the fact that they were the only windows, not an extra layer of glass.
Fortunately, the contract specified that the house sold “as is.”

As a child, I became fascinated with secret doors and rooms. The Morris house
was the largest one to which I had access. I wished it had something like that, but knew
within reason that it didn’t. “Y’all didn’t happen to build any secret rooms or stuff like
that?” I hopefully asked my grandparents. They assured him that they hadn’t, but they’d
forgotten about a concealed space between the dining room and living room. I learned of
its existence only when I noticed the thickness of the wall between the two rooms and
took measurements.

“I know the fireplace takes up part of that space,” I insisted, “but what’s in that
part over there?”

“That used to be a closet, but we closed it off years ago,” my grandfather

explained.

“When I was little, they sometimes put me in that closet and shut the door to
punish me when I did wrong” my mother added. That was a common form of discipline
in those days. It wasn’t viewed then as being inappropriate, but was more like a “time
out.”

I was delighted that I had, after all, discovered a hidden room in the big old house,
even if it was only a closet with no way to get into it. When I visited, I often thumped on
the wall and tried to imagine what it looked like. Since only two other closets served the
entire house, it’s hard to imagine what line of thinking led them to give up desperately
needed storage. Many houses of that age, however, had no closets at all. Clothes were
kept in cabinets.

Some years after the death of his wife, Tommy took the dining room as his
bedroom. In the process, he reopened the closet to provide space for a half bath. That
half bath was his last building project. It was almost too much for a man of his advanced
age, but he managed to bring it to a successful conclusion. The task required many trips
to the hardware store. When he ruined any of the building materials, he bought
replacements. If the second attempt failed, he’d make another. Eventually, he produced
a neat little half-bath.

A door from the dining room connected to the seldom-used formal living room at
the front of the house. It had a spectacular brick fireplace with a white marble mantle. Its
source of heat was an unvented, thus very dangerous, gas space heater in front of the
fireplace. It couldn’t be used at night because of the very real danger of carbon
monoxide gas.

The floor, which extended into the adjacent bedroom, was of the finest heart
loblolly pine without knots or imperfections of any type. In the mid 1950s, Josie fell on
that slippery surface and fractured her hip. The injury was so severe that she was unable
to get around for months. Afterward, she had to walk with a crutch and had a noticeable
limp. This was in the days before modern orthopedic surgery and hip replacements. The
doctor pinned the end of the femur to the rest of the bone to the best of his ability. It
allowed her to regain a large measure of mobility and to continue living for years. Such
an injury was often fatal in that day. Years later, the pins caused an inflammation and
required removal.

“Right there’s the exact spot where she fell,” I thought each time I passed the
place near the piano. I regarded it with a sort of horror.

The living room furniture was well constructed and the decorations quality so that
they outlasted Josie and even Tommy’s long lives. An interesting set of bronzes
consisted of two bookends of “End of the Trail.” Since she didn’t know that they were
reproductions of a noted
Frazier work, Josie called them “the dying Indian.” Those bookends are now on display
in our den in Russellville.

The couch, designed to seat four, had two matching stuffed chairs. The brown,
velvety fabric was worn, but still strong. When I lay down on the couch, I had to keep
my face upward to avoid the unpleasant odor of a decades-long collection of dust. The
eventual addition of flowered slipcovers only worsened the situation. If anyone sat on
the couch, the slipcovers lived up to their name and “slipped” right off the cushions.
 When my grandparents set up housekeeping, vacuum cleaners didn’t exist. When
the device came on the scene, they didn’t see the need for one until the last few years of
their lives. My grandmother kept the house clean with the equipment she’d always used.

With the couch and chairs, still in sound structural condition, mother sold them to
a used furniture dealer when she emptied the house for sale. Everyone felt a bit sad to
dispose of them, but nobody wanted or needed them. The only constant in life is change.

When I was a teenager, my grandparents had purchased matching end tables, a

gossip bench, and a coffee table. On the end tables they placed a pair of inexpensive
white lamps with gold trim. My parents began to refer to those lamps as “antiques.”
Inexplicably, they thought that they were valuable. They knew full well when they had
been purchased, but chose to disregard the facts. “I remember when they were bought.
They aren’t old at all–just ordinary lamps,” I protested. My words fell on deaf ears.
People sometimes believe what they want to despite facts to the contrary. I eventually let
the lamps go with the sale of my parents’ final house in Russellville.

The gossip bench was purchased specifically to hold the telephone when it
appeared in 1950. For years, only one was installed for the entire house. Eight
households shared the single line. “Listening in” was commonplace. Nobody could
expect that any conversation was private. Josie also often eavesdropped. She never
made any other use of the telephone, but left all calling to her husband. “It makes me
nervous to talk on the phone,” she explained.

The living room had several large windows designed to provide abundant natural
light, but perpetually closed Venetian blinds defeated their purpose. One end of the room
featured an upright piano made by the famous Jesse French Piano and Organ Company
based in Nashville. Two chocolate-brown ornaments, a pitcher showing woman’s head
and a vase showing grapes, were on opposite ends of the top of the piano. They qualified
as “antiques” at over one hundred years old. They were ugly then and they’re ugly now.
Mother didn’t like them, but felt obligated to keep them. I’d intended to get rid of them if
they came down to me, but, when confronted with the reality, I couldn’t. They’d
belonged to my grandmother’s mother. They’re probably close to 150 years old. The
vases lurk in dark corners of our house in Russellville. Just because something is old
doesn’t mean it’s valuable. Those surely aren’t.

(To be continued.)