The House on Standpipe Hill
On one of the highest hills in Orange, Virginia, in the shadow of the hundred-foot standpipe that once held the town’s water supply, sits a small brick house squeezed into a minute plot of land bordered by a slightly tilted white rail fence my father built. There is no name to describe the style of the house’s architecture; maybe “late world war II” is description enough. Russell Bailey, a local architect, designed it specifically to fit our family, but mostly for the tiny lot on which it was built. A guy named Jack Fry laid the brick so professionally that even after 55 years, not one flaw developed.
The place is long and narrow, with a roof too steep for anyone except a fly to stand on. The peak of the roof projects high in the air, ending in a sharp edge three stories high, and two dormer windows poke out the front, like the eyes of a giant frog waiting to hop. A second roof line intersects at a right angle to the first, extending longitudinally toward the back yard.
To the left of the postage stamp front yard, a short inclined driveway leads to a garage barely large enough for the Buicks Dad loved so much. He never put a door on the garage, probably because there was no room for a door. Well, the car was covered and that was good enough.
Actually, the garage was an afterthought, probably not part of the original house design. But Dad needed a garage so, Dad and Papa Tate, my grandfather, laid the brick, poured the cement, and built the porch on top. Everyone that came by, including me got to mix the cement by hand. There was no cement mixer in Orange in those days.
A trellis, just longer than the Buicks, lines the driveway on the left, acting as a six foot high barrier to whomever lived in the house next door — otherwise anyone sneezing out the window of a car parked in our driveway would send particles of saliva into the neighbor’s kitchen. Dad wanted to buy the lot when it was vacant, but, according to the stories, Mr. Devine, the man who owned the lot and lived in the house catecornered to our backyard, sold it to someone else for the same price Dad offered. Dad never knew why.
Leading to the front entrance, a short concrete walkway now covers the gravel pathway into which I blew a pit the size of a gallon bucket with a Liberty Bell — the premier firework of my youth. The explosion threw gravel onto the high roof, bringing Mom, Dad and all the neighbors running out of their doors in panic. Hello, I am your new neighborhood kid, just doing my thing and blowing up the place. In those days before regulations, you could buy the real stuff with long fuses and the force of a piece of dynamite. Pretty powerful stuff for a ten-year-old kid.
We moved to the house shortly after my brother, Warren, was born. For the preceding year, we had lived in a bedroom of my grandparents, Mama and Papa Luck’s place down on Monrovia Road, on the outskirts of town, about a mile from the new house. Mama and Papa Luck’s home was a two story white clapboard structure with a sitting porch on the front and an extension, containing the kitchen, dining room and closed in porch, on the back — a typical farmhouse probably built in stages, first the plain two story basic shelter, followed by an addition when a family expanded and more money came in.
There was a center hall, a bedroom on the right, where Mom, Dad, baby Warren and I slept, and, to the left, a living room where women sewed or crocheted, men smoked pipes and read, and where we all played caroms, setback, Chinese checkers, and monopoly. A steep stairway led upstairs to three bedrooms, one occupied by my grandparents, another by a boarder named Rosa, and a third, closet-sized room in which Aunt Mary, Papa Luck’s sister slept. Aunt Mary’s last name was Pugh, the same as my grandmother’s maiden name, because Aunt Mary had married Mama Luck’s brother.
The small house was jam-packed with people. Yet, it didn’t seem crowded, unless someone inadvertently kicked over the coffee can Papa Luck kept on the living room floor in which he spit chewing tobacco juice. Dad called it “a nasty habit,” but neither those words nor the disapproval of his wife deterred Papa Luck from one of his primary pleasures.
For me, living with my grandparents was a momentous year, a year of discovery and freedom, of adventure with friends, of play with “Boots,” Mamma Luck’s white Spitz dog who adopted me as his special charge, of crayfish and yellow school busses, of long conversations on the front porch, of hikes to the livestock market with Papa Luck, of wondering if I would ever learn Chinese checkers well enough to win a game from my grandmother. It was a year when cars roared up and down Monrovia Road dragging cans, sparking and rattling on the hard surface, to celebrate VJ-Day, victory over Japan day marking the end of World War II, the year Uncle Freddie came home from the Army Airforce and the year Mamma Luck yelped with joy the day he told her his wife, Alice, was pregnant. It was the year I brought home Mumps to the family and the year I acquired a really cute baby brother.
Over the years, the house at 151 S. Almond became a center for family activities — not just our immediate family, but for relatives on both sides who came to visit or stay awhile. Cousin Jimmy stayed with us when Lucille, Dad’s sister gave birth to Tommy. That was the time Warren sprained his neck in a wrestling match with either Jimmy or me. We were never sure who really did the spraining. At any rate, Warren, who was about four then, wore a cervical collar for a few weeks thereafter.
For years, Marion, a boarder who worked at the silk mill like Dad, lived in the downstairs bedroom, ate every meal with us, watched television with us, and sided with my parents in every discussion. She was like a commentator in a Greek play — always observing, but unlike the commentator, making judgements.
Later, after Papa Luck died in the nineteen fifties, Mamma Luck came to live with us in the upstairs sewing room, a closet-sized space strangely quite similar to Aunt Mary’s room in Mamma Luck’s old house. Mamma Luck was quick of mind and a skillful seamstress, quiltmaker, crochter, and game player. Through some quirk or interest, she categorized everyone, if not everything. If someone new came to visit, her first question was, “Who is your father and mother?” She wanted the whole family history. I never figured out why she was so obsessed with people’s backgrounds. For a while, I suspected it was some form of racism or classism; yet, I never saw other evidence of discrmination in her. Perhaps she’d read Deuteronomy and wanted to continue the legacy. “I just want to know,” she said when I once asked why she was so interested.
Momma Luck lived to be over 100 years old, remarkably lucid, still quilting up to the last couple of years when she moved into the Orange Nursing Home. She’d outlived her husband, two of her sons, and all of her peers.
One cannot forget shower baths at 151. For its time, the home design was modern — there were two baths, one up and one down. Or, to be technical, a bath and a half, because the downstairs facility had only a commode and sink without a tub or shower, whereas the upstairs room had a bathtub — but no shower. Dad hated tub baths. “You draw clean water, step in it with dirty feet, sit in it with your behind, then wash your face,” he’d explained. He wanted a shower. Innovator as he was, he knew the perfect solution — build it in the basement. After all, there was a concrete double laundry tub near a corner down there. All we have to do is make a partition to keep water from going all over the basement, then hook up a shower hose to the laundry tub. Cheap, quick, innovative, not to mention private. Well, maybe not so private.
Having just built the garage addition, Dad had some leftover cinderblock and mortar he wanted to use for something. The shower also solved that problem. So, one weekend, he build a cinderblock wall near corner next to the laundry tub, creating a three sided shower sized room with the open side facing out toward the laundry. With some of the leftover mortar, he fashioned a tiny dam and irrigation channel to route the water toward the drain about 8 feet away. Luckily the floor was sufficiently slanted for the water to flow. He bought one of those rubber shampoo sprays with a 6 foot hose and hung it on a nail driven into a joist above the shower room. The spray gizmo featured a threaded end that a person could push onto the faucet of the laundry tub 4 feet away. The laundry tub had an indentation for a bar of soap, so no soapdish is needed in the shower itself. So what if we have to lean over three or four feet to get the soap. We can always put the soap on the floor if we get too lazy to reach that far.
Soon, we got a chance to try out the new shower. First, we had to make sure no one was either in or going to the basement. We might be greatly embarrassed, for instance, if somebody came down to wash clothes while we stood buck naked in the open shower. Next, remember to bring a towel and a robe. It’s a two story walk back to the bedroom. Connect the shower hose to the spigot. Turn on the hot and cold water levers, while stretching out a right leg so as to feel the temperature of the shower water with a toe. Be careful not to open the faucets too far because too much water force will blast the hose off the spigot. Also, too much water may overflow the train channel causing a flood in the basement. Oh, by the way, remember the basement isn’t heated, so you’d better use plenty of hot water. Oops, did you bring the shampoo?
Never, in this design, engineering, and construction project did anyone question why we didn’t simply ask a plumber to come in to install a shower in the upstairs bath. The pipes were easily accessible, the cost and effort certainly less than building a cinder block wall in the basement. Maybe Dad wanted a guys’ place. Women certainly tended to avoid the spider infected basement shower.
Years later, Dad finally installed a shower upstairs. It probably took all of an hour’s work. But this happened after Warren and I left for our new adult life, Mamma Luck had gone to the nursing home, and Marion had retired to Somerset.
One day, in the interim, before he built the new shower, I called Dad on the phone.
“Whattaya doin?” I asked.
“Well, for the first time in my married life, I took a shower in the basement and walked bare naked to the bedroom upstairs,” he said. Dad had just defined personal freedom.
Warren and I shared the “boys’ room,” upstairs with a window facing west with a magnificent view of the distant Blue Ridge Mountains, a dormer window facing Almond Street, a closet with a sharply sloped ceiling too low for an adult to enter, two twin beds, one on each side of the dormers, two long natural wood bookshelfs on each wall beside the beds, and a hardwood floor cold enough to freeze the feet of a polar bear. The shelves were stacked with books and momentoes — the brown doggie bank where I collected coins, the “Boy Grows Up” book our parents gave us to explain the birds and the bees, and a tube-based art deco RCA radio tuned to WRVA, my station of choice for late night listening. That radio stayed in place from my twelft birthday until we sold the house in 2000. Every night during my teen years, I’d turn off the light, move my left arm to the radio, rotate the switch, wait for the radio to warm up, and then go to sleep to the sounds of Perry Como, Louis Armstrong, or Rosemary Clooney. Almost forty years later, returning from my home in Europe to visit Mom, my arm moved in the well-practiced motion. The RCA, still tuned to the same station, blared country music, but sounded a long legacy of continuity and support. “How many people could experience this?” I wondered.
The radio was my big connection to the outside world. I can’t remember when we first got television, but I do remember the first time I ever saw one. Welford Sherman, the scoutmaster of our local troop, owned an appliance store down on Water Street. One night, at one of our meetings, he said, “I’ve got a surprise for you. We’re going over to my house to see it.” We hiked the half mile or so to his place to sit on the floor around a huge wooden walnut box with a tiny window in front that looked like the bottom of a large coke bottle. Welford threw the switch while we all gaped in amazement at a fuzzy, snowy black and white picture of some guys talking and laughing. A scientific marvel has finally come to Orange. None of us could hope to actually own a television because they probably cost as much as a car. But Welford, sensing the future, installed a TV in the front display window of his store where people of the community could gather around to watch the Joe Louis fights. Everyone in town soon wanted one of those new gadgets.
My memories of our own TV are dominated by visions of Lawrence Welk, the Norwegian accented bandleader whose music was sickeningly wholesome. Every Saturday night, we’d gather in the living room to see Welk’s array of goodie goodies strut their conservative clothes and sing sweet songs. When Elvis Presley and, later, the Beetles hit the Ed Sullivan show on Sunday night, Mom and Dad, and probably all other parents across America, groaned their disapproval, having no idea of the revolution ahead.
I left 151 at age 17 to attend the University of Virinia. UVA was only thirty miles away, but undergraduate engineering required total commitment.
Years later, while working in my corporate career, I dropped by to see Dad and Mom. It was to be a short visit as I was on my way to Washington, DC. On the way, I had ripped a seam in my suit pants.
“Take ’em off, I’ll fix ’em for you, Dad said. We went upstairs to Mom’s sewing room where he repaired the seam like a professional seamstress. We laughed about the possibility that I could have gone to an important business meeting with ripped pants.
Just two days later, during a meeting in Albuquerque, NM, I got a devistating call. Dad had just died of a massive heart attack while taking a treadmill test.
Warren and I sold 151 S. Almond St. after Mom’s death. We took lots of pictures, rounded up things to sell or give away, and divided up the mementoes.
Once in a while, I drive up South Almond Street, stop to stare at the front door while glancing up at the once dark hundred-foot standpipe, now painted white, in the background. All the familiar neighbors are gone, Mrs. Gill, who used to take me to choir practice at Trinity Methodist, Jimmy Halley, the adventurous young friend, “Moose” Gill, who taught me how to catch a baseball, Mr. Baldwin, the retired police chief, Shirley Sheffield, on whom I had a huge crush, but never told her, Mrs. Jacobs and, many others who were part of my early life.
They always say, you can move away, but you can never get Orange County red clay off your feet. After traveling the world, even living in Europe for five years, I’m still a small town kid.
