Even the built-in bookshelves and mantel in the living room had been removed.
They had already donated all our kitchen appliances to the Habitat Restore and moved the kitchen cabinets down to the basement, which was also completely gutted.
The landscaping around the house had also been relocated to the back yard, making the house look kind of naked from the front.
These guys work fast! Apparently, the roof is coming off next week.Everyone was fascinated by all the stuff that had been walled into the house for more than 50 years. I asked Rob where they had found it, and it turns out it had been inside the wall of the closet in my office. I had speculated that it might have been inside a closet wall, since our closets are lined with cedar panels. It's possible that there were originally shelves or cubbyholes inside the closet that were covered up when the cedar lining was installed at a later point in the house's history. Or, someone could have created a hiding place by prying loose one of the panels…
When I left, I took my bag of treasures to my next-door neighbor's house. Francine inherited her house (which was built at the same time as ours – around 1925) from her uncle, who was the original owner, when she was a teenager and has lived there for more than 60 years. Her memory for names isn't great, but she told me some interesting stories about some of our predecessors. In the 70's and 80's the family that lived there was traumatized when their daughter married the leader of a Hare Krishna group from Germany and renounced most of her worldly possessions.
In the 60's, the house was purchased by a wealthy family for their son and his new wife. Apparently, the wife, who was from England, had been the family's maid, but the son got her pregnant, so his parents married them off and moved them into the house. It sounds like it was not a very happy union. Francine described the husband as a "psychopath" and said she once heard loud music coming from next door and looked out her bedroom window to see him performing some kind of crazy ballet dance up and down the driveway. He made his wife play tennis with him all the time, even during the final stages of her pregnancy. His family eventually had him committed to the Pratt mental hospital in Baltimore.
In the 50's, a woman lived there with her mother and son. Francine liked both women, but said the son was "wild" and always getting in trouble. Once, while staying at a hotel, he flew into a range and threw everything out the window of his room. His father was a "crazy doctor" who lived in DC – it wasn't clear if they were divorced or just lived apart for the sake of convenience (although DC isn't exactly far away).
So I think our treasure trove was left by the son. He must have hidden his cigarettes and booze in the wall of the closet so his mother and grandmother wouldn't find them. I suspect some of the other items may have been stolen or found. The wallet belonged to a John C. Snider Jr. (b. 1917), who lived on the next block over, and the key case had a card inside identifying them as the property of Dr. Clift P. Berger of Oakland, MD (or maybe he was the father?). One of the glasses cases, which contains a cracked pair of aviator sunglasses, has this handwritten inside: 2nd Lieu John Poe; 247th Fighter Group; Andrews Air Force Base. Josh thinks the writing looks more like a kid's wishful thinking than an actual Air Force pilot's, so maybe that was his name.
The library book, which was found in the ceiling, is a 1947 edition of Young America's Aviation Annual. It was checked out from the Clarendon Branch of the Arlington Public Library on Nov 25, 1950. After flipping through it, I can see why it was hidden in the rafters rather than returned to the library – many of the photos have been cut out!
I'm hoping to get to the library this week to do some research on the previous owners of our home and see if any of the names and dates match up. Maybe they still have a record of who checked out that book…
No comments:
Post a Comment