Every room in our new home needed fresh paint or wallpaper. Even without the West Side properties, it could have overwhelmed the time and energy of most fifty-something couples. But Mom and Dad had nurtured more than buildings over the years. They had taught my brothers and me the skills of home maintenance, the value and satisfaction of a job well done, the patience to stick with long-term projects from start to finish, the optimism and confidence to keep our eyes on the prize. Paul, Billy, and I were so thrilled to have a home of our own, we willingly dove into whatever effort was needed to uncover the hidden beauty in our Cinderella house.
In our family’s version of “quality time,” we teamed up to refurbish the house during the December 1965 holiday break. Paul volunteered to paint every surface of the enormous sixteen-hundred-square-foot unfinished basement, beams and all. The week before Christmas, he rented a paint sprayer and worked around the clock for two full days, stopping only to eat the sandwiches Mom brought him when he refused to come home until he was finished.
When Paul finally walked into the back door on the West Side, he was like the mimes who stand motionless in European city squares, stiff and white as a statue. His lashes, heavy with paint, blinked oh-so-slowly. Every hair on his body was a bristly, sticky white: head, arms, hands—even up his nose. Only his eyeballs weren’t white. They were red, bloodshot from the insult of spray paint.
My bedroom was next. Wrestling rented wallpaper steamers, we pressed the awkward, heavy rectangles of metal against the walls for thirty seconds at a time. Vapor hissed out, clouding my room with the cloying smell of melting wall-paper paste. Despite frigid outside temperatures, we threw open the windows, releasing intense steam and heat.
Pressing rigid putty blades against softened old paper, we scraped off layer after layer. Press. Hold. Scrape. Repeat— until we were down to the bare wall, each of us shouting a loud “Hooray!” upon reaching the base level. Sometimes the massive steamer plate fell against an arm, causing a blistering second-degree burn. An expletive, a quick trip to the bathroom for Mercurochrome and a Band-Aid—then back to steaming, a vision of the end product firmly in mind.
Mom found beautiful wallpaper, a closeout at a dollar per roll—enough for the parlor, entry, and hallway up to the second floor. One of her tenants recommended a contractor, Mr. Henderson Ford, a large, heavyset African American man, who dropped by to give an estimate. Ford arrived in a paint-spattered coat, which, when unbuttoned, exposed overalls stretched by his rotund belly. Garrulous, funny, and with years of experience, he explained to Mom how he’d approach the work. She liked his forthright style, his attentive ear, and his good suggestions. They hit it off instantly, and she hired him on the spot to paper the first floor and all the bedrooms.
Amidst all these complicated projects, Mom still had to figure out what to do with our present two-flat on Washington Boulevard. We had to pack up sixteen years of family living and the accumulations remaining from Dad’s Depression-era mentality. “Never throw out anything you might need someday,” was his parents’ mantra and a guiding principle still embedded in Dad’s psyche. It was how his family had survived, then thrived, during lean times. He saved everything— scraps of wood (for repairs), old buckets (still serviceable), a two-foot stack of 78 records (“These will be priceless someday”), multiple sets of dishes and cheap Revere pots and pans he collected at Salvation Army stores (“The kids will need cookware when they move”), and hundreds of other items, from rolls of plastic to bottles of nails and screws, each type labeled and sorted into its own baby-food jar, and multiples of every tool imaginable: ten varieties of saws, fifteen screwdrivers, wrenches of all sizes and uses.
How were they going to get everything packed and then manage their rooming house, with a total of twelve individual tenants, from five miles away? That winter of 1965, Mom panicked at her predicament. Heart racing, mind ajumble, she saw lying on the dining-room table a small pamphlet by Norman Vincent Peale, the author of The Power of Positive Thinking, probably ordered from a magazine ad. Inside was a Bible passage, Psalm 46:10, offered as a solace in times of crisis: “Be still, and know that I am God.” Mom remembered it as: “Be still. I am thy God.” She lay down on the dining-room couch, repeating this passage over and over until her thoughts and pounding heart calmed. “That’s when I began to think,” she later told me, “and figure out priorities. Before that, it was always work, work, work.”
“We can’t possibly run a rooming house from five miles away,” she told Dad.
“Well, we’ll see,” he said, unwilling to make a decision.
Mom wasn’t religious and seldom went to church, but the Peale epiphany would inspire her invocations of the Almighty in the years ahead.
The following March, Mom was moving boxes to our new home, when she found a contractor’s soggy brochure on the front porch. “Divine intervention,” she declared, and called the man and hired him to remodel our rooming house. Within ten days, his crew tore down the sleeping-room walls and restored the second floor to a single-family, eight-room flat with two bathrooms. They turned the three basement studios into one multiroom flat, all completed as our family packed its possessions. Now she would have to cope with only three tenants in our two-flat, instead of twelve.
A month later, the moving van pulled up in front of the only home I’d ever known, loaded up our furnishings, and headed out of West Garfield Park, where Dad had lived his entire life—more than half a century. But Dad wasn’t really letting go of his old neighborhood. He remained tethered to the past by three buildings.