Buckingham Palace, 1953 - The Finale

Buckingham Palace also offered a course in vicarious sex education. Many young men had magazines whose graphic photos came close to popping my fourteen year-old eyes out. Wow!

One guy had a framed photo of his German girlfriend prominently displayed on his dresser. She was standing by a country lane with both hands on the handlebars of her bicycle, and the bike was not sufficient to hide her immodesty. Another fellow had a desk full of post cards - French postcards.

Sometimes I’d go by a room and hear giggling or heavy breathing coming from behind the door. Once I walked into a room thinking it was empty only to back our with mumbled apologies. Curiosity got the better of me a couple times and I shamefully took to key-hole peeping, but those endeavors resulted in little reward because of the limited field of view. I took early retirement after that brief career of spying.

The Moose Lodge burned in the spring of 1960 and Don and I went off to college that fall. The Lodge built a modern structure on the south end of town so the Palace was no longer easily managed, and gradually went into decline. The city block emptied over the next fifteen years. The Courtland Hotel burned, a church next to it on Main went shortly thereafter, followed by the Detzen’s Bread building that faced Jackson Street.

Our old building was the lone survivor for a time. Mom and Dad sold it in the early seventies and the place was demolished a few years later. Google’s “satellite view” shows the city block is now one big parking lot.

Buckingham Palace, 1953 - More Renters

A heavy set women in her fifties rented room five for a short time. She was sick and produced a body odor that was powerfully offensive. Room five was in the back corner of the building next to a bathroom. Neither of us liked to go beyond room four as the noxious smell penetrated the whole area. No one else cared to go there either. I believe she went back to the hospital shortly thereafter, and I never heard anything more. We felt a guilty relief at her departure.

Many of the short timers were single men, itinerate drifters, who stayed a few weeks looking for work, catching their breath, or settling business. One was a young man of Mexican descent. He was in his early twenties, gregarious, always smiling, and outwardly friendly. He stayed for a month or two. I don’t know where he came from. He never mentioned family or friends, and seemed to have magically materialized into the flatlands of Indiana.

The guy was the first native Mexican we ever met. Mexican farm workers showed up in August every year. They came to pick tomatoes - one stop in their itinerate circuit through the states harvesting crops. We had seen them in other years working fields during the day, and sitting outside camps in evenings. They had always been nameless shadows until he came along. He was the first to have a human face

Don and I stopped to visit nearly every Saturday. We noticed he had a book on English grammar, another on math, and a notebook filled with his self-study. His effort seemed futile - maybe because he had such a distance to go, or maybe because he was alone, and had neither guidance nor support. His claim to fame was a broad smile that showcased a mouth-full of large white teeth. He bragged of being able to snap the caps off two beer bottles at the same time. - one at each side of his mouth. He demonstrated his prowess by opening a coke bottle one day, but I never saw his double play.
GO TO: Part 7, The Finale

Buckingham Palace, 1953 - Our Renters

There were several middle-age men, single, either recently divorced or widowed, who lived a suspended life for a few months before setting a new course.

Don came to me one Saturday and said he though the guy, Ike, in room number twelve, was dead. He had went in to change sheets that morning and quietly closed the door when he saw him lying in bed. He was still there in late afternoon in the same position, an arm hanging extended over the edge of the bed. Don went in to take a closer look and noticed an odor of decay. Ike had been dead for several days. No one missed the man, and it had been left to us to find him.

Most of the names have escaped me. There were two women, friends, that rented adjoining rooms on the third floor overlooking the street. Each carried a small suitcase, the apparent entirety of their possessions, and they stayed only a few weeks. Neither seemed to work. I would guess they were in their late forties. I only remember what one looked like because of a photo that set on her dresser. It was of her as a young woman, pretty, and sitting on the rail of a ship with a sailor standing beside. Maybe it was during World War II, maybe earlier.

That was then. Now she was broken, and had difficulty speaking, as if she had a mouth full of marbles. After they moved we found her dresser drawers full of empty booze bottles. I’ve always wondered what paths she followed to end up on our doorstep. I felt a great sympathy for this woman I hardly knew, and could barely understand. She was a human wreckage, a lost soul, that had landed on our shore for a brief time and then drifted back to sea.

Don was convinced the fellow in room number one was a cat-burglar. He took frequent trips out of town, and had a small bag of tools that he kept at the foot of his bed. They were the type a burglar would use - a least according to Don. The guy added suspicion one Saturday. He was drinking, a bit tipsy, happy, and wanted to talk. He kept starting to tell us something, a secret, but each time he would back off at the last minute, giggling to himself that he had better keep his mouth shut. I never heard whether he ever got caught, assuming that burglary was, indeed, his sideline.
GO TO: Part 6, More Renters

Buckingham Palace, 1953 - House Maid Service

We received fifty cents an hour over the summer, but were put on salary in the fall - ten dollars a week. On Saturday, our nine to five work day commenced with a stop at the laundry to pick up a tall stack of sheets before continuing on to “Buckingham Palace“. The informal name was bestowed by fellow Moose members shortly after we opened and it was thereafter referred to as “Buckingham Palace“. We had no sign advertisings the regal name, only a small note on the door directing potential renters to the Moose.

Every Saturday we changed sheets and towels, cleaned the bath rooms, vacuumed the carpets, and emptied the trash cans. The memory of those many Saturdays, the routine, has blurred to a singular image - any one would fit all. It is the memory of the people living there that sticks with me. Many tenants passed through in the seven years we were involved . Some stayed for many years, a few for several months, and many for only a few days.

Three or four were retirees, living the remainder of their lives on scant pensions in single rooms. Elmer Cox and his next door neighbor, Roy, come to mind.. They had the two smallest rooms, no more than ten foot square. Roy’s room never changed. The articles on his dresser: a comb and hair brush, a framed photo of his wife, and other sundry items, were always exactly positioned. It was spooky, like no one really lived there. Elmer and Roy were frugal, husbanded their money through the month, and then had a party with any leftovers - usually enough for a pint of whiskey each.
GO TO: Part 5, Our Renters

Buckingham Palace, 1953 - More Child Labor

Loose plaster sometimes hid behind the old wallpaper. Sagging sections often telegraphed their intent. This was especially characteristic of ceilings where large portions came down with the paper. The building was erected long before anyone thought of drywall, so the newly cleaned rooms possessed a “haunted house” aura with wood slats exposed.

Nearly every room needed some plastering, and since Don and I lacked experience in that particular craft the task defaulted to Dad. He was a jack-of-all-trades, and did the plumbing, electrical, and rewiring in the building. The only thing we didn’t do was to lay the carpets.

So Dad troweled plaster over the slats, and the putty-like material oozed into the spaces, anchoring the hardened end-product. He did a good job but the edges of the mended sections were still apparent. Painting helped. A professional might have crafted a perfect mend, but I expect plastering was becoming a lost art even then.

I cannot remember the paint colors, or if we used one throughout. A single hue would have been economical, but the truth of the matter escaped me sometime over the last fifty years. I do sort of remember a neutral pastel, maybe yellow. We learned to paint that summer, and Don and I paid a portion of our college expenses with paint brushes and rollers. But that’s another story.

The carpets were laid by a guy from Indianapolis and his college age son. Dad had previously measured each room, and the carpet man commended him on his accuracy. The Courtland Hotel was replacing some of its old furniture, so we acquired their discarded beds, dressers and writing desks. None of the rooms had built-in closets so we purchased sixteen new brown metal ones. By the end of summer we had the rooms set up and ready to rent. Don and I were transformed into chambermaids, and thus began the next stage of our education, an informal introduction to sociology, psychology, and the humanities.
GO TO: Part 4, House Maid Service

Buckingham Palace, 1953 - Child Labor

The basement, accessed from the rear of the Trustee’s, was lit by a single naked bulb that hung from above. The room, about twenty foot square, lay in the back corner. The ceiling rose to an height that was sufficient for Don and I, but compelled Dad, who stood six foot-three, to crouch in a perpetual stoop.

The place emitted an earthy redolence. The outer walls were part of the foundation, but inner walls rose to only four feet. A dirt crawl-space that ran throughout the building’s underbelly was accessable above the inner walls. Don and I, enticed by its dark reaches, tried to deflect light from our single source into that void only to have it swallowed by an eternal night.

We were there to work and never got a chance to crawl into that particular adventure. The two of us consoled ourselves with jokes of what might be found out there - rats, skeletons, buried treasure?

The boiler sat on a concrete platform raised above the floor in case of flooding. It was original equipment, old enough to be retired, but circumstance demanded that we coax a few more years out of it. Dad came down that first day to show us what to do. We removed the outer metal cover exposing the entrails of the rusty thing. There were eight or ten heavy cast-iron sections, each measuring about 3 feet by 2 by half a foot.

We took the sections apart, cleaned out the rust and reassemble them with new fittings. Dad dropped in a couple times each day to bring parts, check our progress, and show us the next stage. It seems that it took about a week, maybe a bit longer to finish the project Dad fired the boiler that fall, and there was much hissing and clanking as steam surged through the system to the radiators.

Wallpaper covered the upstairs rooms and halls, many layers, one pasted on top of another, decade after decade, till the rooms were smaller for it. Our next job was to remove the wallpaper from all sixteen rooms, three long halls, and four bathrooms.

Summer was coming into full heat, and Dad rented a piece of equipment, a wallpaper steamer, that made things even hotter and stickier. The commercial steamer delivered volumes of bellowing steam through a hose to a flat plate with a handle on one side and many holes on the other. We were to hold the plate against the wall, and until the steam penetrated the layers of paper.

In theory it worked fine, in practice, not so well. One of us would stand several minutes pressing the steamer against the wall, but when we shifted position hot gas bellowed from under the tool scalding our forearm. We donned long sleeve shirts when we would have preferred to work in bathing suits. And when it finished cooking we had one small patch of limp paper to peal off.

It wasn’t working, so we tried closing the room, firing the steamer, and doing something else for an hour or two. The room filled with hot vapors that soaked into the wallpaper. When the room cooled enough to get back in the paper peeled off in long wide strips.

Our goal was to see how long of a piece we could strip off before it broke. The ceiling was the best arena for this contest as gravity helped peel the strips, sometimes from wall to wall - that was equivalent to a “home run“. Some rooms had vinyl wallpaper within the layers. We figured those rooms might have functioned as kitchens at onetime. Those took more steaming.

We got so efficient that we could strip a room in a day, wash the paste off the plaster, and clean up the debris by the 5:00 PM quitting hour. We were usually cleaning up one room while steaming another.

GO TO: Part 3, More Child Labor

Buckingham Palace, 1953 - The Purchase

My parents purchased a building in downtown Kokomo, Indiana in 1953 - the biggest investment of their life. The place was on Taylor Street, sandwiched between the Moose Lodge and the Courtland Hotel. It’s unlikely they would have been interested had Dad not been the manager and secretary of the Moose. Mom worked as his assistant in the office. Both spent six days a week on the job, so it was an opportunity to have an investment that would be easy to manage.

They paid $16,000, which seems modest these days, and by late spring the family took possession of commercial property. Don and I learned that it was to be a family affair, signaling that we were to be involved. Thus began our passage into the world of child labor, informal instruction in various skilled-worker professions, and general education concerning the larger world of life.

I was thirteen years old in 1953 - Don, fifteen. When school let out that June we discovered our halcyon days of wandering leisurely through summers were forever curtailed. We found ourselves in the cramped, dungeon-like basement of our new property. The building was run-down and in significant need of repair. Don and I were to start at the bottom, and with Dad’s guidance, work our way up.

The property appeared to be two separate buildings when viewed from across the street. My impression yet is of two entities grown together like Siamese twins. They were probably constructed at the same time - somewhere around 1890. The one next to the Moose was two stories, while its taller sibling stood three.

They seemed large. I never heard any dimensions, but would guess the buildings’ footprint covered two to three thousand square feet of downtown, with all floors totaling around six thousand. Red brick facades, typical for the era, gave the two a nondescript acceptance. If I had not spent so much time in them, I wouldn’t remember they were ever there.

The bottom floor was occupied by the Howard County Trustee. Its drab interior had high ceilings, and offices looking out onto the street through big plate glass windows. Commodities for the poor were kept in its cavernous back reaches. I rarely went in, and have only vague memories of it.

The office was managed for years by a thin little man, who seemed shriveled and ancient. His name was Elmer Cox, and I remember him wearing black baggy suits, with matching vest, a broad tie, and a black fedora. He retired shortly thereafter and became our first tenet when we finished the upstairs into boarding rooms. He rented number three till he was moved to a nursing home or the mortuary - I don’t remember which.

The door leading to the upper floors was in front-center of the building. It opened to a long stairway that had a level section about half way up. A hall at the top lead straight to a restroom at the back of the building. If you turned right at the top of the stairs, you would pass under a broad archway into the “other” building. Another turn to the right led to the third floor stairway.

There were three bathrooms, each at the end of a long hall. Only one room had a private bath. It looked onto Taylor street, and rented for ten dollars a week. Four other rooms had street views. Most rooms were rather small, going for seven dollars. Three or four had sinks, so they cost eight. We had sixteen rooms, and they brought in about a hundred and twenty dollars each week when all were occupied.

The Courtland Hotel had once used the upstairs rooms, probably during WWII, but the place had remained vacant and neglected for years. The first inspection opened the families eyes to the amount of work necessary in repairing and redecorating the place. That is where Don and I came into the picture. We started in the basement rebuilding the old boiler, the heart of the heating system.
GO TO: Part 2 - Child Labor