Our Horatio Alger House

bank directors that workmen had gone into the Smith House and had removed the bathtub that the directors got alarmed. It was discovered that workmen had removed every chandelier in the house, some of them quite elaborate. They had removed a full-length mirror.from the outside of a downstairs closet door. Similar mirrors were removed from upstairs closet doors. They had taken the mirror from inside the rear wall of the china closet in the dining room and from above the built-in buffet in the dining room. In every case leaving big expanses of unfinished wood as eyesores. They had unscrewed and taken every hook from closets all over the house. It was not the bath tub but the stationary built-in laundry tubs from the basement that had alerted the neighbor-and- through--him, -t-he--bank--directors:-•·-Blanche's-sister;-tlre-Presideur--oftlre-weTl:J~came up from Xenia and dug up rose bushes and shrubs from property the bank assumed they owned. My father did not need to be a Sherlock Holmes to realize his opportunity when he read in the paper that there was to be an auction in nearby Springfield of the :furniture and fixtures from a fine house. By this time the bank was incensed~- especially Mr. West, a man ofgreat integrity and the successor to Oscar Smith who had been called in to straighten out the bank. He went with my father and mother to the sale. A formidable man with an aura of authority about him, rvfr_ West confronted Blanche Smith. He told her that if she put up items for sale that were an integral part of the house, like the chandeliers and the built-in mirrors, he would make a public announcement that the people would be buying mortgaged property ano it might well be reclaimed. Blanche, understanding quite well what effect this would have upon potential buyers, immediately gave in saying, "I want to be a lady, I want to be a lady." Those items were not sold, Indeed, they had been brought back to the house and had been installed before we moved in. My parents did buy all the window shades and curtain rods for the entire house. They bought all the hooks for the closets. They bought the canvass awnings that we put up every Memorial Day on the front porch and on the west-facing windows. Probably they bought much more but those are the items I seem to remember. Moving day arrived in mid-summer. My parents, always anxious to save money and now more than ever, declared, "It will be an easy move. Really, just next door." They decided we didn't need a moving van. With the help of some friends, we could simply carry everything from one house to the other. By midday under the hot July sun, my father realized he'd taken on more than we could handle. He found a man with a horse and wagon, probably the town drayman who always brought packages from the railroad station to my father's store. In any case, that horse and wagon transported the rest of our worldly goods to the house next door. Neighbors -- adults and children alike --swarmed through the house, ostensibly to help us -– actually, I suspect , to see the interior of our house that they had always been curious about. The revolution had happened -- the castle was open to the commoners! We children, all from small houses, had a wonderful time. We could run up the elaborate front stairs over two landings and two turns, chase through the long hall, run down the utilitarian back stairs and back to the front of the house. There was also a horizontal circular trail -- from the kitchen through two swinging doors, through the dining room, living room, reception hall, music room and back to the kitchen.