The House: 1916
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Title: The House: 1916
Author: E.C. Norton
ISBN: 0966788346
Description:
There are millions of houses across the land, similar in so many ways, but each holds the unique experiences of the people and families who have called it home. Author E. C. Norton takes the reader on a journey behind the front door of one such home, a single-family frame home built in 1916 in Ridgewood, New Jersey, that would serve as the home for a series of unrelated residents for the rest of the century. These individuals and families were like others on all the other streets, and in all the other neighborhoods, in all the other towns across the country. They lived the life of the country -- they fought in wars, suffered economic hard times and struggled to adapt to the effects of population growth, social change, political corruption and age. Some succeeded, some didn't. But, taken together, their lives reflect the experience of the nation. Norton has painted a multilayered and nuanced portrait of one house in one town, and in so doing has vividly illuminated the rich life of the country.
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Excerpt: Chapter 1
September 21, 1916
The old horse stood patiently in the shafts, occasionally twitching away pesky flies. The street was quiet, no traffic on the dusty unpaved lane. The street had been cut through to the brook the year before. The wagon behind the horse contained fresh lumber and the smell of the new wood mixed with the heat of the afternoon.
About 20 feet away two masons on their knees moved their trowels in wide arcs, smoothing the fresh cement of the walk leading up to the front porch. It was a two-story building, freshly shingled in unpainted wood, essentially a farmhouse, one of two on the street - the only two buildings on the street, the first development. The houses, though new, resembled many older buildings in this part of northern New Jersey, functional homes without much grace. The masons worked silently, two short, black-haired muscled men in denim shirts and work pants.
The only sound was a faint regular tapping from inside the house. It came from the rear yard, out the open swinging doors of the cellar bulkhead. The noise was made by a carpenter putting risers on the cellar stairs. At the bottom of the street the low burble of the brook was broken by hoofs on the old wood bridge. A small carriage moved up the street. A bulky man wearing a cheap black coat, denim pants, and a straw hat dismounted at the new house and yelled, "Why is the horse in the sun?" The two masons looked up from their work, and stared at each other. One stood, obviously the older of the two workmen. He pointed inside.
Henk Diemstra patted the dust from his coat and climbed the long steep driveway. It was just like Alf, he thought, to leave the horse in the sun, without water or feed. Diemstra walked with his distinctive rolling gait to the back-door steps, climbed the three steps and pushed open the wood door. His son Alf was seated, straddled legged on a saw horse, reading a newspaper.
His partner, George Undercliff, came through the kitchen hall with a piece of molding in his right hand.
"Hi!" Alf Diemstra said, sliding off the saw horse at the sight of his father. George Undercliff smiled and stopped.
"Why'd you leave the horse in the street, in the sun?" the older man asked without preliminaries.
"I'm taking the rest of the load back in a few minutes, Pop. We won't need it all here. We're about done, except for the kitchen, and whoever buys this place will have to set that up the way they want it..."
The older Diemstra grunted.
"Where 's the other carpenter?" he asked.
Alf Diemstra pointed to the floor. "Hey! Roger," he called.
The hammering stopped and they heard steps on the cellar stairs, and a voice before they saw the figure.
"I don't care what you say, Alf, we're gonna get into the war sooner or later. Mr.Wilson is not gonna keep us out forever." The tall, wiry young man appeared in the dark doorway on the last three words. He smiled at Henk Diemstra. Alf Diemstra laughed. "Roger here thinks that it doesn't matter whether Mr. Hughes or Mr. Wilson gets elected, that we ought to be in the war... I was just reading him Mr.Wilson 's speech he gave the other day in Ohio..."
"Never mind that," Henk Diemstra said, studying the bare kitchen walls, with their exposed wiring. "I need to know when this place will be ready for showing."
"Next week, Pop," Alf replied.
"What are you doing in the basement, Roger?" Henk asked.
"Setting some riser on the cellar steps," Roger Livby answered softly.
"Risers?" Henk asked, looking to his 19-year-old son. "We don 't need risers on the stairs. Frills. Let the buyers put 'em in."
Alf shrugged. "Roger thought the stairs would be safer if he put risers and a stair hold on."
"All I asked you to do today is to finish the molding in the parlor," Henk said, color rising in his round, blunt-featured face. For the first time he focused on George Undercliff.
"George has been doing just that, Pop," Alf said placatingly.
"Well, Roger should help him. Forget the risers," Henk barked. The older Diemstra moved through the kitchen and into the hall toward the parlor. Alf looked at Roger sympathetically.
"Well, you can't say I didn't warn you," Alf said. He stuck the newspaper section between the exposed wood lath in the wall.
"Let me get my tools," Roger said, heading toward the stairs. He pulled his pocket watch out. Another hour and he would have had the risers and stair hold finished. Now old-man Diemstra was on the warpath again, all because the house wasn't finished. Roger, Alf and George had been working in it since mid-June, through the hot summer. Ten hours or more a day. Roger Livby took the seven o'clock trolley from Paterson each morning, a ten-cent ride through the cool mornings, a five-mile ride to the village of Ridgewood, the most pleasant part of his day. The big green interurban car was mostly empty, as passenger traffic was going the other way - workers on their way south to the large, old silk mill city, to labor behind red-brick walls, and in banks and other offices. Livby usually carried a tin lunch box, and in it the bread, cheese, meat and fruit his mother prepared each evening. Each morning the car glided to the shed on Ridgewood Avenue, a wide thoroughfare with large homes perched far back from the dusty roadway, homes that only bankers and mill managers could afford. Homes with ten rooms and three servants, quite unlike the small cramped rooms Roger Livby grew up in the Dublin section of Paterson with his parents.
They lived over a hardware store on Grand Street. His parents were English. They arrived in New Jersey in 1889. Edward Livby worked in the Garner Mill, his wife Ettie had worked there for five years until Roger was born, their only child. English, they lived in the midst of Irish immigrants to the boisterous, active mill city on the Passaic River. Paterson, N.J., boasted that it was a fist of iron cloaked in silk. On upper Market Street the old locomotive shops still turned out the steam monsters that had connected the American nation, and had pulled other continents together.
Roger Livby had gone through the second year of high school, at his mother's insistence. Neither she nor her husband had any education in a formal sense. But when Roger was 16 his father had his accident, nearly losing use of his left leg. Roger had to go to work. He got a job as a clerk in the hardware store downstairs, and that led to his interest in carpentry. But when he tried the city's contractors he found that they were all overburdened with apprentices. "Come back in a year," he was told. In a year the Livbys could be starved.
Fortunately, Mr. Livby recovered, and he was put on the job. Roger had scouted the outlying areas. He almost found a position with a contractor in the booming town of Rutherford, to the east, and on the main rail line. It fell through, but he got a recommendation to go see Henk Diemstra who operated the coal and lumber company up in Ridgewood. Roger took the trolley and walked the mile and half to Diemstra's shabby office alongside the dark, dank pile of soft coal. It was a rainy day. Henk was poring over journal entries at his large desk when the Paterson youth walked in.
"Paterson, eh?" Henk asked, suspiciously. "All my son Alf wants to do is play ball with the Panthers down there, but he ain't half that good. You play ball?"
"No, sir," Roger replied "I'm a carpenter."
"Want to be a carpenter, that is," Henk said. Behind his back Henk was known in his family as the "tight one." He was also respected by his churchgoing colleagues as a shrewd businessman, someone who had grown up on a small, subsistence farm in nearby Midland Park, and who without education, background or real connections, had started a business in 1894. It was a depression year, when many businesses had collapsed. There had been a coal company in the village for many years. Henk began his operations from a shed three miles out of town, in Midland Park. Soon he was known as the fellow who would make a coal delivery at any time of day, in any weather, and who would extend credit, a very unusual system at a time when coal was paid for at time of delivery.
