The plumber was ready to finish re-installing the basement powder room Friday, but the sink hadn’t yet arrived so we are in a holding pattern around a holding pattern; that is, we still don’t know when the major renovation will begin and the powder room should be installed Tuesday. By the time the major renovation is done, I will have lived in this house more than any other home in my life, nearly nine years. Dan’s longest home tenure by contrast is more than 20 years. The house that currently holds the record for me is the house my family moved to when I was 4 years old–a big house in Glencoe, Ill. I would post a photo, but that house was torn down in 2004 and replaced with a much larger home. (Later in this blog, you will have an idea of why I have no pictures from 9 years of my life.) What was the history of that house? It turns out to be pretty sad, from available records and my memories.
Everly L. Haines and his wife, Blanche, built the house on or just before 1918. It was a big upgrade from the apartment they rented in Lincoln Park in Chicago. He was an executive with lighting manufacturing companies and this fact will soon become important. Everly and Blanche had a daughter, Marjorie, who was 10 years old when they moved into the Glencoe house, but there is no record that she ever lived there. By the 1920 Census, Marjorie was living in the Lincoln State School and Colony for the “feeble minded but not insane”, which was at least a 3-hour drive from the Glencoe house. Then, months after they moved into the house, Blanche died at the age of 44.
Everly’s parents moved into the Glencoe house with him, although I don’t know why. Three years after Blanche died, Everly married Minnie Daugherty Curless from their native Ohio. Minnie’s first husband had died of blood poisoning (sepsis?) in 1910, leaving her with a then-2-year-old son. For several months, they advertised for a “girl” helper. The ads specified that they wanted the “girl” to be honest and reliable, and often wrote that they preferred she be “white” and “German.” The ads noted that she would have a private room and bathroom: more to come on that with bathroom oddities seeming a early 20th-Century thing.
About five years after they married, in 1927, Everly died of benzene poisoning from his laboratory work in the lighting factory; he was 54. Interestingly, his obituary mentions Minnie and her son, but not Marjorie, who lived at the Lincoln Center until at least 1950, according to Census records. I could find no record of the deaths of either Minnie or Marjorie. I feel enormous sadness for Marjorie.
Note the year–1927–just before the crash and the Great Depression. By 1930, Census records show that Minnie, her son, and Everly’s mother, Sarah, were living in the Glencoe house. In 1933, ads to sell the house noted it was in foreclosure. Those ads also specified that the house had 2 and a half bathrooms, which was interesting because when I lived there in the second half of the 20th Century, there were two full baths and no half bath. From 1933 to 1964, no (easily available) records note anything about the house, even on Society pages, which were extremely common at the time. The first ad for the house in April of 1964 noted it had a large, new kitchen (which, by the way, I considered a “crap kitchen”) and 2 bathrooms and the price was “in the $30s”, which is about what Census data said the house was worth in 1930. By July of 1964, an ad said the owner was “sacrificing” the house for the price of $34,900, or about $280,000 in today’s dollars.
My parents took the “sacrifice” sale and my family moved in that August, just before I started kindergarten. My father, Tom, was an advertising executive. My mother, Pat, was a substitute teacher now and then. I had an older brother and two younger sisters. (A third younger sister would arrive in 1966). I vividly remember moving: the movers had been late and my mother (never a placid person) was furious. Very, very late at night we unloaded and my brother went to his room to sleep. After the movers piled some of the mattresses intended for me my sisters, who were 1 and 2 years old, I was put in charge of their safety. This was scary for a 4-year-old, but I did it. After that, there were the occasional Society page listings of my parents–at least early on.
My brother had his own room with his own bathroom–one of the two full baths. My sisters and I shared two of the three upstairs bedrooms and we shared the other full bathroom with my parents. So what happened to that half bath that existed early in the century? I do not have records, but I do have a memory of a strange, small, empty room in the basement. It was finished, but had a concrete floor, like the rest of the basement. It had a window that opened and we often wondered if it had been a bathroom. It was right next to another area that could easily have been a bedroom for a “girl” who would hopefully be “white” and “German”. I don’t know why a previous owner might have taken a bathroom out–anymore than I understand why prior owners of our house removed a bathroom. (Ideas are welcome!)
We moved from the Glencoe house after several chaotic years when my parents were struggling with alcoholism and my father had lost several jobs. In 1972, presumably we, too, lost the home to foreclosure (although I have no records). We moved to a three-bedroom apartment in Highland Park–my parents shared a bedroom, my three sisters and I another, and my brother had his own. Two years and another apartment later, the state Department of Family Services found my parents to be abusive and neglectful and put their five kids in foster care. (Side note: I had–and still have–a wonderful foster family, so much so that “foster” is not a word I have used for decades.)
Since the Glencoe house was razed in 2004 and rebuilt, it appears the same family has lived there. It has five bedrooms and five bathrooms and is estimated to be worth about $2 million.
It must be the bathrooms!
1936into2023 
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