In his epic poem The Wasteland, T. S. Eliot called April the cruelest month, and boy oh boy.

April 2020 will be known as the month when the disastrous first realities of the global pandemic really started to settle in, like irritable bowel syndrome.  That’s when we figured out that this was the real deal, that all the nation’s preppers were squirreling away toilet paper, baking flour and boneless chicken while all the rest of us had to dress up like Billy the Kid just to buy a 3/8 socket at Lowe’s.  We saw 30 million Americans put out of work in less than one business quarter, entire sectors of our economy completely devastated, and a nation of parents haplessly trying to school their kids from home while also trying to hold down the proverbial fort and do their own jobs (if lucky enough to still have one).  And perhaps the biggest discovery of all is that, generally, even the most cuckoo, egomaniacal, self-proclaimed anti-socials amongst our shrill hordes get lonely for the company of others, no matter how badly we want to mace them sometimes.

And to think.  Last April I was moaning and groaning about the unmitigated audacity of the weather interfering with my kids’ little league schedule.  Shit, at least we had little league.  At least we had a schedule.  But at the time it seemed like a real parade killer.  We were coming out of a long, cold winter only to have the longer days of spring greet us with an entire 30 days of torrential downpours, muddy gardens and Netflix. Poor babies!

It was, however, a perfect month to raid a good estate sale – another thing you don’t see anymore.  Even if you could pay someone to sell the entire contents of your home right now, it would likely look a lot like the makeshift hospital government scientists set up in Eliot’s house near the end of E.T. the Extra Terrestrial.  But last spring there were some banging good sales in Olde Delmar, including a real special one at 36 Forest Road.  Like other houses on the block, this warm, cottage-style home was built in the 1930s (1938 to be exact) with storybook character, steep roof pitches and small window panes that are textbook for the era.  I couldn’t wait to see it, because many on that road have seen very few exterior upgrades; the neighborhood looks pretty much exactly the way its architects, builders and town planners envisioned 80 years ago!

Before I visit an estate sale in an old house, I feel like I owe it to the homeowners to learn as much as I can about them – where they worked, what they did and where they came from – to honor their time in the home, the neighborhood, the community, the universe, because I’m essentially, albeit legally, plundering their safest space.  It’s a bittersweet privilege.  This allows not only insight into the people who spent thousands of hours walking its floorboards and concrete slabs, but also deeply enriches my own experience of living in this community.  Ann Friedman’s May 1, 2019 article in Curbed (“The Magic of Estate Sales”) calls such events “a going-out-of-business event for one person’s life,” since unlike a garage sale – where the public only sifts through items the homeowner no longer wanted – an estate sale is more like suburban anthropology.  One walks through the home and sees it pretty much as it was before the person downsized, was otherwise relocated, or died.  You see, intimately, everything that had meaning to total strangers and was integral to their daily lives – their music, art, books, right down to the coffee mugs and dinner plates they used every day, sometimes for decades.  We all have these deceivingly provisional hoards, and it’s a stark but mystical reminder that soon it will all slip through our fingers like beach sand sifting back into a rising tide.

Until then, however, we forage, and the pickings at 36 Forest were right up my alley, either expedient (solid, well-kept garden tools for example) or old, well-loved and from an era that (mostly) predated disposable commerce.  This is a score, since many estate sales in Delmar tout wares from the second great wave of suburban development in the 1950s and 60s, thereby increasing the risk of ostentatious, second-owner, Me Generation kitsch – colonial revival wing-back sofas, pedestrian plasticware, blow driers, fondue pots, experimental cookbooks, Herb Alpert LPs, the burnt oranges, harvest golds, avocado Glam Roc wallpaper and appliances.  Not for me, so I was excited that, except for perhaps a bad kitchen upgrade, we’d probably be walking into that coveted “time machine” experience – the sights, smells and sentience of the Silent Generation – and so we were.

The house was originally built for Charles F. Probes (left), who hailed from the Finger Lakes Region where his father worked as a school teacher and traveling salesman.  He attended Cornell University and worked as a newspaper reporter in Elmira and Binghamton before moving to Delmar for a job as chief of the NYS Education Department’s Publications Bureau in 1938 (in today’s parlance this means he was the agency’s communications director).  He and his wife were socialites, and Charles was an officer for the legendary Aurania Club in Albany’s Pine Hills, as well as the Monday Night Evening Guild and the Brotherhood of the First Presbyterian Church.  He retired from NYSED in June 1960 after 37 years of service.  At the time of his retirement, this coveted state position paid a whopping $12,000!

His wife, the former Mildred E. Burns, was a regent of the Tawasentha Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) and her ancestral soldier was from Connecticut.  She too attended Cornell University, but her wedding announcement in the Watkins Express laments that “she would have been a member of the graduating class of 1920, but for a physical breakdown, which compelled her to give up her studies in the last half of her Junior year.”  Nonetheless, she was still allowed membership in the Cornell Women’s Club and the Kappa Delta sorority, and was also active in the Legislative Women’s Club, the Aurania Club and the Monarch Club of Albany.

In 1954, the couple moved to a modern, a single-story home at 70 Marlboro Road, but would soon live out the remainder of their lives in Florida, where their only child Bianca (right) still resides.  Bianca Louise Probes graduated from BCHS in 1951 and, in her mother’s footsteps, became a president of the Teunis Slingerland Society’s chapter of the DAR.  She had a woman named Beatrice Boot as a 5th grade teacher (stay tuned for more about her in a different post) and like her mother attended William and Mary College but never finished her degree.

The second couple to occupy the home was Philip Arthur Cline (left) and wife Anna M. Knebel Cline, who lived there until late 1968 (when Anna died) and raised two children in the house – son Richard Arthur and daughter Sue Lois Margaret, who would marry prominent area physician Almer T. George and reside at 396 Wellington Road together for many years.  Philip was employed by New York Telephone as a general accountant and in 1971 he would marry Anna’s sister Margaret!  They too relocated to Florida, remaining there for the rest of their lives.

I could spend the rest of my life researching a particular piece of property, but I stopped short of learning anything about the immediate past owner, since I enjoy seeing what evidence I can gather can just by visiting, equipped with nothing but a wallet and my increasingly-failing five senses.  Then, later, back to the public record to see what I got right or wrong.  But fate, like Lemony Snicket’s “strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for,” had something else in mind.

The house was staged wonderfully, and as advertised the collection was eclectic and right up my alley.  Just lovely, with tons of natural light in the living spaces and devoid of any awful floor-plan remodeling, and what’s cool about cottage-style homes is that they easily reconcile varying tastes in decor.  One can mix old and new; rare and inexpensive; and simple and ornate pieces and forget about committing to a single decorating genre.

It didn’t take long to figure out that an elderly gentleman had been living in the home by himself for quite some time.  There were no women’s clothes for the taking in the upstairs bedroom closets, and although the living spaces were accessorized with lovely converted oil lamps, 200-year old stoneware jugs and Victorian-era furniture, there was a utilitarian spaciousness and order there that is typically more guy-driven.  Plus, the entire basement was a professionally-outfitted woodworking shop to my delight (not as easy to get away with that as a married man these days).  The owner was clearly quite the handyman, a real do-it-yourselfer who came of age in an era when money was always tight, credit cards were harder to get, and you could probably do it better than the next guy anyway.  So there were tools.  Oh lordy, lordy, life-after-forty there were saws and sanders and clamps and ramps; meticulously sorted and labeled drawers of rivets, nails, screws, bolts, washers and wingnuts; compressors, welding guns, planers, wrenches, hammers; greases, glues, mineral spirits, polyurethanes, paints, soldering pastes, oils.  I gave serious thought to hiding out in a crawlspace in hopes they’d lock me in overnight but settled for buying as much of that stuff as my man-van could handle instead, like Haystacks Calhoun at an all-you-can-eat buffet at Ponderosa.

I grabbed those converted oil lamps, a sturdy but stately cedar chest, and an old metal filing cabinet.  I’m always on the hunt for these beasts, since the ones you get at Staples crush like soda cans if you even look at them the wrong way.  This one came with a thick mess of hanging folders, under which I found an envelope marked “BOAC” (British Overseas Airways Corporation). I expected old boarding passes but found a 57-year old time capsule instead, one that detailed the first days of married life for Elmer C. Dering and Virginia Niven Lyons.  Dated August 1962, the tiny parcel was packed with mementos like a hotel bill from Castle Harbour Hotel in Bermuda (demolished in 2002), shopping receipts from stores in St. George and Hamilton for pillowcases, hats, earrings, pins, sweet dishes, bud vases, ashtrays and all sorts of clothing.  We can literally trace the path of the newlywed’s first adventure as husband and wife. One of the shops they perused together almost 60 years ago (Calypso Ltd.) is still in business today.

History. Nerd. Gold.

But what tripled the “wow” factor was a small collection of news clippings announcing the marriage. One was trimmed from the August 14, 1962 edition of the Sullivan County Democrat and indicated the nuptials took place at Lyons family farm on Route 17 in Monticello. My wife’s family hails from Monticello – heart of the Borscht Belt Catskills – and my mother-in-law immediately recognized Virginia.  They went to high school together and her father James (left) ran that old farm, where the family home still stands today. In 1939 he was elected to the NYS Assembly and served for almost a decade.  In the 1950s he was appointed as deputy commissioner for the NYS Department of Agriculture and Markets. This is another fascinating nexus to my family, since I also worked for both entities during my career.

When I found that Elmer and Virginia’s son (James, after his grandfather) lived in town, I returned these accidental treasures to the rightful owner.  When he came by to reclaim them, I was privileged to hear more of his father’s story.  Elmer is now 86 year young and traded his place on 36 Forest for an apartment attached to Jim’s own home in Delmar. He grew up with two brothers in Cambridge, Washington County (that’s him to the left in high school), and after graduating from Russell Sage in 1951 he joined the US Navy, serving on the USS Nautilus – the world’s first operational nuclear-powered submarine and the first submarine to sail under the North Pole.

Think about that for a second.

“What did you do in the war, Mr. Derring?”

“Oh, nothing special. There was that one time though, when me and a bunch of other guys boarded what looked like an enormous robot version of a blue whale with a nuclear reactor for an engine and traveled 1,200 nautical miles under the polar pack ice of the entire Arctic Circle.  You know, where the water is so deep and the longitude so high that magnetic compasses and normal gyrocompasses become inaccurate?  Like, where ice extends in the Bering Strait to the point where there wasn’t enough space to fit the sub between the ice and the sea bottom?  And we thought maybe we’d have to have to blast our way to the surface with torpedoes?  Yeah, there was that.”

After discharge in 1956, Elmer met Virginia in Monticello as a newly-hired lineman for New York Telephone – just like the man from which he purchased his Delmar home (Jim says many phone company families lived on the street in that era). The 1950’s were a period of rural expansion for the company, and like many NYT guys in that era he was deployed to the Catskills to usher in the era of dial-phone service. He lived in a small trailer near the Lyons Farm at the time and young love blossomed as it will.

A few years later, the couple moved to Albany and bought 36 Forest in 1969. He became a programmer at NYT and retired in 1992. Virginia, a SUNY Postdam graduate, took a job at Saint Gregory’s School for Boys in Loudonville but also worked frequently as a substitute teacher in Bethlehem schools.  Sadly, she too died at only 57, the same age as the last bride who lived there and just a few short years after Elmer’s retirement.  He never remarried and remained in the house where I carefully rummaged through drawers of lock rings, drill bits and unused welder’s contact tips for 20 more years.

Jim told me that most of the antique wares in his father’s home belonged to Virginia’s family (I learned that my hand-made 18th Century trunk was once an old toy chest), and described the stress and sadness that came with navigating the timing of emptying the home with the property sale.  On the afternoon prior to the estate sale, in his childhood home, surrounded by all that history – his father’s entire physical record staged and tagged to move, from precious family heirlooms to dish-washing detergent – he sat down on the living room sofa and cried.  “It was just completely overwhelming,” he confided.

And so it was not surprising that tears welled in his eyes again when I handed over the clippings, receipts and boarding passes that now commemorate perhaps the most sacred and difficult commitment one can make in life – the formation of a true partnership with another human being.  “I’m sorry,” he said, as we stood there in my gravel drive on that warm and sunny morning.  As if an apology was necessary.  As if he didn’t realize I was crying too.

* An edited print version of this post ran as “Adventures of a History Nerd” in the Fall 2019 edition of Bethlehem Historical Association’s quarterly newsletter.  If you love local history as much as I do, why not flip them a donation (or two)?