Adventures at 702 Monroe

When my parents bought a rundown 1886 Queen Anne Victorian mansion in the 70s, I thought they were crazy. The place was a wreck, with sagging porches, rotting fences, a dilapidated roof that badly needed replacing, fading paint—the list went on and on.

I was wrong. Little by little, my dad—extremely skilled at building and remodelling houses—fixed the old place up until it was a shining gem.

He bought it for a song from the son of the local police chief, who had neglected the place for years. Down came the wooden porches, to be replaced by concrete and brickwork with new porch railings lovingly reproduced using the old railings as a guide.

My mom helped, competing with my dad to see who could lay bricks the fastest.

Next was the roof, redone in multicolored shingles.

The fence around the yard was replaced, with slats carefully cut via a jigsaw to exactly replicate the style of the old fencing.

Then came a new coat of paint, making the entire house gleam in my mom’s favorite color: yellow!

With the outside done, the interior was next. New paint was applied, ceilings remodelled, and proper walls were put in upstairs to replace makeshift partitions made of panelling.

What in the world was an older couple, with all but one of their children gone, going to do with such a huge house?

Hah! Plenty. My parents embarked on an exciting Christian hospitality ministry, providing housing and counselling for people temporarily down on their luck.

That was a crazy time with people coming and going, women happily singing worship songs in the kitchen as they prepared meals, and even impromptu baptisms in the bathtub!

Most memorable, I think, was their unusual holiday tradition: my mom would prepare a lavish dinner on Thanksgiving, as my dad drove around visiting every freeway onramp in the area looking for hitchhikers who had no place to go for the holiday.

“Come have dinner with us,” he would say in invitation. Many did, and much southern-style fried chicken, blackeyed peas and cornbread, and pecan pie was gratefully consumed.

Then my parents entered missionary work, and needed someone to housesit while they were overseas. Would my family like to do that for a few years?

Oh, heck yeah.

Soon we were settling in, registering our kids in a new school district, and checking out our new digs.

The elaborately carved woodwork on the passthrough from the dining room to the kitchen was so intricate that I thought for sure there must be some hidden switch to open up a secret compartment.

But that was foolishness—I think. I never found any such thing, at any rate.

Upstairs, however, there were actually crawlspaces around the perimeter of the top floor, entered via a secret hatch disguised as a bench in one of the bedrooms.

From there one could go all kinds of places, including the interior of the turrent at one corner of the house.

At one point I could look down into the crawlspace above the porch. There was a metal bucket placed down there long ago to catch the drips from a leak in the roof, with newspaper laid underneath it. The leak had been fixed long ago, but I always wondered what the date on that newspaper was.

I never found out, as the way down to that level was treacherous and I didn’t have the courage—or the foolhardiness—to attempt it. It may be there still.

My kids did find some ancient coins and baseball cards along the dusty crawlspaces, though.

Curious children weren’t the only adventurers to explore those passageways, unfortunately. Sometimes critters would get in there, most notably a possum that took up residence at one point. My daughter wasn’t crazy about that.

We borrowed a live trap from a friend and put it behind the doors of a cupboard in my daughter’s bedroom, and after a few days, we opened the doors to find we had a very annoyed animal on our hands.

Possums are mean-tempered little darlings, let me tell you. That possum tried its darndest to kill me as I sat beside that cage in the back seat as Alice drove us into the country, looking for a place to set it free.

There’s no way it could… but it wanted to. It kept clawing at the cage, hissing as it tried to get to me.

Once we found a likely spot to turn it loose, I hauled the cage—possum still hissing and madly clawing at the bars—to a nice meadow. I carefully unlatched the lid of the cage, lifted it open, and stood back.

The possum continued to hiss and claw at the side of the cage, completely unaware of the expanse of unobstructed blue sky just above his head.

Bemused, we watched this useless exercise for a while, then I approached the cage and gave it a hearty kick. It tumbled a few times, the possum bolted from the cage, and was gone.

My parents sold that house long ago, and Alice and I moved to Minnesota, but every once in a while we would swing by the old place when visiting California. We’d pose in front of the house and take a few photos. I knocked on the front door once, but nobody was home.

It’s still a bright, cheerful yellow to this day.