Mooney
My father’s family had a house with a feature I always found fascinating.
It was a set of heavy oaken doors, sliding in a track, that separated the dining and lounging area from the living room.
The doors didn’t have a lock, but if you were in the dining room staring at them, the suggestion of “don’t go into this room” was inescapable.
That aura of the forbidden, I learned years later, was planned. Living rooms in the 1800s and early 1900s (and this was a 1900s home) were like great halls where royal audiences were held. They weren’t for everyday use.
No, their purpose was entertaining visitors of some sort of importance. Even seldom-seen relatives from out of town might not qualify to enter.
The furniture, dark and foreboding, had white doilies on the arms and at head level on the back, protecting them from perspiration and hair ointments.
Against one wall stood the mandatory upright piano, which (according to family legend) one of the long-vanished sisters could play like Clara Schumann.
Well, the bottom line is that we don’t live in homes like that anymore. Look around all you want, but you probably won’t find the features your grandparents believed necessary for civilized living.
If, for some reason, you want a pantry totally separate from the kitchen, you’ll probably have to pay a builder to construct it for you.
Ditto the wraparound front porch, long ago replaced by a little concrete pad (ye gods) just outside the front door.
Ah, those old porches were nirvana. You could sit out there and read while enjoying summer breezes and chatting with neighbors who strolled by on the way to church or the grocery store or nowhere in particular.
If there is ever a museum of lost activities, the neighborhood stroll would be my first nominee for inclusion.
But the subject is homes. A couple of other long-gone features harkened back to the days of coal mining here in Wyoming Valley.
The little window in the front of the foundation was for a chute that would carry tons of anthracite from the delivery truck to your coal bin.
A side door leading to the cellar probably meant that the home was once occupied by a mining family. Dad, not wanting to carry dirt from the deep underground shaft into the living quarters, could enter via the cellar and bathe there in a metal tub before coming upstairs for dinner.
One really neat feature of the older home was the attic. I believe society lost something when the lords of construction decided that two floors would be max.
Out-of-season clothing, back issues of “Collier’s” magazine and rusty old toys found their eventual home there under the wooden beams. Every attic I ever saw also held a 1930s console radio or a scratched maple dresser with a three-sided mirror. Take your choice.
Downstairs, the room that would elicit the most wonderment from a modern visitor would be the foyer. The larger homes had the real thing – a sizable entryway where you could hang your coat on a hook, put your galoshes on a mat and wait to be ushered into the family part of the place (most assuredly NOT the living room).
When did the big changeover to “modern” styles begin? Probably it was in the late 1940s, when prosperity and home loans made planned suburbs the norm.
Well, not much to do but go out on the front porch and reminisce. Wait a sec! I don’t have one.
Tom Mooney is a Times Leader history and genealogy writer. Reach him at tommooney42@gmail.com.
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Tom Mooney is a Times Leader history writer. Reach him at tommooney42@gmail.com.