My Great-Grandparents' House (Part II in the series "My Louisville")

On my most recent visit to Louisville I asked my mom to take me to see the house of her grandparents.  George Herman Bach (1885?-1943) and Lillian Whitehouse Bach (1899-1954) lived in this brick bungalow on Dixie Highway in Shively; I don't know when they first moved in, but my grandmother, Lillie May Bach (1919-2007), was born here. 

This house is just north of Algonquin Parkway, the third structure from the corner, on the west side of the highway.  This is the house in which my grandmother grew up with her younger sister and brother.  Their dad was a butcher at a nearby butcher's shop on Dixie Highway.

The last time we visited this house it was standing empty with a "For Sale" sign; all the windows were boarded up, and the red brick still looked as it always had.  On this visit (June 2013), the house had gotten a new lease on life:  a new owner had painted the brick a pale yellow, and the interior is in the process of being refurbished.  In this photo you can see a fellow standing on the front porch, talking on the phone; he was working on the house, and talking to the owner.  He asked me if I wanted to talk to the owner myself, and handed me his phone.

My great-grandmother (whom, of course, I never met) lived in this house until she died in 1954, but then it passed out of our family.  The present owner had never heard of the Bachs, but did know the previous family who lived here, I think he said the woman's name was Alma White.

The present owner is fixing it up -- the bags of trash on the front porch are stuff they have taken out of this long-unoccupied building -- he says he hopes to have a residential unit on the second floor and commercial on the first floor.

I love this photo of the front door with its side lights and transom lights.  My mom says that her mom would be really happy to see that her parents' house is getting some TLC.  For my part I was happy to see that it was no longer standing neglected and empty, and I was relieved to see that it's still standing.

This type of brick bungalow is quite common in Louisville, and all over the country, in fact.  Bungalows date from the early 20th century, when streetcars were common and private cars were not.  Bungalows don't have garages, as you can see in this photo.  Once the automobile became more common, detached garages were built.  Later, houses with carports, and eventually attached garages, were built; the ranch house displaced the bungalow as the most popular vernacular architecture type.

On Dixie Highway many houses have disappeared to make way for commercial development, but north of the Watterson many remain residential too.  Just north of my great-grandparents' house is a large discount store called Save-A-Lot, so it's not inconceivable that this house could have succumbed to the bulldozer at some point like its former neighbors.  I'm hoping to see it occupied on my next visit, whenever that happens; and if it's a commercial occupant I might finally get to go inside.

Dixie Highway (Part I in the series "My Louisville")

Northbound on Dixie Highway through Shively; notice the two-story house on the right, now Dixie Florist, just past the Pep Boys.  Note the above-ground power lines that dominate the view.

I’m from Louisville, Kentucky, but until now haven’t written anything about it in my blog, having spent my entire adult life in other places I liked better.  I grew up less than half a mile from Dixie Highway, in Valley Station, which is in the Southwest part of Jefferson County, and really quite far from downtown.  It’s a good 30 to 45 minutes’ drive to the downtown waterfront, depending on which route you take and the traffic conditions.  I could have walked to Valley High School, had I been a student there, but instead I attended Pleasure Ridge Park High School because I was in the advanced program.  For people who are not from Louisville, the name Pleasure Ridge Park (which is also the name for the part of town it’s in) elicits amused smiles and sometimes smirks – but that’s another story.  People in Louisville know it as PRP, and don’t think twice about the name’s origins.

Dixie Highway in Shively -- six lanes plus a center median

I always hated Dixie Highway when I was growing up.  Oh, I doubt that anyone loves Dixie Highway – for folks in Southwest Jefferson County it’s a long, traffic-clogged obstacle between them and getting anywhere fast.  We lived 6.5 miles from my grandparents’ house in Shively, but that drive – nearly all of it along Dixie Highway – seemed interminable.  

Besides Dixie Highway’s congestion, though, it is a real eyesore.  It is one long hideous stretch of unregulated commercial development dominated by car dealerships, fast food outlets, big box stores, strip malls with crummy chain restaurants in their parking lots, drugstores, gas stations with convenience stores, car washes, grocery stores, and countless small businesses filling in the remaining nooks and crannies.  There is one movie theater, the only one serving this entire vast part of town.  Oh, did I mention dive bars, nasty motels, and adult entertainment?  It has its share of those too in certain parts.  The road is lined with above-ground power lines, telephone lines, and traffic signal wires.  There has been no effort to make it aesthetically pleasing, a direct index of the economic impoverishment of this part of town.

I realize that “hate” is a very strong word, and when I say that I hated Dixie Highway, it’s not only because of the traffic nightmare or the aesthetic impoverishment it presents.  My strong emotional reaction was in part a function of my unhappy childhood.  I lived there from about the middle of 4th grade until I graduated from high school; these nine years were about the most unhappy years of my life, though the unhappiness began a few years earlier when my parents divorced.  Growing up I always associated my personal misery with the apparent squalor of Dixie Highway.  My family was poor – more accurately I should say lower middle class, because we did have all the economic necessities, and were doing better than many folks in this community, but that’s not saying a lot.  In Louisville it is painfully obvious that the better off you are financially, the further east you live – and Valley Station was about as far from the East End as you could get.  My boyfriend lived in St. Matthews (in the East End), about 20 miles from where I lived; one of his friends told him once that I “didn’t look like a girl from Valley Station.”  I knew what he meant, and I had to take that as a compliment.  But I always experienced my childhood home as a real stigma.

But on my most recent trip to Louisville I started to see Dixie Highway from a different perspective, that of a trained architectural historian, and to think about what it might have looked like once upon a time.  I began to pay attention to the many buildings along the highway that clearly began their lives as houses.  Most of these houses south of the Watterson Expressway (I-264) appear to date from the late 1940s and the post-war housing boom that occurred across the nation.  These are modest single-family homes, and look very much like the housing stock from that era that survives in the surrounding neighborhoods.  Before the late 1940s the homes on Dixie Highway were mainly farmhouses, somewhat larger than their later neighbors.  South of the expressway, every last one of them (with one possible exception*) has been converted to commercial use.

Another beautiful old farmhouse converted to commercial use on Dixie Highway.

Fortunately I have a very good source of historical information:  my mother has lived in Louisville for most of her life.  Her parents lived in Louisville for their entire lives, except for a few years during World War II when as newlyweds they lived in Virginia, where my grandfather worked at a shipyard.  (He was a welder, and couldn’t enlist in the services because his eyesight was not good enough.)  In fact my family has lived on or near Dixie Highway for several generations.

My mother remembers a time when Dixie Highway wasn’t six lanes wide with a center median; she says it used to be four lanes, with no median, and all the buildings on the highway were houses with big front yards.  (Think Southern Parkway, a well preserved example of Louisville’s residential thoroughfares.)  When Dixie Highway was widened it took away most of those lawns, and miles and miles of trees.  And when those houses became commercial real estate, much of what remained of those lawns was paved over for parking.

 Left: Dixie Highway north of the Watterson;  right: Some older houses in Shively on Dixie Highway north of the Watterson Expressway.

North of the expressway you can see what Dixie Highway used to look like:  here it is still four lanes, and there are many houses still standing, and still residential (though there’s a lot of commercial property here too).  There are a lot of old trees.  I notice there is a narrow center median, and I wonder if this is where the streetcar used to run.  My great grandparents, George Bach and Lillian Whitehouse Bach, lived in a house on Dixie Highway just north of Algonquin Parkway.  My grandmother, Lillie May Bach, grew up in this house, and she once told me that when she was little, it was “out in the country.”  By the time she grew up it was in the city, for Dixie Highway had developed quite a lot during those decades.  This part of town is called Shively, sometimes known as “Lively Shively” according to my mom (who grew up there).

This old farmhouse is now a law office.  It has an old-fashioned port-cochere.

Dixie Highway was (and still is) the road to Fort Knox, and in my grandmother’s youth it mainly ran through farmland.  Based on the style of housing, as mentioned earlier, it appears that the post-World War II housing boom brought a new wave of development and lots of single-family homes to Dixie Highway.  This was the Levittown era, with its modest spec housing built in large numbers for returning war veterans starting their families.

Post-WWII housing boom:  this 1940s house is now an insurance agency.

The next era of big changes for Dixie Highway came along with the development of interstate highways and urban planning of the early 1960s.  The Watterson Expressway was built in 1961-62 – my mom’s freshman year at the University of Kentucky – and it appears to me that this was the catalyst for Dixie Highway’s expansion into six lanes.  It does not become six lanes until you reach the Watterson – north of the Watterson it’s still four lanes – and the six-lane Dixie Highway runs from the Watterson south to Greenwood Road, a distance of 3.2 miles.  South of Greenwood Road it returns to four lanes.  When I was driving through Valley Station a couple days ago I noticed an advertisement for a local business which boasted “50 years on Dixie Highway.”  That would make it 1963 when that business began – part of that wave of commercial development following the construction of the Watterson.

In Valley Station, well south of Greenwood Road, there are long stretches of Dixie Highway lined with trees – in fact an extensive stretch of forest lies opposite the mall containing Target.  South of Ponder Lane you can even find a frontage road with houses and large front yards running next to the highway, again reminiscent of Southern Parkway.

In this essay I don't mean to recapitulate the "narrative of loss" so common among so many descriptions of historical development.  When my mother was growing up in Shively in the 1940s and 50s, "everyone went downtown for everything," as she tells it.  It's nice to be able to find the things you need without going downtown, and today Dixie Highway seems to offer a lot of things people need.  As a metropolitan area of 1.3 million people, the growth of the city was inevitable; I just wish it could have been implemented in a more aesthetically pleasing and history-conscious manner.  Dixie Highway is not a thoroughfare that historic preservationists are likely to champion, but I think some of these old structures deserve some attention and respect.

*I mentioned above that I think I found ONE house on Dixie Highway in Shively, south of the Watterson, that has not been converted to commercial use.  It’s a gray stone house that sits directly opposite Gagel Avenue, minimal traditional in style, one and a half stories.  It has absolutely no signage, plus a white picket fence around the back yard, which makes me think it’s residential.  Unfortunately it is sandwiched between All America Pool and DT’s Bar and Grill, making it a rather unpleasant place to live – not to mention the six-lane highway outside its front door.  Still, I have to hand it to anyone who can resist the many pressures, both economic and otherwise, to give in to the commercialization of the landscape.

This little house on Dixie Highway and Gagel Avenue appears to be still residential.

Note:  When I say that I hated Dixie Highway, and that I felt stigmatized for growing up in Southwest Jefferson County, I do not mean to offend anyone who previously or currently lives in this part of town – i.e., Shively, PRP, and Valley Station.  Lots of people are proud to come from this part of Jefferson County, including my mom and my grandparents, all of whom I love very much.  If anything I deplore what I perceive as the snobbery of many Louisvillians who look down on the Southwest.  (Again, that’s my subjective perception.)  Further, there are many affluent neighborhoods in the Southwest, though mine wasn’t one of them.  What I have tried to convey in this essay is my acknowledgment that it was my own unhappy childhood that made me feel bad about living in this part of town, because at the time the two were closely connected in my mind.  Now that I am 49 years old I am long past those biases formed in childhood.  And as an architectural historian I find the history of Louisville's development quite intriguing.  I offer my sincere apologies to anyone whom I may inadvertently have offended with my discussion.

Eulogy for My Grandmother

On Saturday, June 18, 2011, one day after what would have been my grandmother's 100th birthday, we celebrated her life with an event at the Woodstock Community Center. It was a very special day, with music, readings, and spoken tributes. One of her friends, who is a former professional opera singer, led us all in singing Happy Birthday. Some Native American musicians played music (Mescal was interested in Native American culture her entire life). Family members played "The Ashokan Farewell" and other instrumental arrangements. A New Orleans-style jazz band, called the Saints of Swing, began the event with a rousing musical procession, and after all the speeches were over they led a procession of guests down to The Colony for the reception.

New York Congressman Maurice Hinchey was the first speaker, and his tribute to her was very thoughtful and engaging. Mescal had been a political activist for the last four decades of her life -- she even served one term on the Woodstock Town Council in the early 1980s. She meant a lot to a lot of people, and really made her mark on the community.

The Woodstock Town Council decided to name the Woodstock Community Center after my grandmother because of the instrumental role she had played in acquiring the building for the community while she was on the council. She would have been proud but also embarrassed by the generous gesture in her honor.

Six months after her death, in January 2011, I still miss her all the time. Below is the text of my own comments delivered at the memorial event:

Hello, I’m Mescal’s granddaughter, Beth. I knew Mescal for 46 years – almost 47. I learned so much from my grandmother. I have so many wonderful memories of Mescal, but I will try to keep my remarks brief. Mescal was born in a world without television, or cell phones; the radio and the telephone were not used nearly as much as they are today. There were movie theaters in the world, but not in the rural community where she grew up. She had a fairly solitary childhood; except for her sister and cousins, there were no other children close by, except for the summer boarders at her grandparents’ boarding house. She read a lot, and was very close to her father, Fred Toms, and to her maternal grandfather, Mathias Burgher. Even at age 99, she would talk fondly of both of them, and her memories of her childhood were as vivid as if they had happened yesterday. She always told us stories of growing up in that far-off distant world, trying to teach us modern kids what it was like to live without electricity, or indoor plumbing; and to give us an appreciation for how hard her grandmother had worked to do things we take for granted, like doing laundry.

Despite – or maybe because of – growing up in this small community, Mescal was curious about the rest of the world. When I was around 15 or 16 years old she took me to the Tibetan Buddhist monastery for a kirtan – a ceremony of meditation and chanting. Afterwards we stayed to have a meal with the monks. It was a simple evening, really, but to me it meant and still means a lot. It was an experience of learning about people whose views and beliefs were different from ours, through the very simple act of watching and learning and absorbing the moment. It was an experience of accepting and respecting them, without judging their beliefs, AND of being accepted and respected by them. Mescal didn’t take me there as some kind of pedagogical exercise, or at least I didn’t experience it that way. Instead it was something that SHE wanted to do, and she was generous enough to include me. She went because she was curious, and I was curious too. I’ve always loved her curiosity and her sense of adventure. And it made me feel really good to be included in her life and the activities that she cared about. I often didn’t feel like her granddaughter; I felt like her friend.

Another important memory for me was that, as a young teenager, I was often brought along with my grandmother as she delivered Meals on Wheels. Mescal was one of the founders of this organization in the Woodstock area, and she worked hard as one of the volunteers who brought hot, healthy meals to shut-ins. I would accompany her to the kitchen in the Dutch Reformed Church where I met the people who prepared the meals. As we made our rounds, I met the people who received the meals. As a young person growing up, I only knew of my grandmother as someone who cared very much about helping other people. She believed in serving others, and she taught me this by her example.

She always wrote letters to the newspapers, and letters to her elected representatives, about the social issues that concerned her the most, both locally and nationally. She didn’t just talk about the issues she cared about, she acted on them.

Throughout my life, Mescal was an inspiration to me, and a role model. I was always SO proud of her, and proud to be related to such a remarkable lady. The letters she wrote to me were so interesting and impassioned that I would share them with my friends – her thoughts on universal health care, and other political issues. She was outspoken, opinionated, and passionate about the causes she believed in. She was also quite frank and open when talking about her political views, her religious views, and even sexuality and the body. She didn’t refrain from talking about a subject for fear of embarrassment or of offending someone. More than anything else, she wanted to have lively conversations and exchanges with people about things and ideas that really MATTERED.

Most of all she wanted to make the world a better place. When I was staying with her here in Woodstock last summer I noticed she was wearing a pair of pants that had lots of holes and tears in them; I wanted to buy her a new pair, but she wouldn’t let me. I wanted to sew up the seams where they were coming apart, but she said no, “it doesn’t matter.” What was important to her was instead giving the money to some organization that needed it because of all the good work they did in helping people. She didn’t believe in spending money on herself needlessly.

I want to stop and acknowledge, too, the unfailing support of her children and their spouses and partners, which helped facilitate Mescal’s generosity in the world. She was so grateful for your love and devotion. You always made sure she was taken care of, and that she had what she needed. She felt that she was not a good mother, and I believe it was very humbling for her to experience the love and generosity from you all that she didn’t feel she deserved. Through this, I think, she experienced grace, and she was always, in my view, living in a state of gratitude.

I always wanted to be just like my grandmother. Sometimes I think I am like her, at least personality-wise – with all of her flaws – but at other times I realize I don’t even come close to the generosity and the unselfishness that were so key to who she was. But I will keep trying to learn from her example. And when I am 99, I will still remember her like it was yesterday.

Mescal Hornbeck

My dearly beloved grandmother, Mescal Hornbeck, died on January 19, 2011, at the age of 99-1/2. I was very close to her, and her death was a major loss for me. I had seen her only about three weeks before she died, and she was in good health. Her death (from congestive heart failure) came as a shock to me, because somewhere in the back of my mind I really believed she would live forever. I was fortunate to spend two months with her in the summer of 2010, along with my son, Eli, and to have seen her frequently during 2010. I miss her so much.

One gesture of mourning that I made was to cut off my hair after she died. Sometimes Hindus shave their heads in mourning for a close family member, such as a parent or spouse. I did not go quite that far, but did cut it pretty short, as short as I could stand to. After not having cut it at all for 5 years, this was a radical change.

What was the point of cutting of my hair? It was a number of things. For one, it represents for me the major loss of one of the most important people in my life. For another, it represents my transformation. I can no longer in any way think of myself as a child, because I have no more living grandparents. At age 47, of course, and being a parent, I stopped being a child quite a long time ago, but something about having that amazing matriarch -- the wizened elder, the sage --made me feel like I was in some sense still sitting at her feet, at least figuratively. Now I am one generation older; the elders in my family are my parents and their generation.

I do feel that 47 is fairly old, but my grandmother was still more than twice my age. Therefore she was always right -- though she would listen to other people's point of view, at least most of the time. She was cantankerous and difficult to get along with sometimes, but she was also an amazing individual who made quite a contribution to the world.

We held a "celebration of her life" on June 18, in Woodstock, New York, where she had lived for the past 40 years. It was the day after what would have been her 100th birthday. This was a remarkable experience for me, and I will be reflecting on it for quite some time. Maybe some of my reflections will make it onto this blog, but most of them will remain private. Grieving is not really something you can do publicly, I have found.

My Grandmother at Age 17

My beloved grandmother, Mescal Elizabeth Toms Hornbeck, died on January 19 at the age of 99. I have spent that past week (my spring break) at her house in Woodstock, New York, taking stock of the estate -- going through books, photographing the furnishings, and thinking about the disposal of her belongings. She had a lot of them, but she also has a lot of kids (4) and grandkids (7) and even great-grandchildren (2). Among the books I discovered her 1928 senior class high school yearbook, the Maroon, from Kingston High School (New York). Here's what the text says:

Mescal B. Toms [this is a typo, her middle initial was E.]
11 Lucas Avenue
Prospect: Elmira College.
Career: A.A., 1, 2, 3, 4; Interclass athletics, 1, 2, 3, 4; Captain hockey, 1; Captain baseball, 1; Prisma, 3, 4; President Prisma, 4; Hi-Y Auxiliary, 4; Mary Lyon, 4; Varsity debating team, 4; Bankers' Council, 2; Literary Editor MAROON.

Do you remember the Heritage of the Desert, in which Mescal plays so prominent a part? It wasn't our Mescal, but we are sure that she could have played the part to perfection. Both she and Bebe are dark, vivacious , and full of fun. Mescal acts well the part of an efficient executive too, for under her administration Prisma has enjoyed one of the most prosperous years since its organization.

Also printed in her senior class yearbook was this poem she wrote:

A Hermit

“For who would rob a hermit of his weeds,

His few books or his beads, or maple dish,

Or do his gray hairs any violence.”

–- Milton

A hermit sits in meditative bliss,

His thoughts removed from common things like this.

His mind is on the infinite

And spurns the signs of human fellowship.

His books, his beads, his weeds, and maple dish,

The only tokens of his lost kinship

With us, his fellow mortals here below.

But scorn him not! With noble strength and aim

He left this world of sordid sin and gain

To seek for wisdom and for Wisdom’s Source.

--Mescal E. Toms

My "Guardian of Identity": the Family Home (Notes from Woodstock, New York)

My great-grandfather built this house in 1951 for himself and his wife; their two daughters were grown and married and raising kids of their own, so this 2-story house with 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms was more than ample for their needs as retired grandparents. Neither of them probably suspected that my great-grandmother would live here for another 36 years, until she died at the age of 102-1/2. Now my grandmother lives here, and her longevity, rivalling that of her mother, makes me realize (with my genes) that I'm probably going to be on this planet for the long haul.

This house has so many unique features and loving details -- built-in cabinetry in almost every room, a breezeway where we used to eat all our meals in the summers; the original wallpaper(!). The house sits about 100 yards from a large stream; at night you can sit out on the back porch and hear that stream, with water rushing over countless mini-waterfalls, and you can see all the stars unlike anywhere else. For me this place is nothing less than perfect.

Close by is the town of Lake Hill -- it's not really a town, it's just a blip on the map, where everyone has to get their mail delivered to a P.O. box instead of home delivery. When my grandmother first moved there in 1972 (to be near her aging mother) she had a party line. (That's an old-fashioned kind of shared telephone line, for those who've never heard of it.) We used to walk to the post office every day to pick up the mail, a mile or so down the road.

I say every day, but really I mean just on the summer vacations when I was visiting, along with my parents and two brothers. I loved it when my parents would leave us kids there alone with Grandma for a week or so, and sometimes I got to stay myself, alone with my grandmother, who was (and still is) my most important role model. Whenever we stayed in Lake Hill -- during which we visited Woodstock almost daily -- we kids would spend hours every day roaming in the woods, picking wild blueberries and finding beaver dams; we would swim in the ice cold mountain streams, with which this part of the country is riddled. Grandma would set up a bed for me on her front porch (which was screened in), and I considered it a special treat to be able to sleep out there at nights.

My grandmother moved from Lake Hill into the Woodstock house in 1984 when her mother could no longer be alone. It's hard to believe that my great-grandmother died more than 20 years ago (1987), but since that time, this house has been the gathering place for my extended family. I've sometimes dreamed of growing old here myself, though it's hard to imagine how that would happen given my present circumstances.

Although I have never, ever actually lived in New York, I feel very close ties to the state. My father grew up here, as did my grandmother and my great-grandmother. Its natural beauty, its history and its culture all mean a lot to me. Woodstock (population: 6,241 acc. to Wikipedia) embodies my idea of a perfect rural life; it has all the cultural amenities of a city, thanks to its proximity to New York City, but all the unspoiled natural beauty of "the country." Of course, for most rural Americans, my description of Woodstock as "rural" would be laughable; after all, you can see your neighbors' houses, and you can walk to "downtown" (such as it is). But to me those attributes are highly desirable; I have no desire ever to feel isolated, or to be dependent on an automobile. Personally, I like community and walkability. If the function of a house is to remind us of who we are (acc. to Alain de Botton), then this house fulfills its function better than any other house I've lived in.