While we were living at Emerson Street, I volunteered for the Seven Sisters Treasure Mart. Mrs. Howell had graduated from Bryn Mawr and nobody else there was from Bryn Mawr, so I got to meet her right away, and she lived on Courtlandt Place. Her grandson, Gilbert, was about two years younger than Ben.
Mrs. Howell invited me over for tea, and I told her we had to find a bigger house than the one on Emerson Street, because we didn’t fit there anymore, especially with John on the way. She said, “Well, the Carter House here on Courtlandt Place is vacant.” She would call the right people. She called Bill Kirkland, who was the attorney for the Carter family including his many other clients in the Montrose area, (Note: he also handled legal affairs for the Waldo family, who owned 201 Westmoreland, but that’s the next chapter). The important thing to realize is that this was a closed network of social business people, even more social than business, and we were so fortunate to be welcomed into it. We were wined and dined by this group, and that is why we were able to move to Courtlandt Place.
A controversy was that the Houston Coliseum wanted to start having prize-fighting events, and the social group was very upset by this. That is when Clovis was able to be a spokesperson for the cause of not having prize-fighting in the Houston Coliseum. Why would you want sweaty people fighting in the Coliseum when it should used for concerts and cultural activities that would attract the right kind of people? Here was Clovis, and new professor at Rice, and he was very outspoken about everything. People loved him, particularly these elderly ladies from the social set. On and off, Clovis had lived in San Antonio and had a good instinct for the social dynamics of Texas at that time. Oil had been discovered, people were making lots of money, and it was oil and cattle, but oil mostly. Most outsiders’ image of Texas would be from the movie “Giant” where James Dean was an oil tycoon who struck oil — but very few outsiders understood the cultural values of the Texas young leaders who wanted people to come and make this a very special social place to be. You could translate the old Virginia to the old San Antonio, and now newcomers were welcomed when they had the right attitude. It was almost a frontier
When we lived at Courtlandt Place, Gilbert would ring the doorbell on Saturday mornings and when I answered the door he would call out, “Mrs. Ben’s Mother! Is Ben in?”
Moving into the elegant brick house at Courtlandt Place, with a veranda and goldfish pond in the back garden. The family that owned the house did not want to sell it. Fun fact: After the Heimsath moved to Westmoreland, the Waldrons moved in to 14 Courtlandt Place.
The Courtlandt Place house had multiple bathrooms, all the full bathrooms were upstairs, attached to one or more bedrooms. Some of the bedrooms had washstand where I assume you might wash your face in the morning. The house was full of antiques. The washstands might have been collected by Mrs. Carter, and not necessarily used by the inhabitants. The master bedroom had a full bathroom with a toilet, sink, a bathtub and shower head in the bathtub. But downstairs there was only a “powder room” with a toilet and sink. I hung a full-length mirror on the wall of most the bedrooms.
When we move to Courtlandt Place, John was just a small baby, and we put his crib in his room which was across the hall from our master bedroom. You walked up the stairs, you turned left, walked through a door that went to Jonn’s room and also you would pass a bathroom door, and then you went into John’s room, which was very large, because it was above the porch cochere.
(Map or sketch of upstairs layout goes here).
When it was John’s bath time, I would fill the bathtub and put him in. There was a hot water and a cold water faucet, and then the bathtub water came out of a single spout below. It did not take John very long to figure out how to turn the bathtub faucets on by himself.
One day, I must have gone out to run some errands, and Clovis was downstairs in his study, and John was upstairs in his room by himself. The other children must have gone somewhere with their friends. I came back from my errands, entering through the side door, and the first thing I noticed was that there was water all over the floor in what we called the butler’s pantry, a small room next to the kitchen and the side door. In the butler’s pantry was a built-in china cabinet with glass doors, that held beautiful china, and everything was full of water — it filled the cups, it filled the dishes, it filled everything. It was a mess. I ran upstairs and turned off the water, calling Clovis. I realized where the water was coming from, no question. John had turned on the bathtub water faucets and did not know how to turn them off. I picked up John, who fortunately was not in the bathtub, which was full and overflowing. He might have drowned, it was scary. I ran downstairs to get Clovis, who had been working at his drafting table, and all of a sudden he realized what had happened. We said, “We’ll never do that again.” and were very thankful John had not drowned, but we had an awful mess to clean up.
The first summer after John was born, we decided to bring the family on summer vacation to Hampton Bays where my parents lived. We would always stay the first night with my parents, and then find a place to rent for a month or so. I would drive up in the station wagon with the children and Clovis would fly in when he could take time away from the office, and I would pick him up at the airport.
I remember arriving at LaGuardia Airport with all the children, and going to pick up a rental car, and there was some kind of problem, so we had to wait. I said to the attendant, “I will be happy to wait here until you get me a car.” The attendant took one look at all the children — Mary Elizabeth, Catherine, Ben, and John — with all our baggage and everyone very tired after the long flight, and the car came very quickly.
When we were at my mother’s house, we looked for a house to rent. We saw an ad for a house in Bridge Hampton, and we found out it was owned by a Yale alumnus, Harry Joe Brown. The house was open and we could look at it right away. The interesting thing is that before we could move in, over the weekend he was having a party, and we were going to stay with my parents over the weekend then return on Monday to look at the house and figure out how we could move in.
Except that, when we went to clean up the house, we found the weekend party must have been a very wild one. I’m not going to mention some of the things we found. We called Harry Joe Brown and told him he needed to have someone clean the house before we could move in.
We packed up our stuff and left my parents’ house, and moved into this house that was two blocks from the ocean and we found had plenty of extra bedrooms. So Clovis got on the phone and called some of his Yale buddies and invited them to come visit us and stay for the weekend.
We have a picture of everyone at that weekend party, lined up in front of the fences, and it was a very large group — Clovis’s friends and their wives and children — there were people everywhere.
(Picture goes here of the Bridgehampton house party)
(Picture of all our guests at Bridge Hampton summer house party, lined up in front of the fence.)
The house was walking distance to the beach, so we would walk to the beach in the afternoon. We realized potatoes were falling off the trucks carrying potatoes from the nearby potato farms, so on the way home from he beach we would all collect potatoes, carrying them in our wet bathing suits. Clovis thought that it was terrible to pick up the potatoes off the roadside, he was worried about the health risks, and I had to convince him that this was perfectly okay because we were out in the country and the potatoes falling off the truck were safe to eat, and delicious.
Charlie was staying in West Hampton Beach that summer, and we went to visit him.
(Picture goes here, if we can find).
The house had a large rug made of an animal skin, maybe a goat skin, and I can remember all the children lying on this fur rug and listening to the music from the record player. This was a summer of records I recognize sometimes where I hear a song on the radio. “It’s clouds’ illusions I recall, I really don’t know clouds at all,” from “Both Sides Now.” Also James Taylor, the first album about flying machines and “I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate.” And of course the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine.” It was a record player where you could put a stack of records and it would play them one after another, so you did not need to keep going over to turn over to change the record.
(Look for pictures of this — they have to be there. Walking to the beach, being at the beach, all the guests lined up against the fence.)
During the summer we enjoyed our vacation time in Hampton Bays, and then would go back to Houston in time for the school year. At that point the older children were at Saint Anne’s and Ben and John were at the Oaks Montessori School. Ben and Elizabeth Terry were in the same class, and so we got to know the Terrys. They had a beagle who had puppies, and we got one of the puppies. Her name was Ophelia, named after the character in Hamlet, because she had sad looking eyes. (The first dog was Tex, a Weimaraner).
Emerson Street and Courtland Place were rentals. After John was born, it was time to buy a house.
During the time we rented Courtlandt Place, we were working on buying the Waldo house at 201 Westmoreland. It took about a year to complete the purchase.
When it was time to move, we hired the Two Brothers’ Movers to pack up all our household goods and bring them to our new home. At Courtlandt Place, there was already a lot of beautiful antique furniture that we could use. In the bedroom, there was a beautiful antique bed that was in the bedroom, but we slept in our own bed, that we had moved from New York, and we found a place for it on the attached screened porch.
I packed up everything and worked with the movers so that everything would be moved that belonged, but leave in place the rugs and furnishings such as the dining room set and the living room set that belonged to the Carters.
We were finally going to live in our own home. That made an enormous difference to me.
From the time we were married, Clovis and I had not had any pets, except the cat at Henry Street, that Clovis brought in from the cold because he was afraid it would freeze, and it came with us to 2 Water Lane and even had kittens. When we moved to Texas, my sister Nancy and her husband David moved into 2 Water Lane and the cat come with the house, so when we moved to Texas we did not bring any pets.
The first pet we had in Texas was Tex, and we got him when we moved to Courtlandt Place. We thought we needed a dog, because living in a big house like that, we should really have a big dog, to be a watch dog. When I was growing up, on and off we would get a dog, but we would then find someone who would take it, because we never kept pets for very long.
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