I got a Facebook message from my New Orleans cousin on Tuesday, saying someone down there had some information about my grandmother.
The Baldingers lived for 40-odd years at 308 Homestead Avenue, a beautiful old mansion built near the turn of the 20th century. They moved there in the early 40s and stayed there after my grandfather died in 1945. My mom and her siblings eventually sold the place in the 90s after Nan died. The family that bought it then still owns it, making it a 100-year-old home with just three owners. I suspect that kind of ownership isn’t that odd for many of the older homes in New Orleans.
I had to smile when the lady called me later Tuesday and called it “The Plantation.” It’s a large house, maybe 3,500 square feet, on a double lot at the time. It wasn’t at all what I thought of as a New Orleans plantation, but that’s what it was known as for a long time.
I spent almost an hour on the phone with her, sharing my vague memories of the house. Because we lived almost a thousand miles away in Ohio, we didn’t visit much. Nan died in 1980, when I was 15, and she’d already been in assisted living for several years by then, so I was too young to form many memories of my few visits there.
One is still very clear though. It’s a three-story house, though the ground floor was what most Northerners would call the basement. NOLA houses don’t have below-grade basements because of the water table there. At any rate, we always used the back door, which opened into the very large, deep, dank, dark basement. There was only a single overhead bulb close to the back door, giving just enough light to get to the back stairs that led to the screened porch. The fifteen or so feet from the door to the steps were almost terrifying for a 6- or 7-year-old child. I’m sure there were other lights in the basement, but I never saw them turned on, so the basement was this eerie, shadowy place, and I had a healthy fear of the dark at that age. I hated that basement.
Nan intimidated me, too. She was this very tall (hey, I was 6), somewhat sour-looking woman who I always felt was judging me severely. I know now that she wasn’t that tall, because by the time I was 13 or so, I was several inches taller than she was. But this photo from my Aunt Gayle’s wedding in 1947 is just the way I remember her looking at me almost all the time.
At any rate, the lady calling was putting together a history of the Homestead house for the family who currently owns it. The owners’ children are giving it to their parents for Christmas, which I thought was very sweet. She’d found in her research an article at the New Orleans States, one of several predecessors to today’s Times Picayune, that profiled Rebecca Florence Baldinger in the mid-1940s. The idea of a lady running a lumber business all by herself was pretty big news, even in the aftermath of the losses of World War Two.
The best thing about this article was that Nan actually talked about how she and her husband met. That’s information I never had. My mom almost certainly knew, but I never got around to recording it in any way before she died. It may be in some of my dad’s paper records, but I no longer have access to those.
I knew Nan grew up in the hills of West Virginia and married in New Jersey in 1921. The Baldingers appear in the 1930 and 1940 US Census living at 180 State Street. But I’d never known anything else about the time between her 1913 college days and her 1921 marriage, other than the facts recorded in the censuses. This article was quite the breakthrough for me.
She found her way from the panhandle of West Virginia to New York, working for what the article called a lumber commission office during World War 1. That’s where she’d met my grandfather, who was working for the Southern Pine Emergency Bureau, whatever that was. She also worked for a time for the “construction division of the army quartermaster corps.” I haven’t yet found much information about either organization. That’ll take some emails and phone calls I think, rather than just a few minutes at DuckDuckGo. It’s fascinating information to have at any rate.
I do wonder though at the reliability of the article. I know when she contacted the insurance company after Ed died, she told them her parents had died years ago. But they were still alive; she just hadn’t had any contact with them in 20 years or more. That jives with my long-standing impression of her as a very private woman, very intent on avoiding contact with her extended family for whatever reason. So even at that chronological distance, the information she shared with the reporter may not have been completely correct.
Who knows?
Writing
I think I made a breakthrough with Ghost the other day. I was sitting at one of our rental houses as a locksmith changed out the locks and finally figured out what the threat to my Ghost of Innocence main character will be in the second act. It’ll be a doozy and require a fair amount of research to really tweak the idea, but I think it’ll be worth it in the end.
What that really means is that I didn’t get any actual writing done this week. I just spent much of the days staring at my computer or wandering the backyard or thinking about how ghosts can be harmed. It bugs me when I get stuck like this because even though I’m spending a lot of time focused on the story, I don’t immediately have anything to show for it in terms of “production,” of words on the screen. I know that the idea that I haven’t accomplished anything isn’t true. But without something quantifiable, it feels that way. That’s one reason I keep track of the words I put down in the various files I maintain for a story, like the outline/plotting file. Even if I only write 70 words worth of notes that day, it’s a positive number that I can point to later.
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