Chapter 39

Saturday morning I found out how hard parallel parking could be. Dad had me drive him down to the office. I had to park right in front of the store. I made it, let’s leave it at that. I would need some more practice. Like a bunch more before I was comfortable. If I wasn’t used to the stick shift it would have been really bad.

Dad had about an hour’s work to do at the office, so I waited for him. Having nothing better to do I retrieved a flashlight out of the trunk of the car or boot as Mum would say and went to the basement. Now, Dad had been down there, but it was just a quick check for leaks and other problems.

The place was bone dry. It was also pretty spooky for some reason. I found out that I didn’t need the flashlight as there were plenty of lights. Once those were on the place wasn’t spooky anymore.

It was several rooms connected together. You could see where a coal furnace had been removed. There was now a modern gas unit near the stairs. Another room used to be the coal bin. It looked like the coal chute door had been boarded over.

I looked everywhere I could. I had visions of the Pit and the hidden compartment in the blockhouse, but I found nothing. Well, almost nothing. There was a cigar display case. It had five old wooden boxes of Cuban cigars in them. I checked, but the cigars in the open boxes were completely dried out. There was one box that had never been opened. There was also a fancy looking humidor box but it was empty.

I took all the boxes upstairs and dumped the dry cigars out. I didn’t open the sealed box and assumed the cigars would all be dried out, but it was nice to have an unopened box. I would take the boxes home for our Spanish class.

I didn’t know what we would do with them but they were cool looking. These were all made from cedar, not cheap cardboard. They all had a picture of Teddy Roosevelt leading the Rough Riders.

The humidor looked like it might have some value. A metal tag on the bottom said, “Benson & Hedges Copper & Brass Campaign Chest Humidor.” If nothing else it would make a nice box to keep papers in.

After Dad was finished at the office we checked out a duplex our company had just bought. It was in pretty good shape. Dad and I manhandled a sofa to the curb that someone had left. Other than that it could all be carried by one person. We were getting good at cleaning these places out.

I checked out the attics and basements of both units, but they were pretty clear. There were the usual odds and ends of old tools and canned goods in the basement. The attics typically contained busted window screens. I don’t understand why people kept them but they did.

Dad checked all the windows. Two had problems being raised. In both cases, the ropes for the sash weights had rotted. These were a simple replacement. This occurred so frequently in older houses that we had an extra rope, actually cotton clothesline, at home.

We decided to bring boxes back tomorrow and carry all the junk to the curb then. Denny and I would do that while Dad repaired the windows. He would then schedule an extra trash pickup by the city. After the place was cleaned out we would paint the interiors next week.

As we worked Dad gave me a brief update on the housing business. As of last week, we had twelve units rented out, so we had exceeded the original goals. The rents were paying the mortgages, adding to reserve funds and still leaving enough left over for the family to take out one hundred dollars a week. Right now in Bellefontaine, the average wage was forty dollars a week, so we were doing all right.

Dad had offers in on four more units and had hoped for at least three of them. The owners of the fourth one had unrealistic price expectations. It was part of an inheritance and the owners lived out of state, so they didn’t know local conditions. They didn’t understand that houses in Bellefontaine weren’t worth as much as in California.

Our business was now a member of the Chamber of Commerce and the Better Business Bureau. With a family membership at the country club, we were becoming known as prominent local citizens. Dad and I thought that was funny. We were just us. Not that long ago Dad had been working on the railroad extra board hoping to get called for work.

We also talked about what we would do with the boathouse. It was really too big for just one boat, but not big enough for more than twenty so it wouldn’t be useful for a boat storage business.

The structure itself was solid. It was a brick building on a concrete foundation. Why it was built on an island I will never know. Anything of size and weight had to be barged over.