My family on my Mom’s side, the “Moore’s,” are one of the oldest Fort Myers families. My Grandfather was one of the ‘community leaders’ if you will. He was King of Edisonia, all of that superficial McGregor nonsense I sort of ignored in high school.
However, we owned a house on Cordova near Fort Myers High just off of McGregor. The house my Mom grew up in.
My grandfather built a motel downtown “with his bare hands” and it still exists today – although we sold it and it’s now known as the Rock Lake Resort.
They lived here when McGregor was a dirt road. My great grandfather owned the only ferry that could take anyone down or across the river. Thomas Edison and Henry Ford took that ferry many times. Once, they were having a boat party and my grandmother fell off the side and started screaming. Somehow she survived.
My grandfather’s first job, at 13, was to knock beehives off of Thomas Edison’s front porch.
My Mom says my grandfather was a lot like me, he could never sit still. He always had to be doing something. He also got Alzheimer’s and passed away when I was in elementary school. They say it skips a generation.
When my Mom was young my parents really gave her everything, she was an only child. She went to Edison Park, where I went to elementary school, Fort Myers High, where I went to high school, and Florida State University, where my sister goes to college.
She was a majorette at FMHS. I have her diploma and her baton and all of those funny old “treasures.”
The house on Cordova was built like a tank. It’s withstood many hurricanes and remains there today. My Mom has told me countless stories about that house, some frightening, some inspiring, all interesting.
When my Mom’s parents passed away – her Dad to brain disease, her Mother to cigarettes – the house was left to us. It had been abandoned since the 70′s. It was falling apart.
The air, they said, “was toxic.” The floor was littered in rat poop. The entire side panel of the front was eaten away by termites and where there once was wood, there now was honeycomb – home to thousands of bees. On the back porch, the roof had fallen in. Termites ate away half the wood floor… most of the foundation.
In my Mom’s closet upstairs all of the books had been sitting there so long, in mildew and filth, that they’d somehow formed one giant column of papers.
The house sat on two lots, stretching from one McGregor road to the other. The backyard was overgrown, with a 50′s style brick barbecue that had a tree growing through it – cracking the bricks and ruining the furnace.
When I tried to go upstairs my parents would scold me, warning that I could fall through the roof, or worse.
Windows were broken, pipes were busted, and the electricity was shot (including the wiring).
In reality, it was in total disrepair.
Every month we would get a citation from the city – this house needs to be condemned.
So we’d mow the lawn. The city would shut up for a little while.
A few months later, the same thing.
“When are you ever going to do something to that house?” My Dad would say.
“I don’t want to think about it.” Would be my Mom’s stubborn reply – the same reply she gives to everything that’s important or a big task.
Years went by. My Mom’s cousin offered to buy it. “What are you going to do with it?” asked my Mom.
“Demolish it.”
That was the end of that.
My Mom was looking for someone that wanted the house because of its charm, because of its history. She wanted someone to love it as much as she did.
Every week, intermittently with the citations from the city, we would also receive phone calls and letters from real estate lawyers and other potential buyers. Most were looking for easy money or simply wanted it for the lots.
Who would want to put hundreds of thousands of dollars into a house after purchasing the property? Bulldozing is so much easier.
And then there was Stacey Brown.
A friend of my elementary school violin teacher, Stacey worked in the same building my Dad did. Every day she would peer out her office window, waiting for the little white door just below to open up. Out would slink my Dad – it was time for his cigarette break.
Out she would go, pretending she was a smoker too, and would – just so happen to – bump into my Dad.
“Oh! So how about that house?” She would nag. My Dad, used to the pestering, would say: “She’s never going to sell that house.”
My Dad knew how stubborn my Mom was – something that’s taken me 20 years to finally get.
2 years went by, Stacey didn’t let up. And one day, as she sauntered downstairs to what had become a seemingly pointless routine, my Dad changed his tune.
“I think she’s ready.”
Without any thought, she said: “This weekend. What time.”
Stacey and her husband had their eye on two other houses because they figured the Cordova house was a lost cause. However, just before they were forced into a decision that Stacey said made her husband’s “stomach hurt” they were all of a sudden meeting my Dad for a tour.
It was a disaster. Worse than they thought. And worse, my Mom would not allow a house inspection or appraisal for fear it would be condemned.
Her husband duly noted “I only have one fixer-upper in me. If we do this, this is it. No more moving on to something fancier. We buy it. We fix it. We love it.”
They bought it.
Somehow, in the cosmic fate of the universe, and out of what seemed like nowhere. A family bought the house from us at a decent price… even with all the meticulous (and annoying as hell) terms that my Mom put on it.
A) Pay a good price for the house and the two lots
B) Clean it out FOR US, and put what we want in storage
C) Keep it like it is, but feel free to gut it – which in reality meant years of work before they could even dream of moving in.
After 3 years of wonder, today, I went back to the house.
When I arrived I could hear little kids running about inside. I rang the doorbell.
Stacey’s husband answered and I started to stammer ‘hi i’m michael george carol’s son she used to own the house i know i didn’t announce myself but i’d kind of like to see things i’m sorry for -’
“Come in.” He said.
I almost shit myself. The house was gorgeous. I kind of felt like those people do on Trading Spaces – only this was an entire house and it wasn’t done with cheap IKEA trash.
Every room had work. I felt like I was on the site of some great constructive masterpiece. Every wall we passed he would describe… “Well I had to rip this out, the termites ate it. I redid the siding and the plaster and the flooring and the molding and the wiring and the this and the that and took out this wall and put in this beam and yadda yadda.”
We went through every room as he detailed the construction. It had changed, and yet it hadn’t.
“This is the room where your Mom lived during high school. This is the mirror she probably used to get ready for dates.”
“This was your grandparent’s room. This was their bathroom. This was his closet. This was her closet.”
I wanted to cry.
I don’t think I ever realized how hard it’s been to live without truly knowing my family. I’ve met them through photographs and documents and trinkets and stories and little shocks of nostalgia, but most of the time it all feels like a dream. I was born late – my Mom was too old, the family was too old.
We went downstairs and into the backyard – which is probably one of the largest (if not the largest) in that section of McGregor because it’s basically an entire lot. There was a large rabbit pen with hay where Stacey and her daughters were playing and introducing a “visitor bunny” to the others.
We went into the carport and I was told about all the old Rock Lake Motel 50′s space heaters that were stored in the garage and eventually thrown out. About how the old bath mats, removed from the Motel when we sold it, were given to C.R.O.W. as bedding for rescued animals.
About all the garage sales they had. All the storage units to where they lugged our stuff. All the time and the care and the passion they put into making sure what my Mom wanted is what actually happened – and yet my mother barely knows any of this.
I thought about trying to tell her it all, and realized she would just have to see it for herself.
I tried to decide how lucky we were to find people that would do exactly what my Mom wanted.
Before I left Stacey said, “Oh, hold on!” She ran upstairs and ran down with what she called another “little treasure.”
She handed me a little pair of wings. On the back was etched “Mrs. Charles S. Moore.” That was my great grandmother. These were the wings they gave wives whose husbands were serving in World War I.
“I find these things all the time and I just don’t know where to put them. Most are taken to the storage unit.”
I don’t know why my Mom has never taken me to the storage unit. I suppose when I do go it will be a chance to relive my history. And yet as much as all of this is inspiring and heartwarming I can’t but feel a tinge of sadness – because it’s all just that… history.
My mother is old and my father has passed. In a few decades no one will be alive that knows the true story of the Moore’s or what their effect was on Fort Myers. How disparate we’ve become as our family line dwindles and I’ve moved away.
I make it a point to ask my Mom every time I find a picture: “Who is this? What is this?”
She has all the knowledge. I wish I could somehow filter it all out and bottle it up. But, of course, I can’t.
One day I hope to do something for the Browns – the people who held onto a part of my family that was for sure doomed to be condemned and demolished by the City whose history it holds so close.
For now I look at the boxes and boxes in our garage filled with jewelry and furniture and photo albums and everything the packrats of my Mom’s family tree have sent down to each generation and wonder… who will have the heart to finally sift through and start filtering it down.
On my way out, as I stood in the newly bricked driveway, the Browns continued to talk about their odd connections to my family and all of the effort they’ve put into the house. “Every once in a while people drive by and say “I tried so hard to buy that house,” and Stacey says they simply reply ‘Not hard enough.’”
The stories that always stick out to me are the strange supernatural ones my Mom used to relay. “There’s something special about that house, it has an energy.” It was one of the myriad of reasons she refused to let anyone destroy it.
“You know, we have a psychic friend,” Stacey told me as her husband rolled his eyes and she consequently called him a skeptic.
“Well, anyway. She tells us there’s an old man who sits in the living room and follows us around and he’s just very, very pleased.”
She imagines it’s my grandfather. The man who knocked beehives off of Thomas Edison’s front porch. The man who built a motel from the ground up. The man who was King of Edisonia and raised my Mom and took care of my Grandmother. The man who got Alzheimer’s and lost his mind and passed away before he could ever really know who I was.
The man who now lives in the house where he raised his family and finds himself content – passing the days by watching a family of a new generation with a father who has the same work ethic as him.
Michael George :: Feb.13.2009 ::
Miscellaneous ::
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