BE OUR GUEST: NOT A CASTLE ALTHOUGH IT WAS BUILT BY A KING: FIRST HOUSE LEAVES LASTING IMPRESSION

Peter Hilty is a resident of Cape Girardeau, a former professor at Southeast Missouri State University and a former member of the city council.

It was not a castle although it had been built by a King Harley King, that is only four or five years before Doctor Wilson drove into the country from his office in Fortuna in his long car with headlights streamlined into the fender~. We moved from there when I was five into another house, where the family lived until my parent~ died 40 years later. Yet I believe that the King House left a deeper impression after only five years than the Mumaw house did during a tenure 10 times that length.

Now I am astonished to realize how deeply that house of my birth marked me. It is there that I most often return in dreams. Abe Lincoln may have been branded by the family log cabin at that time logs seemed the best presidential timber. But there was nothing pioneer about the King House. It stands still in sturdy elegance as it was when it was built, its perpetual youth a quiet comment upon my own mortality. During the years I have become a kind of student of houses, as many have, and can explain to anyone with lots of patience everything about the house of my birth.

It was built with a concrete foundation; the base of the Mumaw house was roughcut limestone laid unceremoniously on the prairie sod. Concrete is better. It was a rather new building material about the time of World War I, and oldtimers recall that the mixing of ingredients and especially the adding of water was somewhat like mixing angel food cake batter. An ornate metal form against the outside wall gave a design suggesting dressed blocks; apparently our fathers thought a naked concrete wall to be ugly, and I feel they were correct.

The frame of the Mumaw House was tediously built of heavy timber with mortise and tenon joints, but the King House wa~s spiked together with two-inch materials. Older carpenters had predicted disaster when this "Balloon Framing" was first used; it must be slipshod for it was so much easier than mortise and tenon. Such framing had first been used for temporary buildings at the Chicago World's Fair the ~same my father as a lad had attended and where he rode the first Ferris Wheel. But when carpenters set about to dismantle the~se supposed rickety structures they found them remarkably sturdy and have been building with nails and two-by-fours since.

The windows in the elegant King House were double-hung with weights and sash cords and yellow pine sash, tough as iron. The rest of the trim and the winding stairway were also yellow pine and has, I believe, not needed redecorating. Downstairs rooms with nine-foot ceilings had handsome crown moldings along with picture frame moldings with brass clips which held our large paintings.

~The formal room was the "Parlor." I did not know then that the French word meant "Conversation Room," but it worked quite well for that purpose. Every few weeks Dad would pour a sack of calcium carbide into a tank in the back yard and the generated gas would flow through pipes into every room. Some lights were ignited by flint wheels a quick twist of the wrist an a spurt of sparks and the room was lighted with a friendly two-prong flame.

The Parlor, the Dining Room, our Bed Rooms were much then as they are in present houses with only a few subtle differences I have not smelled for generations that kind of perfume which greeted me when as a kid I went into my older sister's bedroom. Mom's loyalty to her Home Comfort in the kitchen is a delight to recall; it was the one item which she knew was better than furnishings in neighbors' houses.

The Pantry was a spacious room in itself, ringed with deep shelves. Here a young boy not yet taught to read could make out labels; I remember a bright tin box of cinnamon sticks which the Raleigh Man had brought. The tin showed his very truck whirring down a country lane.

Not until years later did I come to know what a great place was that house of my birth. Some of my "liberal" friends in college sought to upset my native good sense. They had taken courses in Design and learned some of the heresies of Functionalism. They showed sketches of what I took to be second-rate shoe boxes, which they claimed were modern houses, designed from the inside out. Flat Roofs. "What idiot ever began building pitched roofs?" they asked me. Almost no windows. "This House has Lights." "And who wants eaves gutters?" And built on a slab. "In five years no house will have a basement."

So the house of my birth became embattled conflict it won rather easily, although my serious friends left us a generation of instant slums.

The King House forced me to become a philosopher. Almost everything of the design of the house has over my life been proven correct. Seventy years ago we were building very good houses. Not much need to change them drastically. The banner waving from our present house built the very year I was born, might read "Tradition."

The philosophic man must decide at some time in life, if he wishes to sleep upstairs or down. I have put my fate with the upstairs people since beginning life in the King House and have never slept well downstairs. The winds of morning come best through upstairs windows.

~One must also decide if he wishes a cellar or a basement. The King House had an honest Cellar, including potatoes with long sprouts, glass Jars with glass lids, and a fifty gallon vinegar barrel. A basement is different. Finished basements are for storing oversize photos of your wedding when you realize that no one wishes to look at them again. In the shop in our cellar I made an operating walnut spinning wheel a dust-producing project which cannot be done in a room with Wilton carpets and leather sectionals.

The King House had a full-~size attic with an honest stairway. Life supplies cellar refuse and attic junk. Perhaps if we sort ruthlessly we will reach a position when our living quarters are quite bare. The King House also had a ladder going to the trap door which led onto the flat section of the roof. Brave visitors were protected by a low railing. "Widow's Walks" they were called. And here the wives of the New Bedford Seafarers could pace about waiting for friendly sails. Not likely anyone could see into the Atlantic from the prairies of Missouri, but on nice spring days we could see the farm steads of our neighbors, and on clear days the stars of eternity.