A Very Fine House (but only one cat in the window)

Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here, again blogging with family photos, but this time there’s a difference. There is actually a connection to my mystery novels.

When I set out to write the Deadly Edits series as Kaitlyn Dunnett, I decided to make things easy on myself by giving Mikki Lincoln, my sixty-something sleuth, who is returning to the town where she grew up after fifty years away, a fair number of my own memories. I modeled her home town, Lenape Hollow, after my own, and gave Mikki the house I lived in from 1951 to 1965.

I loved that house, and had many fond memories of living there, but to write about it I had to do a little research. Although, as with most research for writing fiction, very little of it ended up in the story, what I discovered was of interest to me.

For one thing, I discovered that the size of the lot was only .22 acres. Somehow it always seemed bigger to me as a kid!. I was also able to identify the previous owner of the house as Frederick Thurmann (1877-1950). In census records, he’s variously listed as a carpenter, salesman, and owner of a butcher shop. In another source, there were indications that Thurmann’s store was boycotted during World War I because he was suspected of being a German sympathizer. Anti-German sentiment was also the reason the street his house was located on—Wedemeyer Terrace—was renamed Lincoln Place. I went back to Wedemeyer Terrace for Mikki’s address.

By the 1920 census, Thurman was living in the house my parents bought in 1951, but it appears in this photo to have been build some years earlier than that, at least to judge by the style of the ladies’ dresses. Whenever it was built, by the 1930 census the property was valued at $4000.

My parents and I moved in on June 24, 1951, when I was three years and eight months old. With us came our dog, Skippy, who was about a year older than I was. My father was a do-it-yourselfer and, among other things, remodeled the upstairs bath, added a half-bath downstairs, tore down an old barn and used the lumber to build an attached garage with storage space overhead that opened onto the front porch, and set up an office and a darkroom in the basement. The office came later, after we switched from coal to oil for the furnace. Coal had previously been delivered through a small window directly onto the floor in that section of the cellar!

In addition to the rooms I drew in a floorplan for Mikki’s house, mine had a root cellar at the foot of the stairs under the bulkhead door leading to the cellar from outside and an unfinished attic. The half on one side of the stairs was a playroom for me and in the other half there was a double bed made up in case of company. What’s marked as “guest bedroom (office)” on the floorplan was rented out to roomers, then housed my maternal grandfather from 1958-61, and finally became my room. It was perfect—I had my own little balcony and a huge walk-in closet.

Mikki, of course, made some changes. So did various owners after 1965. At one point, when the house was for sale, I found the realtor’s photos online and got quite a shock when I saw that the living-room fireplace my folks had sealed off had been opened up again—as I’d already had Mikki decide to do.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lest I forget, yes we did have a cat. In 1958, along with my grandfather, Spot came to live with us. He led a very long life, later retiring to Florda with my parents.

Spot in 1957 with his older brothers Jack and Pete, who went to live with a family friend

Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty-four books traditionally published and has self published others. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. In 2023 she won the Lea Wait Award for “excellence and achievement” from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. She is currently working on creating new omnibus e-book editions of her backlist titles. Her website is www.KathyLynnEmerson.com.