"Mike, in my book, you're a giant."

In my day job, I'm a Realtor. This summer I sold two buildings on my courthouse square for a brilliant man named Mike Kraft. I wanted to say something about Mike in my blog, and finally decided to simply post the letter I wrote to him after we closed the sale.

Mike,

The Wild Building: 20 N. 9th St. in 
Noblesville, Indiana, one of Mike's restorations.

I want to thank you for allowing me to take you through the process of handing your Noblesville properties to a new owner. The trust you and Betsy put in me was humbling and inspiring. Far too often I work with people for whom the homes and historic buildings are simply houses and structures.  You and I both know your buildings, and what you did with them have meant much more to Noblesville.

I admire you more than I can say. You were a pioneer on the courthouse square in Noblesville with those two buildings at the very time I was struggling to do the same thing in the surrounding residential neighborhoods, in my own meager way.

In the 1980s most of the locals had given up on the courthouse square. When some business leaders were urging the county commissioners to tear down the courthouse to make way for more parking and move county offices to the highway, you bought and restored those two buildings and nurtured first class tenants. You inspired others. The money and effort you expended gave others permission – made them feel it was reasonable to do the same with their buildings. You inspired a mayor – Mary Sue Rowland, to promote downtown and gave her a solid example to point to as a model for downtown’s future. And when her Main Street downtown redevelopment program looked for it’s first office, you gave them one for $1 a month.

The home of Alexander's Ice Cream, Mike's other
stunning project at 876 Logan St., Noblesville IN.

You showed vision when it was lacking. From your office in Washington, DC you respected your hometown history when many of the folks here had forgotten or given up on it. When you bought those buildings twenty five years ago our square as a dingy, sad place. Back then I walked my children in strollers down its cracked and broken sidewalks and imagined it alive and vibrant again. Today we have one of the most dynamic courthouse squares in the Midwest. The seeds you planted 25+ years ago are a big reason why. Families walking their kids in strollers through downtown today have the luxury of taking it for granted. I’m so happy they can.

A few days ago my wife and I walked downtown and ate at Matteo’s, another tenant you nurtured in another building you once owned, and on Friday night we walked downtown with her 10 year old son to one of the buildings I just helped you sell, Alexanders, got ice cream and sat out on a bench. On both of those nights we looked out on the courthouse square – nearly every parking space taken, people on the sidewalks window shopping, the restaurant full, music spilled out of the sports bar down the street, trees growing up around the restored courthouse. Those nights I thought of you and the seeds you planted.

When I had my first weekly newspaper column in the 1990s, you sought me out on your trips to Noblesville, just to sit and chat. Do you remember that? I know you sought me out because I was a lonely voice of opposition in a town that didn’t care much for opposing views. Your encouragement meant the world to me and gave me reason to keep writing, erasing some of the doubts that preyed on me, countering the nasty letters to the editor in response to my columns. When I was the first Main Street president, fighting to get the rest of the courthouse square moving in the direction of your example, while I was being ignored or rebuffed by building and business owners as a starry-eyed meddler, your notes of support kept me going.

Do you recall 10 years ago you visited town while I was salvaging architectural detail from a house on 10^th Street the city was planning to tear down? It was a house I rented when I first moved to Noblesville. You told me you had taken piano lessons there as a child and asked me to find you a memento. In the attic, I found the original ornate screen door that was once on the front door of the house. There was an old brass bell still hanging from a wire at the top of the door, a bell that would have rung when you as a young boy came through the door for your lessons. Made me happy to hand that tarnished old thing over to you.

Mike Kraft, on his recent 80th birthday.

Your sentimental love for this town blows me away. 

The years have taken their toll. I know your feet, your hands, and your mind are all moving more slowly now. As we worked to sell these properties it broke my heart a little when I sensed over the phone and through the emails that you were feeling powerless and of little use to the world around you. But you have moved mountains in the town where you grew up, the same place where I’ve made my life and where my own kids grew up, on the same streets you ran and loved as a child.

In my book, you are a giant.

Follow this link to buy Kurt's new novel The Salvage Man

Follow this link to buy Kurt's novel, Noblesville

Lives In A Baseket

The best tings about being known as a local history nerd is that people bring me old stuff.

One day in the winter 2003 I got a call from the secretary at my office. She was confused and concerned. Someone I’d never met had presented themselves at the front desk and left a soot-covered bushel basket, asking that she give it to me, saying they thought I’d enjoy it.

I love getting calls like that.

The contents of that filthy basket were found in the attic of a home being renovated on South 10^th Street. It was crammed with letters, programs, invitations, and wallpaper samples. They provided a glimpse into the life of the Alexander family of Noblesville, brothers Harry and Fred, and their mother, Lou, between 1888 and 1900.

Fred Alexander wrote the earliest letters home from California. In those days young men dreamed of testing themselves in the untamed West, to “grow up with the land,” as they called it. Fred wrote home to the local paper describing his 1888 train trip across the plains and through the mountains. He then often wrote home from Pasadena where he struggled to make something of himself, working in a shoe store.

Throughout that winter I read those letters in the evening after work. I’d spread a towel across my lap and open a few of the filthy, blackened envelopes and carefully read. I’m sentimental enough to get a pang of heartache to think that the careful thoughts and feelings of an entire family, a record of 15 years of their lives could be left strewn in an attic and forgotten, covered with the dry-rot of old wood shingles and filtered debris from a reroofing job.

Time and again I thought, “I’m going to stop with this and give it all to a proper historian like Dave Heighway.” But then, greedily, each night, I’d open a few more letters and read. It was like reading someone’s diary - a guilty pleasure.

Summers in the early 1890s, Fred’s brother Harry wrote to his girlfriend, a young schoolteacher named Clara. During the school year she rented a room in the Alexanders’ 10^th Street house, but spent each summer with her family in Clinton, Indiana. Harry’s letters to Clara give tiny glimpses into life in Noblesville in the 1890s. He describes the flowers planted in the yard, vegetables tended in the garden, the town’s gossip, the newfangled concrete paving of a sidewalk in front of his law office downtown, and the political goings-on in the Methodist Church choir. The letters mention once significant figures in Noblesville – Meade Vestal, leader of the town’s brass band, and Thomas Boyd, then Noblesville’s big man on campus, a state senator who would stand trial in a scandalous paternity suit in 1893.

In these letters Harry Alexander can been seen carefully cultivating a relationship with Clara. Delicate hints of affection – but not too much affection, suggest Harry was uncertain if his interest was returned. In each letter, he calls the Alexanders’ home, “The Rest Cottage.”

In 1892 Fred Alexander returned from California to the little house on 10^th Street, called Anderson Street in those days. He falls in love with a girl from Frankton, named Gertrude. Letters over the next year tell a tragic story.

In spring of1893 Fred finds work in Chicago during the opening of the World’s Fair, writing faithfully to Gertrude, expressing his undying love. He finds an apartment for them and describes the people and the places in Chicago that he dreams will make up their world after they marry. He writes home before the wedding giving instructions to his brother Harry to, “rent a horse and carriage,” and “buy me a new shirt.” In autumn he comes home to ride in that carriage, wear that new shirt, and get married. But Gertrude is sick from a disease the letters never define. After the wedding they stay with her family in Frankton.

Then, in early 1894, Harry, who had gone to Frankton to help Fred through the impending tragedy, writes to Clara, boarding again at the Alexanders’ house in Noblesville, opening his letter with the stark phrase, “Gertrude is gone.” Just months after the wedding, Fred’s wife had died. Amid the jumbled debris in the bushel basket I found a stack of printed flyers, announcing Gertrude’s death. In his misery, Fred returned to California, then wandered to Florida.

But there were many happy things in that bushel basket – hand made invitations to the club parties that filled peoples lives before radio and television, like Shakespeare Club meetings in which members took turns reading the works of the bard. There were colorful, intricately printed invitations to recitals where local children would sing, play piano, or recite famous speeches. There was a program from the dedication of the First Presbyterian Church, a ribbon from “Bromo-Seltzer Day” at the World’s Fair in 1893, a program from a play at famed English’s Opera House in Indianapolis, graduation announcements, and calling cards left at New Year’s Day receptions.

As my winter wore on I followed Harry’s Alexander’s summer letters to Clara. By 1896 his affections were out in the open, and I followed letter by letter their wedding plans and his work to make the “Rest Cottage” just right for her. That summer he traveled regularly by train between Noblesville and Clinton, staying with her family there, missing her terribly when back home.

The last letters come from Fred, fighting in the Spanish-American war, still trying to make something of himself – this time in the military. From a small island near the Philippines, he tells of deprivations, military ineptitude, and personal disappointments.

I don’t know what became of the Alexander family. Don’t know how many children Harry and Clara had, whether Fred ever married again, or when they all said their last goodbye to the “Rest Cottage.” But I think of them every time I pass that little house on 10^th Street.

Betty Lou Kyle's Passion For Theater

Betty Lou Kyle is a living legend among Noblesville’s theater community, having directed or acted in 44 local productions in the past 5 decades. She returns after a 6 -year absence from the stage as the director of the Belfry Theater’s next production, The Perfume Shop.

I ate lunch with Betty Lou recently at The Hamilton restaurant and asked her why she returned to the theater after such a long break. In her typical self-deprecating style, she said, “I wanted to stay involved in something - not just play cards,” she chuckled.

She recalled her first local play, The Emperor’s New Clothes, presented in the 1968 in the O. V. Winks building at the 4-H Fairgrounds, before the Belfry’s current location on State Road 38 was even created. It also marked her creation of the Apprentice Players, an annual play staring local children. In addition to directing, she has acted in productions such as Driving Miss Daisy and Little Foxes.

Betty Lou told me about studying drama at Indiana University, where she met her late husband, well-known attorney, John Kyle. Theater was a family affair from that moment on. Both Betty Lou and John were founding members of the Hamilton County Theater Guild and acted in plays there throughout their marriage. Betty Lou laughs, recalling, “John even tied me to the railroad tracks once in the play 10 Nights In A Bar Room.”

All of her children, son John Kyle Jr., and daughters Amy Bradburn and Kathy Abrell appeared in Apprentice Player shows. And coincidentally, her granddaughter, McKenzie Kyle, now a professional actress in Los Angeles performed in a production of The Perfume Shop in Sarasota, Florida recently.

At age 82, being back in the theater with actors, set designers, props people and costumers looking to her for direction is admittedly intimidating, but Betty Lou says the excitement for building a show returned quickly. “Once the actors took the stage for preliminary readings I was drawing energy from them.”

The Perfume Shop is set in early 20th century Hungary during the Christmas holidays and is a light-hearted love story about two bickering co-workers who unknowingly exchange love letters as anonymous pen pals. It was the foundation of the Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan film, You’ve Got Mail.

In a series of coincidences, Betty Lou’s family history at the Belfry is echoed by the experiences of several other families involved in The Perfume Shop, giving the entire production a cozy feeling of close emotional bonds.

Mary Jo Bick, wife of assistant director, Jeff Bick, is the stage manager, and their son Michael is acting in the show. Long-time Belfry actor, Ginny Burt is joined on stage by nieces Anne Auwaerter and Fran Knapp. Gina Beckner and her small children, Emma and Jackson are all sharing their first stage experiences. And Jannette Wiles, a costumer on this production and a Belfry veteran of 37 years, will see her granddaughter, Grace perform in the show.

I stopped by the Belfry on a damp weeknight earlier this week. A scene was being rehearsed on stage. Other actors studied lines in various corners of the theater. Betty Lou and Jeff Bick sat side by side in the theater seats, note pads and play books in their laps, fielding questions from a costumer, then an actor, then they whisper ideas and questions back and forth together while three actors continue their scene on stage. Betty Lou shouts out to one, “Louder, Tom.”

Betty Lou attends to fewer details now than she might have 10 years ago, instead focusing on the actors and the final presentation of the story. Though she is a slight and soft-spoke women, when she begins offering direction to actors, many young enough to be her grandchildren, they fall hushed and focused, respectful of her professional stature and authoritative knowledge of what works on stage and what doesn’t.

Watching Betty Lou orchestrate this close-knit handful of families and Belfry veterans in what is likely her theatrical swan song is stirring. It reminds me of the many giants of this community I’ve been fortunate enough to know over the years, people who have, with passion and inspiration, made it a great place to live.

The Belfry Theater is located on 10690 Greenfield Avenue, just east of State Road 37. The Perfume Shop will run from November 25 to December 11th. Tickets can be reserved at http://www.thebelfrytheatre.com/

Performing The Coda

Coda: A few measures added beyond the natural termination of a musical composition.

While I waited for Murphy’s daughter to arrive I walked around the exterior of the house taking notes. After making a loop of the yard and ending back at the front step, I recalled a snowy Saturday a few years ago when two friends and I came over and shoveled Murphy’s front walk so he could get out and about.

When his daughter arrived we went inside. It was like Murphy might be home any moment. His magazines were in a neat stack. His clothes in the closet. The remote control sat on the coffee table before the TV.

It is an odd thing to walk the rooms of an old friend’s house after they’ve passed, trying to estimate its value. This is the place where Murphy and his wife raised their children, where he came home from work everyday for decades, where he cared for his wife as she was dying, where he aged alone in his 80s.

He was born black in a time of segregation, lived in this neighborhood for 88 years. He served in WWII, set type for printing presses, served on the City Council, sold insurance, and lived to see a black man elected president of the United States.

A photo of President Obama hangs on the same walls that hold framed newspaper clippings and awards that span Murphy’s 88 years.

And it has all come to this just a few months after this lovely man died; me walking the rooms of his house trying to figure out what the place it worth. In this way, I’m the coda – the final notes beyond the piece of music that has ended.

The guy who taught me this business was Dale.

The last time I saw Dale was at Murphy’s funeral in May. He was supposed to speak but wasn’t feeling up to it. The cancer was taking its toll. I sought him out and said hello. That brief moment of small talk in a noisy room filled with people would be our last conversation.

We sold real estate together for 8 years. He was generous to my family beyond imaging. But Dale and I were relentlessly on opposing sides of civic and political events. He hurt my feelings. I hurt his. But when I saw his white hair and broad shoulders above the crowd at Randal and Roberts Funeral Home, I sought him out to show him the respect I felt for him.

Sitting at his funeral just a couple months later listening to stories about his life, I thought back to one of my own stories about Dale’s generosity.

I had a listing owned by an elderly woman. Dale announced one day he had the perfect buyer. I rolled my eyes when I found out it was someone he’d bailed out of jail (Dale was a bail bondsman, too). But he got his buyer pre-approved and my seller accepted their offer.

Immediately Dale discovered the buyers didn’t have enough money for their loan application. He told the lender to take it out of his own commission at closing. The appraiser demanded that the peeling paint on the eaves and trim be scraped and repainted. My seller had no money to do it. So Dale delivered his own ladders, paint brushes and paint he bought himself to the house and told his buyers, “If you want the house you’ll have to paint it.” They did.

There were other fees his buyers couldn’t pay, like a gas company deposit. He paid them all or arranged for it to be taken from his commission. At the closing he joked and told stories as usual and was eventually handed a very, very small commission check. He walked out of that closing spinning his key ring on a finger and whistling a tune. You’d have never known he’d just got paid near nothing for a hell of a lot of work.

He’d given a break to somebody who needed a break, a gesture he would brush off as unimportant if you complimented him for it.

A couple weeks ago my phone range while I ate lunch with Stacy at Noble Coffee. I stepped into the tearoom for privacy. It was an attorney I didn’t know. She said a deceased client of hers had identified me in her end-of-life planning documents as the Realtor who should list and sell her house. She gave me a name I didn’t recognize. She read off the address and I mentally walked down that street until I realized it was Sandi. The last name had thrown me off. I forgot she had remarried in the decade since she disappeared from my circle of acquaintances.

A few days later I was meeting that attorney, standing on the back porch of that familiar house for the first time in years. Distant memories flooded my mind.

Before I was a Realtor, when my wife and I had small children and were living on one teacher’s salary Sandi had noticed we were struggling. Earlier that year she’d seen a friend and me strip two old houses of their aluminum siding. She asked me what I got for recycling it. “$500 apiece,” I told her. So as she began renovations on this house, she asked me if I wanted the aluminum siding. “Sure,” I told her. I figured I would be removing it myself, but I got a call one day from Sandi saying her construction crew had removed it all and stacked it in the yard for me.

Walking through the house I noticed a cabinet my wife had refinished for Sandi. I saw porch columns I’d salvaged from a Victorian-era home at 8^th and Cherry and sold to her. She used them to decorate her bedroom. I recalled the Christmas vacation she did me another favor, hiring me to strip the woodwork in the upstairs bathroom.

And when I became a Realtor, she hired me. In one of my last conversations with her, almost 10 years ago, we sat in the dining room and went through legal documents to sell another property of hers.

It has been a sad summer for a lot of reasons. Especially sad that three friends, mentors . . . people I looked up to when I was a young adult and new to Noblesville have all passed in a single season. But there’s also a feeling of purpose to play a bit of the coda in their lives, those random notes at the end of the piece of music they lived.

In Search of A Downtown Theater

It’s summer, 1993. Downtown Noblesville’s last theater, The Diana, has been demolished at the corner of 9^th and Clinton. From her family business across the street, then Mayor, Mary Sue Rowland could view the rubble. No one did more to keep the building standing than Rowland. She understood it was a valuable economic asset, but her city council and the local business community didn’t back her up.

If community leaders could go back and undo that event, they would. In fact some folks are trying right now.

The groups trying to reestablish a theater downtown are as far flung as The Belfry Theatre, Noblesville Cultural Arts Commission, the Hamilton County Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, and the City of Noblesville. Proposed locations are varied as well. But it’s agreed a live theater as part of a larger civic center is the vital missing element needed to help downtown realize its full potential.

According to Mark Tumey, board president of Noblesville’s Belfry Theatre, "A part of the Belfry's long range planning is the possibility of relocating to downtown Noblesville.” Tumey says that surveys of both their board and their patrons support such a move.

Tumey sees more than Belfry patrons benefiting. “The possibility of a theater with the heritage of the Belfry's located in the historic downtown area, coupled with local retailers and restaurantswould certainly present a pleasant experience to all,” Tumey says.

The Belfry’s plan is just the first of many stars that will have to align if a theater is to be built.

(At right: The old Diana Theater once stood at the corner of 9^th and Clinton. Its demolition by Society Bank in 1993 was opposed by then Mayor Mary Sue Rowland, and the Noblesville Preservation Alliance. Pictured here are a group of newspaper boys standing beneath its marquee,circa 1925. The gentleman in the back, far right is John Wise, Noblesville's main newspaper delivery man from the 1890s until the Great Depression.)

Brenda Myers, Executive Director of Hamilton County Convention and Visitors Bureau also sees economic benefit for other players downtown. “Anything that can drive evening activity to downtown is a plus. And a theater is a good way to do it.”

In fact, merchants and restaurant owners get a little giddy when they imagine several hundred Belfry Theatre goers converging on downtown for Friday and Saturday night shows and weekend afternoon matinees.

Myers’s Visitors Bureau, like an increasing number of such organizations has stepped beyond traditional tourism promotion, expanding into the realm of economic development that can bolster tourism. Partnering in the construction of a theater would be a prime example.

But the goal coalescing around a future theater isn’t simply to house the Belfry and enhance retail sales downtown. It’s hoped such a facility could solve other problems as well.

Christy Langley of City of Noblesville’s Economic Development Department notes that the annual Mayor’s Ball, and the recent Chamber of Commerce 75^th Anniversary celebration had to be held in Carmel. “Noblesville needs a place for public functions like that,” Langley says.

Brenda Myers agrees, “Noblesville doesn’t have adequate banquet space. A civic center with a theater could do that.”

(below: the Wild Opera House, which once stood a half block south of the courthouse on 9th.)

Mary Sue Rowland’s interest in a downtown theater didn’t end in ‘93 with the demolition of the Diana. Now, as a member of Noblesville’s Common Council and the Cultural Arts Commission, she’s been pushing to keep a proposed theater on the City’s front burner. Working with the Arts Commission, she asked Darren Peterson of Peterson Architecture to re-imagine another Noblesville theater that was demolished decades ago; The Wild Opera House. (see photo at top of entry)

Peterson’s resulting design shows a new civic center theater in the same 9^th Street location that once held the Victorian-era opera house, now a city parking lot.

Rowland has presented the plan to various city committees and it was discussed at the common council’s most recent planning retreat, making the final list of projects the council wants to pursue.

Rowland says, “The vision of the Cultural Arts Commission is a facility that could be a meeting space for 400-500 people for events like banquets and the Mayor’s Ball. And the theater might be a convertible space that could also be used as a dance floor, or winter Parks Department classes.”

Christy Langley summed up what most stakeholders in a potential theater agree upon, “We need to avoid a Palladium-styled project,” (referring to Carmel’s opulent and staggeringly expensive new facility), “and do something that’s more appropriate for Noblesville.”

But a simple reality remains; today the former locations of Noblesville’s old theaters are barren asphalt. Rebuilding a theater on one of those sites will require the commitment of many organizations all working toward the same goal.

(below: Another view of the Wild Opera House. Photo thanks to Dave Heighway.)

Lives In A Baseket - 2003

A vintage Contrarian from 2003:

Last winter a soot-covered bushel basket appeared on my desk. Its contents were found in the attic of a home being renovated on South 10^th Street. The folks doing their work are regular readers of The Contrarian. Because I write a lot about local history, they figured I'd know what to do with them.

The rickety basket was crammed with letters, programs, invitations, and wallpaper samples. They provided a glimpse into the life of the Alexander family of Noblesville, brother Harry and Fred, and their mother, Lou, between 1888 and 1900.

Fred Alexander wrote the earliest letters home from California. In those days young men dreamed of testing themselves in the untamed West, to “grow up with the land,” as they called it. Fred wrote home to the local paper describing his 1888 train trip across the plains and through the mountains. He then often wrote home from Pasadena where he struggled to make something of himself.

Throughout last winter I read these letters late at night. I’d spread a towel across my lap and open a few of the filthy envelopes, blackened from a century of attic dry-rot and roofing debris. Time after time I’d tell my wife, Greta, “I’m going to stop with this and give it all to a proper historian like Dave Heighway.” But then, greedily, each night, I’d open a few more letters and read. It was like snooping in someone’s diary - a guilty pleasure.

Summers in the early 1890s, Fred’s brother Harry wrote to his girlfriend, a young schoolteacher named Clara. During the school year she rented a room in the Alexanders’ 10^th Street house, but spent each summer with her family in Clinton, Indiana. Harry’s letters give tiny glimpses into life in Noblesville in the 1890s. He describes the flowers planted in the yard, vegetables tended in the garden, the town’s gossip, the newfangled concrete paving of a sidewalk in front of his law office downtown, and the political goings-on in the Methodist Church choir. The letters mention once significant figures in Noblesville – Meade Vestal, leader of the town’s brass band, and Thomas Boyd, then Noblesville’s big man on campus, a state senator who would stand trial in a scandalous paternity suit in 1893.

In these letters Harry can been seen carefully cultivating a relationship with Clara. Delicate hints of affection – but not too much, suggest Harry was uncertain if his interest was returned. In each letter, he calls the Alexanders’ little 10^th Street house, “The Rest Cottage.”

In 1892 Fred returned from California to the little house on 10^th Street, called Anderson Street in those days. He falls in love with a girl from Frankton, named Gertrude. Letters over the next year tell a tragic story.

In spring of 1893 Fred finds work in Chicago during the opening of the World’s Fair, writing faithfully to Gertrude, expressing his undying love. He finds an apartment for them and describes the people and the places in Chicago that he dreams will make up their world after they marry. He writes home before the wedding giving instructions to his brother Harry to, “rent a horse and carriage,” and “buy me a new shirt.” In autumn he comes home to ride in that carriage and wear that new shirt. But Gertrude is sick from a disease the letters never define. After the wedding they stay with her family in Frankton. Then, in early 1894, Harry, who had gone to Frankton to help Fred through the impending tragedy, writes to Clara, boarding again at the Alexanders’ house in Noblesville, opening his letter with the stark phrase, “Gertrude is gone.” Just months after the wedding, Fred’s wife had died. Amid the jumbled debris in the bushel basket I found a stack of printed flyers, announcing Gertrude’s death. In his misery, Fred returned to California, then wandered to Florida.

There were many happy things in that bushel basket – hand made invitations to the club parties that filled peoples lives before television, like Shakespeare Club meetings in which members took turns reading the works of the bard. There were colorful, intricately printed invitations to recitals where local children would sing, play piano, or recite famous speeches. There was a program from the dedication of the First Presbyterian Church, a ribbon from “Bromo-Seltzer Day” at the World’s Fair in 1893, a program from a play at famed English’s Opera House in Indianapolis, graduation announcements and calling cards left at New Year’s Day receptions.

As my winter of letter reading wore on I followed Harry’s Alexander’s summer letters to Clara. By 1896 his affections were out in the open. I followed their wedding plans and his work to make the “Rest Cottage” just right for her. That summer he traveled regularly by train between Noblesville and Clinton, staying with her family there, missing her terribly when back in Noblesville.

The last letters come from Fred, fighting in the Spanish-American war, still trying to make something of himself – this time in the military. From a small island near the Philippines, he tells of deprivations, military ineptitude, and personal disappointments.

I don’t know what became of the Alexander family. Don’t know how many children Harry and Clara had, whether Fred ever married again, or when they all said their last goodbye to the “Rest Cottage.” But I think of them every time I pass that little house on 10^th Street.