The Big Stone House

Notes from Lynn:

Dale and Ann Tussing, fairly sane back then, enjoyed driving past the big old stone house on East Seneca Turnpike. They traded conjectures about its history, stories, secrets. It’s not as if they didn’t have other ways to spend their leisure time in 1969. Dale confronted the challenges and pressures facing an assistant professor. Ann blended the needs of her growing family with a plethora of serious quests and enthusiasms. They lived then in a nice house in Syracuse, but upstate New York is a very long way from their roots in Berkeley and San Francisco. Perhaps they imagined they would someday go back to California.
One day they learned that the stone house was for sale. They couldn’t afford it, Dale told Ann. She thought otherwise.

* * *
Forty years later, Dale tapped on his laptop in the double parlor of a house built when James Madison was president. Ann brightened as she answered my questions. The house is usually classified as Federal (or Georgian) as influenced by Dutch and English colonial styles. Built in about 1810 by a tanner named John Gridley, the stone house has been listed since 1971 with the National Register of Historic Places. Ten rooms plus attic and basement. Seven fireplaces. Interior walls of nearly 12 feet, barely high enough for an 11-foot gold-framed mirror for the bustles and bows of the Gilded Age. Nonetheless, the house has the comfortable look of a home where Dale and Ann’s five children grew up, sang songs around the piano and scattered from Buffalo to Australia, each with graduate degrees and one with a doctorate. They appear on the walls as an ongoing gallery of framed snapshots amid scores of paintings, drawings and old photographs that Ann has collected over the years. Her kitchen includes an old-time Kalamazoo wood range and a foot-thick butcher’s block turned into a work table, its surface so beaten by cleavers that it looks like a slightly rumpled newspaper page.

* * *
Who knew? I worked with Dale in 1952-53 when I was editor and he was managing editor of the Golden Gater weekly at San Francisco State’s old campus on upper Market Street. I was 18; he was 17. We were better at beating each other in one-on-one basketball than as rookie editors. Within a year, I was a draftee at Fort Ord, and Dale had married pretty, vivacious and brainy Ann Underhill. (Her mother, Katherine Gibbs Underhill, had been an acclaimed architect of homes in Berkeley before dying at 49 – and leaving Ann with an abiding interest in architecture.) Dale dropped out of journalism to study what he never considered to be the dismal science. He would earn his Ph.D in economics at Syracuse University. After two years at Washington State, returned to Syracuse to become a full professor of economics, author of books on the health and educational systems in Ireland and, as of this year, a retiree in a big old stone house that he and Ann regard with undiminished pleasure and satisfaction. They won’t be returning to the Bay Area.


Notes from Margo:

We meandered along a Massachusetts byway, looking for the route from Concord to Lexington, enjoying the bright yellows in the understory of the fall foliage. Lynn pulled over, as he often does, to let cars pass. A lovely pond was across the road, with the foliage perfectly reflected in its glassy early-morning surface. I said something like: I know that can’t be Walden Pond, but that looks a lot like where my grandfather used to take us. And we looked up at the sign: Walden Pond. A sharp turn into the parking lot and we began a walk around the pond, on the trail my grandfather used to walk.

Let’s call that a metaphor for our whole trip. We couldn’t have planned a gorgeous fall outing to Walden Pond, walking with the ghost of my grandfather. But by taking it slow, and allowing doors to open, we’ve had some magical times. My grandfather, Dirk Struik, the Dutch immigrant, loved Walden Pond so much that he led Appalachian Club hikes there till he was in his 90s. We could see what sparked his love. Through clear water we glimpsed schools of tiny fish and bigger fish hunting the smaller fish, frogs trying to look like tree roots, and pebbles and leaves resting on the bottom. The mirror-like surface reflected a single rowboat in the distance as well as the trees and their foliage. (At right: I called my mom to tell her I was walking her father’s path.)

Erie Canal: Since our stop at Niagara Falls, we’ve had a few high-mileage days, and we rested a few days with our friends Dale and Ann Tussing, in Syracuse. We made a hobby for a while out of following the Erie Canal, mostly because we’ve sung that folk song all our lives: “Oh the Ear-eye-ee was a-rising, and the gin was a-running low…” At Lockport, we saw the “Flight-of-Five” locks that lifted barges and boats 49 feet over the Niagara escarpment. Opened in 1825, they allowed the boats, as their skippers would say, to sail uphill. I’m thinking that might be why the Ear-eye-ee was a-rising. (Lynn’s insert: The canal, mostly dug by hand with a horde of about 2,000 men from 1817 to 1825, was enlarged from 1835 to 1862 and again from 1905 to 1917. Upstaged by the coming of railroads, the greatest engineering feat of the early 19th century is mostly forgotten – except in folklore. Nancy Schimmel sent us a message: “I hope you sang a song,” and we beat her to the punch with another favorite: “I’ve got a mule and her name is Sal, fifteen miles on the Erie Canal”…) We crossed and recrossed the 363-mile canal on the backroads as we drove across upper New York. Near Syracuse, we walked with Dale and Ann along the “Long Level” no-lock stretch of the 50-foot-wide canal. No boats, no barges. On the towpath: Joggers, dog walkers, bird watchers.

The Semitic Museum: We’re in Boston now. It would, of course, be impossible to do the town justice in sightseeing, so we just pulled one museum out of the the AAA Tour Guide: the Semitic Museum at Harvard. A small but truly wonderful museum. My favorite bit was cuneiform tablets, excavated from Nuzi, a town from a Middle Eastern empire previously unknown to me: the Hurrians. Some tablets are the ancient equivalent of legal transcripts, showing that nothing is new. In about 1500 B.C., a Hurrian official testifies (I’m paraphrasing from memory): “It is all lies. I did not have sex with that woman.”

Other tablets are thought to be student practice work – columns of the same words written over and over again. It is evidence, the caption said, of how hard it was to learn cuneiform. (The tablets look like cuneiform versions of my Hebrew study papers.) The Hurrian trove includes what is believed to be the oldest extant map (at left) – an appropriate artifact for our current study of highway maps. Another exhibit shows a typical Israelite home from days of King David. Lynn and I thought we had stumbled into a house from the Mesa Verde cliff dwellers of the American Southwest: Rectilinear structures with rows of small rooms – terra cotta-colored plaster on walls of mud bricks, wooden ladders from one story to the next, ceramic jugs for storing food, wool being spun and woven, cisterns for rain water. It makes sense, really. The two cultures developed in similar desert-like climates. Our image of the Israelites is wedded to the stories about traveling in tents for 40 years through the desert. It’s hard to envision the centuries after the Israelites settled the Holy Land.

Aunt Anne: We visited in the Boston suburb of Arlington with my mother’s younger sister, Anne Macchi (at right), whom I haven’t seen in years. She’s retired from teaching school and volunteers at the library two mornings a week. We sat in her cozy kitchen for several hours and had a comfortable, lively conversation that ranged far and wide: Rush Limbaugh, favorite writers of mystery books, travels in Holland, and the grandnieces and grandnephews in New Zealand.

Kenny’s Far-flung Pals: In the evening, we met up in Cambridge with our young friends Maya Sussman (below, left) and Zoe Marmer (below, right). Kenny’s schoolmates from San Francisco, they just started their studies at Tufts University. They directed us to a Sushi restaurant near campus, and we got to hear from two more budding college students (like Kenny and her friends at Oberlin) who love their roommates, love their classes, love their teachers, and are just generally happy with the way things are going. As in Oberlin, if Lynn is looking for whiners, he isn’t finding them.

Notable: The George Eastman House and Photography Museum in Rochester, New York. The multi-millionaire father of American photography built himself a huge mansion, even though he never married and had no children. (His mother lived there with him for a few years before she died.) He gave piles of money to many educational institutions, including the University of Rochester and Tuskegee University. He was obsessed with creating a more logical calendar, with 13 months of 28 days, and spent millions to promote it. The only place he was able to impose it, though, was the place he had absolute power, the Kodak company.

Mileage from Lockport, New York to Syracuse (by way of Rochester): 147

Syracuse to Boston, Massachusetts: 311

Total mileage so far: 7,010