Schadenfreude. Who’s ever heard of it?

It’s a German word that means delighting in the misfortune of others. I had never heard of this word until I was doing some research for my book The Ugly Woman’s Guide to Internet Dating: What I Learned From 70 First Dates. Before this, I’d heard it described as “The Crab Theory.”

Put one crab in a five-gallon bucket and Mr. Crab will do everything in his power to scale its smooth wall and crawl out of that bucket. Put two or more crabs in a bucket and when one starts to climb up, the others will grab him and pull him back down into the bucket. Unfortunately, humans sometime exhibit the same tendencies as crabs.

In my own life, I’ve struggled mightily with envy, and I’m sorry to say that too many times, I had a decided leaning toward the crab/schadenfreude side.

And then one day, I read a story in the Christian Science Sentinel about a woman who’d spent a lifetime cultivating the habit of gratitude. She said that her mother had taught her to feel sincerely joyous and grateful for the good things that happened in other people’s lives, and to take it as a personal promise from God that, if it happened for them, it could happen for her, too.

The Buddhist have a word for this: Mudita. It’s the practice of finding joy in other people’s success and happiness.

The fact is, we’re all cracked pots and fallible and prone to foibles and missteps and mistakes and even lapses in good judgment. Who among us hasn’t lost our temper and said something we deeply regret? Who among us hasn’t surrendered to temptation when we could have done better? My point is, maybe the real need is to stop staring so hard at other people’s sins and take a better look at our own shortcomings and work on improving those.

Maybe we need to stop cultivating the habit of schadenfreude and work on mudita.

Last week, I spent countless hours bundling up the children and getting them ready for their new homes. Shipping books is a lot of work and time-intensive, and standing in line at the Milan Station (Norfolk Post Office on 38th Street) is a foretaste of hell, but…

It sure is fun to think about this book - Montgomery Ward’s Mail-Order Homes - leaving home to be enjoyed by others. Dale Patrick Wolicki and I spent five years researching and writing this book, and it’s new research on a new topic. As I’ve told my husband and my friend Dale many times, this book will still be in use as a reference work many years after we’re all gone from this earth.

If you’d like to learn more about Wardway Homes, click here.

If you’d like to give your friends and relatives the perfect Christmas present, click here.

And if you’d like to support your local library by donating a copy of Wardway Homes, click here.

Wardway books leaving home

Handsome hubby poses with the new book. Two cuties together in one photo!

What a surprise to find an abundance of Sears Homes in Annapolis Maryland!  It’d be interesting to know how and why this Navy town ended up with so many kit homes.

A picture’s worth a thousand words, so here are a few pictures of my “finds” in Annapolis. Note: All of the homes pictured below were found within the city limits of Annapolis, MD.

BTW, if you enjoy these pictures, please spread the word and email a link to your friends! And join our group on Facebook, “Sears Homes.”

To learn more about Sears Homes, click here.  In short, these were houses purchased out of the Sears Roebuck mail-order catalog. They were shipped to the rail station in 12,000 pieces and assembled by the aspiring homeowner. About 70,000 Sears homes were sold from 1908-1940.

To read a recently published article on the Sears Homes of Annapolis, click here.

The Sears Newcastle was a Colonial Revival and a popular design

Sears Newcastle sitting pretty in Annapolis

The Sears Hamilton was a modest, but a big seller for Sears.

Odds are, the owners of this Sears Hamilton have no idea that they have a historically significant home, and no idea that its historic value has been diminished with insensitive remodeling.

The unusual rooflines on the Sears Jeanette is its best distinguishing feature.

This little Jeanette has a photographer standing in its front yard!

A "bungalow from the Golden West" the Osborn was another very popular house.

This Osborn sits on a corner lot in Annapolis.

Originally known as The Windsor, this little house was later renamed "The Carlin." By any name, it's still a cutie-pie!

Here it is, in the flesh, on a dead-end street in Annapolis.

Perhaps one of their top ten most popular designs, the Sears Crescent was offered in two floor plans, with an expandable attic option in both plans.

From the 1919 Sears catalog, here's a view of the Crescent's interior.

Sears Crescent with its expanded attic! The dormers were probably added in later years, after the home was built.

The most notable feature on the Americus (shown here from the 1925 catalog) was the oversized front porch roof, unique front columns and the second floor front wall that juts out a little from the first.

I found this Americus in an upscale neighborhood. This Americus has been "supersized." Judging by the home's placement on the lot, it's likely that this house was a "custom design" and was built with the extra square footage.

In 1918, Standard Oil of Indiana made mail-order history when they placed a $1 million order with Sears Roebuck & Company for 192 Honor-Bilt homes. It was purported to be the largest order in the history of the Sears Modern Homes department. Standard Oil purchased the houses for their refinery workers in Southwestern Illinois.

Of those 192 houses, 156 went to Carlinville, 12 were built in Schoper and 24 were sent to Wood River. Throughout the 1920s, pictures of these homes were prominently featured in the front pages of the Sears Modern Homes catalogs.

Construction of the 156 houses took nine months, not six as expected. The reason?  A nationwide shortage of wheat. Charles Fitzgerald, spokesman for Standard Oil and Manager of Houses explained to The Chicago Daily Tribune (November 3, 1919) what happened.

“The company (Standard Oil) purchased a forty acre wheat field and the government would not permit the destruction of the crop,” he said. “On the first home, we were erecting the studding while the harvesters were shocking wheat twenty yards away.”

According to the papers of the day, “smut” was another reason for the wheat shortage. When I first read about smut and the wheat shortage, I imagined a large group of idle field workers, sitting cross-legged in the expansive fields, poring over magazines with pictures of scantily-clad women.

Smut, I later learned, is a particularly nasty fungus that creates black, odious spores and ruins wheat crops. In 1919, smut damaged a large proportion of America’s wheat fields.

And “shocking” was another interesting term. As a city girl, I’d never heard that phrase before. “Wheat shockers” are the field workers who bundle up the wheat.

While doing research for my book The Houses that Sears Built, I read hundreds of newspaper and articles from the early 1900s and learned that there is a wholly different vernacular for that time period. Words have different meaning in different times.

One of the Sears Homes in Wood River, Illinois - part of that $1 million order that Standard Oil placed in the late 1910s. There are 24 of these Sears Homes in a row on 9th Street in Wood River. The 12 Sears Homes built in Schoper, Illinois were torn down in the 1930s.