Recently, I drove to Cape Charles to photograph some of the kit homes there. First off, let me say that I *LOVE* that community and if anyone would like to bequeath The Sears Lady (that’s me) a piece of property in Cape Charles, that’d be just dandy. It really is a beautiful place and I’m surprised it did not make Forbes’ “Best Places to Live” list.

Really and truly.

I’ll be expanding this post as the days go by (these picture-heavy posts take time), but here’s a few very interesting homes I found on the main drag into Cape Charles.

To read more about Sears Homes, click here:

The Aladdin Sheffield was a very popular house for Aladdin.

Here's an Aladdin Sheffield in Cape Charles, Virginia (on the Eastern Shore)

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This was one of Sears' biggest and nicest homes.

Right down the street from the Sheffield (see above) is the Sears Glenn Falls. Although it's partly obscured by the trees, you can see the familiar lines of the Glenn Falls.

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The Pheonix is one of Sears' most unusual kit homes. Interesting design and lots of fun details.

Sears Pheonix - in the flesh - in Cape Charles, Virginia

Side view of the Pheonix

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Sears Somerset

The porch has been altered, but I'd be willing to be money that this is indeed a Sears Somerset.

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Sears Walton

This "Walton" is one of two, side by side, in Cape Charles, Virginia

Sears Homes were the most popular kit homes and were sold right out of the pages of the Sears Roebuck catalog in the early 1900s. More than 370 designs of kit homes were offered - everything ranging from Arts and Crafts bungalows to foursquares to Colonial Revivals. These homes came in 30,000-piece kits and were shipped to all 48 states. Sears promised that a man of average abilities could have these homes assembled in about 90 days.

Today, the only way to find these kit homes is literally one by one.  And that’s what I do. When I decided that Sears Homes would be my career, I endeavored to memorize each of those 370 designs of Sears Homes. Now I can drive the streets of small town America and find the Sears Homes - one by one.

In addition to Sears, there were other companies that sold kit homes, including Aladdin, Gordon Van Tine, Montgomery Ward, Harris Brothers and more.

Here are a few of the kit homes I’ve found in the Lynchburg and Roanoke area.

(Special thanks to Dale Patrick Wolicki for accompanying me on the trip to Roanoke, Bedford and Lynchburg to help with the treasure hunt!)

The Sears Alhambra was one of the most popular Sears Homes

The Sears Alhambra in Roanoke, Virginia

Another Sears Alhambra - with some modifications - in Lynchburg

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Best described as a trailing-edge Victorian, the #306 was surprisingly popular

And here's the #306 in Christianburg, Virginia

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The Martha Washington was a spacious and fine home. Here is a Martha Washington in Bedford, Virginia.

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This is a kit home offered by Montgomery Ward. Like Sears, Montgomery Ward also sold kit homes. This one is in Bedford, next door to the D-Day monument.

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Harris Brothers was another kit home company (based in Chicago). This is the HB Ardmore, just outside of Roanoke (in Salem).

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Here's a pair of Aladdin Georgias in Roanoke

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Another Wardway house, this one is in Roanoke.

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And the creme de la creme of our trip: A Wardway #101 in a tiny town just outside of Roanoke. And Dale Wolicki was the one who made this discovery! Without him, I would have passed it by!

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This is an Aladdin Detroit, which we found in Lynchburg.

To look at more pictures of Virginia’s Sears Homes, click here:

A few weeks ago, my husband and I were traveling and visited Shenandoah, Virginia. It’s a beautiful little town with a large railroad presence so naturally, I went hunting for Sears Homes. Found a handful of unremarkable Sears Homes but then I found this Sears Maytown.

This is not an unusual Sears Home but this was one the prettiest examples of a Sears Maytown that I ever saw. And it was set in one of the prettiest towns that I ever visited. It’s a real beauty.

To read more about Sears Homes, click here.

Original image from 1916 catalog

Sears Maytown - original catalog image

Sears Home in Shenandoah, Virginia

To read more about Sears Homes, click here.

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.

When I learned that I was going to be writing a new book on the Sears Homes of Illinois, I called Cairo Historian Richard Kearney and asked if he could spend a day with me when I traveled to Southern Illinois.  I needed his help to find a few more Sears Homes near the site of the old mill in Cairo. Richard readily agreed to help out, which was a huge blessing, for I could not have done this without him! He and I spent an entire day traipsing around Olmstead, Tamms, Mounds City, Urbandale and many other little towns near his home in Cairo.

As we drove along bucolic country roads (some of which didn’t even show up on my GPS!), Richard was the perfect tour guide, providing an amazing bit of color about the region and its fascinating history.

A few hours into our fun day, we came to Mounds, home of this interesting old Glendale. Yes, it’s in rough shape but it is (or was) a fine old Sears Glendale. Obviously, the house has been vacant for years and years. As is evident from the photo (see below), the front porch is long gone, so I asked Richard, “Hey, you want to go around back and get inside?”

Richard, who could best be described as the consummate gentlemen with a pinch of adventurer and a heaping helping of intrigued historian, replied without a moment’s thought.

“Sounds like fun!”

So off we went, eagerly traipsing into the back yard, preparing to enter a vacant house in a run-down section of this economically depressed city. The basement windows were missing and as we walked past them, I thought I saw something move in the dark, scary basement.

“Must be a raccoon,” I thought to myself.

Richard took the lead and I was close on his heels, eager to get inside the old Sears House. As he rounded the bend and entered the backyard, a ferocious and large pitbull lunged at us, barking and spitting and snarling, and with teeth bared. Almost like a cartoon caricature, the lunging beast struggled to snap at Richard’s face but was held back by a very large chain.  Richard came to such a fast stop that I almost ran right into his back. We both took a few steps backward and one of us (I’m not sure who) said, “We need to get out of here, right NOW.”

In retrospect, I don’t know what was going on at that very deserted-looking house, but I do know that the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I *felt* danger. Richard and I turned and ran back to my car and took off.  As we were trotting back to my car, I remember thinking about that old song, “The things we do for love…”

“Like walking into an abandoned, vacant house in the middle of a not-so-good section of town…”

Thinking about this in the calm of my pretty pink bedroom in Norfolk, Virginia, I’ve no idea why there was a vicious, angry pit bull tied up on a huge chain in the back of a long-time vacant house. I’ve no idea who or what I glimpsed in that basement. However, I’m glad that both Richard and I lived to tell the tale!

Next time you read a book on Sears Houses, remember, history has a price! 

Richard Warren Sears - my hero and a merchandising genius - decided that the best way to sell more of the stuff in his 100,000-item, 1400-page catalog was to sell kit homes. In the first years of the 20th Century, multi-generational households were the norm, and Sears knew that getting people into a home of their own would create new customers and also create new demand for household products.

In 1908, a little ad appeared on page 594 of the Sears general merchandise catalog. It read, “Let us be your architect, without cost to you.” Interested buyers were invited to write in and request free specialty catalog of house plans. The first houses ranged in price from $500 to $5000.

And so it was that Richard Warren Sears entered into the kit house business. The mail-order homes were shipped by boxcar and came in 30,000 piece kits. Sears promised that a man of average abilities could have one assembled and ready for occupancy in 90 days.

The house were called “Sears Modern Homes.”  And they really were modern homes.

In 1917, American Carpenter and Builder Magazine reported that “watertight roof, walls and floor are an essential feature of a modern city house.” As a point of reference, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books described life on the plains in soddies and tiny cabins in the 1870s.

It’s possible that the Midwestern men and women who built Sears kit homes in the early 1900s could have been raised in housing that would be considered extremely primitive by today’s standards.

Below is a picture of a soddie. These were very primitive and damp and dank and fairly miserable way to spend the day, nine months out of the year. One look at this photo (below) and you can understand why a pretty little Sears bungalow would be classified as a “Modern Home.”

A Soddie in Kansas, early 1900s

A remuddled Sears Americus in Norfolk's Park Place, on 27th Street

According to local lore, the sextant’s home at the Greenlawn Cemetery (in Newport News, Virginia) is a Sears Home. As is so typical with these “legends,” no one knows which model of Sears Home, only that it came from the Sears Roebuck catalog in the early 1900s. (Sears offered 370 models of their kit homes.)

Recently, I went out to Greenlawn Cemetery to see if the Sextant’s home was indeed a Sears Home. More than 80% of the time, these “stories” about Sears Homes turn out to be erroneous. Most of the time, people do indeed have a kit home, but it’s a kit home from a different company. In addition to Sears, there were five other companies that sold kit homes on a national level (such as Montgomery Ward, Sterling, Lewis Manufacturing, Gordon Van Tine and more).

While I was out at Greenlawn, I took some pictures of the house and walked around and studied it a bit. I’d still like to get into the house to confirm this, but as of today, I’m 60% certain this is a Sears House, more specifically, the Sears Berkeley. However, before I declare this an official, authenticated Sears Home, I’d need to see the home’s interior.

The house at Greenlawn is not a spot-on match to the catalog image. The windows are significantly different, as is the front porch (which has been enclosed).

The Berkeley, as shown in the 1936 catalog

The Berkeley at Greenlawn Cemetery

Front yard of The Berkeley. It's a nice quiet neighborhood.

Whilst driving around the state of Illinois, I visited Metropolis way down in the southern  most part of the state. I found a handful of Sears Homes, and I also found Superman.

I sent my brother an email and shared the photo I took of Superman (see below). My brother wrote back and said, “Smallville, Illinois? Ask to see Superman’s birth certificate. And while you’re there, ask about Obama’s too. More probable that we’ll see Superman’s first.”

Superman stands proud and tall in Metropolis

This once-lovely Sears Whitehall is in a small town in southwestern Illinois. In its happy days, it was a lovely home with clapboard siding (all cypress), probably painted a bright white with tasteful colors or the trim and shutters.

And then one day, someone thought it’d be a swell idea to wrap this fine old house with faux-logs. Sadly, this Sears Home has lost much of its value, due to this insensitive remodeling job.

This 1920s Sears Home does not look good dressed in faux logs

And then there’s this once-lovely Westly, now dripping in plastic and other PVC-based products. There’s so much that’s wrong with this house, I’m not sure what to say. However, I can say that it’s value as a historic structure is mostly lost. What a pity.

Poor little house. If this were a dog, we'd put it out of its misery.

This is a Sears Argyle, and before the "remodeling" work was done, this was a darling Sears Argyle.

To learn more about Sears Homes, click here.

That I overlooked before…

This (see below) is a Sears House, and more specifically a Sears “Dover.” Note the clipped gables on the roof’s edge (also called a jerkinhead).   This house is in Alton, Illinois and it’s one of my favorite Sears Homes, and this Dover is the prettiest little Dover I’ve ever seen.

A pretty little Sears Dover in Alton, IL

In May 1911, Sears opened up a mill in Cairo, Illinois. Cairo’s location at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers made it a natural for shipping and distribution. At the turn of the last century, Cairo (pronounced “Care-Roe”) could boast of having four major rail lines, enabling it to become a centralized shipping point for lumber harvested from the South and sent to the North.

The Sears Roebuck Mill, also known as the Illinois Lumber Company, got its start when Sears Roebuck paid $12,500 for a 40-acre tract in North Cairo. 

On May 21, 1911, The Chicago Tribune reported that Sears intended to build a $250,000 plant. A few weeks later, The Cairo Evening Citizen had doubled that figure and reported “Half a million to be cost of new Sears Roebuck Plant” (July 29, 1911).

In November 1911, Sears ran a two-page advertisement in American Carpenter and Builder Magazine headlined “Great News for Builders.” The advertisement (see below) said,

Shipments have begun from our second and newest great lumber plant in Illinois. We can deliver you bright, fresh, clean lumber at manufacturer’s prices almost as quickly as you can haul makeshift sizes and weatherworn stock from a high priced neighboring lumber yard. Our mill work is sheltered from rain, sun, soot and wind. Our new Illinois plant is located on two of the largest and fastest railroads in the North with direct connections to over 20 different railroads.  (Weatherworn stock was a reference to the fact that, unlike Sears, many mills did not keep their lumber under roof.)

In March 1912, F. E. Van Alstine, Superintendent of the Sears mill was quoted in The Cairo Evening Citizen as saying that Sears had chosen Cairo because of “their low freight rates, superior shipping facilities and other natural and commercial advantages, (which) made the city more desirable than St. Louis, East St. Louis, Paducah (Kentucky) or Memphis” (Tennessee).

But later that month, the rains came and the floodwaters rose, nearly destroying the brand new mill in Northern Cairo. On April 5^th, The Cairo Evening Citizen reported that the “main building of the new Sears Roebuck factory was hurled off its foundation and is leaning toward the east. Just what damage was done to these buildings could not be ascertained, as there was no way to reach them except by skiff.”

In mid-April, the paper said that all seven lumber sheds had been torn from their foundations and much of the lumber inside the sheds had simply floated away.

By August, The Cairo Evening Citizen happily reported that despite the hard times and high waters, Sears Roebuck had decided to remain in Cairo.  It also reported that about half the lumber sheds had been rebuilt and some of that floating lumber had been recovered. The same article reported that the folks at Sears corporate headquarters in Chicago were so pleased with Van Alstine’s post-flood restoration work that they presented him with a brand new automobile.

The mill produced everything for the Ready-Cut (precut) Sears homes except for millwork. The Sears mill located in Norwood, Ohio, supplied millwork; windows, doors and interior trim and moldings.

By the early 1930s, sales of Ready-Cut homes had plummeted and the mill began looking for other ways to generate income. They began building crating material for tractors and other large equipment, including Frigidaire refrigerators and appliances sold by Sears. In the late 30s, the mill produced prefabricated buildings for the camps which housed workers in the Civilian Conservation Corps. Wheeler relates that a typical CCC camp (which included several different buildings) required 400,000 feet of lumber and about 35 of these camps were milled and shipped by the Cairo plant.

In 1940, Sears closed the plant and sold it to the employees. Shortly after the employees purchased the plant, they obtained a contract to build massive crates for shipping B-17 and B-29 bombers overseas for the war effort.

After World War II ended, the former Sears Mill - now called Illinois Lumber Company - drafted and published their own book of house plans and tried to sell Ready-Cut homes again, but without success. The Cairo Evening Citizen relates that the plant was liquidated and closed in November 1955. The article adds this interesting aside:  “Like several other Cairo lumber industries, it slowly died because the wood articles it manufactured were supplanted by iron and steel.”

All that remains today at the site of the Cairo mill are two Sears kit homes - two Rodessas - which were built as part of an experiment in 1921, to prove the superiority of Ready-Cut homes over traditional  stick built homes.

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.

When my husband read an early draft of my manuscript on internet dating, he suggested I make a change in the chapter I’d titled, “Rose’s Tidbits and Miscellany.”

“You’ve listed ‘persistence and perseverance’ as two important qualities for successful internet dating,” he said. “I’d put much more emphasis on that, because those are two of the most important qualities.”

He had a point. I’d talked to so many women who’d given up after a dozen dates, and had reconciled themselves to living alone for the rest of their lives. And I’d met also many women who’d found their one true love in less than a dozen dates.  But that wasn’t my experience. As the months rolled by and the dates kept coming (and going), I had only two choices: give up or push on. I decided to push on.

Perseverance is a common quality found amongst successful people. It was clear to me that perseverance had been the key to my success as both a freelance writer and self-published author. In 2002, I spent more than two years lobbying (perhaps even hounding) a woman at the Smithsonian to allow me to speak at that prestigious and well-known institution.

Eventually, she said yes and that event - that one-hour talk on Sears Homes - became one of the proudest moments of my career. For four years, I mounted a campaign to get the Wall Street Journal to write an article about my work and my book, The Houses That Sears Built. In Summer 2006, the Wall Street Journal called and asked for an interview. That article appeared on page one, above the fold! Reviewing my successes in those hard-to-succeed-in areas, I reasoned it’d be helpful in the dating world as well. And it was.

On October 29, 1941, Winston Churchill told a gathering of upper school students, “Never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.”

The great statesman’s words apply across the whole spectrum of human effort. If you give up too soon, you’ll be depriving not only yourself of much potential happiness, but some well-deserving and decent man, as well.

My 70th first date (now my husband) tells me that he’s glad I persisted and persevered. So am I.

Want to read more? Buy Rose’s book here.

The news media is reporting that Oral Roberts passed today, and already countless blogs - those ubiquitous internet personal journals that seem to have absolutely no social filters or editorial double-checking - are already offering extremely negative and vitriolic commentary on the man’s life.

Color me old fashioned, but I think it is wrong to speak ill of the dead, and it also shows a lack of grace and a lack of basic civility. Victorian essayist Henry Drummond once wrote that good manners are the habit of showing “love in the trifles.”

Oral Roberts was just a human being with all the accompanying foibles and follies that go with that condition, but he accomplished a tremendous lot with his life, including founding a major university in Oklahoma. That is a life well lived.

How about we look at the good that he did, instead of examining his mistakes, and hope and pray that someone will do the same for us one day?

In 1975, I could be found tooling around Portsmouth in my 1959 red Cadillac Sedan de Ville. It was a great car with a four-barrel carb, dual exhausts and a powerful V-8 engine and more than 300 horsies under the hood. Or so I told people. When I shared that statistic, people would cock their head a little and look at me funny. (That has happened to me a lot in this life…)

And then I’d tell them that it was a 390-cubic inch engine which produced about 330 horsepower.

Mechanically speaking, one horsepower equals the amount of effort needed to move 33,000 foot-pounds per minute, or (in simpler terms) the ability to lift 33,000 pounds one foot in one minute’s time. When used as a measure for electric motors, one horsepower equals about 746 watts. The term “horsepower” was coined by James Watt. He was an 18th Century genius who is credited with significant innovations to the steam engine, making it useful, affordable and practical. The historians say that Watt’s inventions and innovations transformed America from an agricultural society to an industrial society.

There’s a reason our old expressions developed the way they did. Back in the day, stage coaches often had six horsepower, with the six sinewy animals straining at the reins to pull the carriage down the dirt roads. Or, as in the case of the 1905 advertisement shown below, the most modern concrete mixers of the day had ONE horsepower.

BTW, there’s a significant problem with this advertisement. There’s no legal disclaimer at the bottom that says, “Horsie not included.”

one-horse powered cement mixer

Closer look at the one-horsepower concrete mixer

In 2002, when my long-term marriage ended, I sat down and wrote my four-page mission statement detailing what I wanted in a man. That mission statement said nothing about finding a man who bore a strong resemblance to Santa Claus.

In my previous life (like so many good wives and mothers) I’d spent 20 years “playing” Santa and doing Christmas for others. It was a wife’s job to handle all the organizational details for Christmas. I was the one who ran myself ragged buying things and making things and cooking things. One year, I spent countless hours writing and editing a 130-page memoir, a typewritten manuscript for the kids, filled with memories of their growing up years.

In short, Christmas was a fantastic amount of work. The ex didn’t believe in giving Christmas presents beyond a token gift. I gave a lot and got a little. And so it went for many years. I looked to my left and right and saw many other wives and mothers in the same boat as I was. A woman’s lot in life, I’d decided.

And then, when I was 47 years old, I met my 7oth first date. And then we were engaged. And then came Christmas. I was touched to my core with the number of gifts I received from him. And they were all delightful surprises and thoughtful gifts and beautiful things.

But wait, there was more.

He did the Christmas errands, too. He fetched the tree. He decorated the tree. He purchased fresh wreaths for the house and fancy bows for presents. He handled Christmas cards and bought holiday stamps. It was an amazing thing to behold.

“It makes me very happy to be able to enjoy the holidays with a woman who loves me,” he said when I expressed awe at the gifts and the work and the errand-running. “And this is our first Christmas together. I wanted it to be special.”

Turns out, my 70th first date didn’t just look like Santa. He has St. Nick’s warm heart and generous spirit, too.

The fake St. Nick gazes up at the real Santa with a measure of reverential awe and envy

In the early years of the 20^th Century, cement was all the rage. And the idea of making your own cinder blocks (for fun and profit) apparently also became quite popular. The back pages of the 1905 issues of American Carpenter and Builder (a building magazine from that era) were filled with advertisements for block-making machines and cement-stirring machines.

Sears offered the Wizard Block Making machine which retailed for $57.50 (a bargain at twice the price!). And Sears suggested that a man could save a lot of money on building a new home if he made his own blocks. Now if a man devoted himself to making nothing but blocks and if a man had someone else preparing the cement for pouring, he could make about one every two minutes. To do this, the poured cement was loaded into a form, pressed down in this contraption and then removed. The form was not removed until the concrete had hardened a bit. That meant if you were serious about making blocks, you had to have several forms on hand.

The ad below suggests that the block could be removed immediately from the form. I’d love to know if that was accurate. Having never made a block in the Sears Roebuck Wizard Block Making Machine, I can’t say for sure.

Sears estimated that 1,300 blocks were needed for the basement of The Chelsea (one of their kit homes). The Chelsea was a modest foursquare on a short cellar. It’d be safe to assume that a Chelsea made of nothing but block would require more than 4,000 blocks. If you devoted yourself to the creation of those blocks and really hustled, you’d need about 17 eight-hour days to do nothing but work like a dog making blocks and setting forms in the sun and breaking open the forms and placing the forms back into the machine. And that’s if he had someone else preparing the cement. That’s a lot of work.

When I give talks on Sears Homes, I get a surprising number of questions about the Wizard Block Making Machine. Apparently this labor-intensive, cinder-block maker was quite a popular item for Sears.

Close-up of The Wizard

The Wizard Block Making Machine from an early 1900s Sears specialty catalogue

In what looks like a backwards evolution graphic, a man demonstrates how to use the "easy-to-use" Wizard block-making machine.

When my husband and I first met and started sharing those many detailed stories about our lives, he told me about his mother. He said that she’d passed on Christmas 1992.

“You mean, she passed on around Christmas time?” I asked.

“She didn’t answer her phone when I called her on Christmas Day,” he told me. “The next day, I drove to Richmond to check on her. When I got to her apartment, I found her there. She’d died some time around the 25th.”

His story had a familiar ring. I’d found my mother - unconscious in her apartment - on Christmas Day 2001. We called the ambulance and we rushed off to the hospital. She never regained consciousness and passed on a few days later.

In Christmases past, my mother often talked about her mother. When my mother was in her early 30s, her mom had passed on.

“It’s been almost 50 years since I saw her,” she told me one time. “But what if for her, this passage of five decades is like me stepping into the kitchen right now to get a snack while you wait on the couch? What if the long wait is only from my perspective? I hope that’s how it is. I know she misses me. I don’t want to think of her missing me for 50 years.”

“You know what Einstein said about time?” I asked her. “He said that ‘to those of us that are committed physicists the past, present and future are only illusion, however persistent.’

“In other words, time is really a human construct and it’s an illusion.”

She seemed comforted by this explanation.

Now I’m the one wondering about all those same things. Is time just an illusion? I suspect that it is. Our eyes see a sliver of the light spectrum, our ears hear only a sliver on the sound spectrum, so it seems probable that we’re only seeing a sliver of the reality of this dimension of time.

Those are the hypothetical arguments. What I do know - beyond any doubt - is that sometimes, I miss my dear mother more than ever.

Click here to learn more about Rose.

My mother (Betty Fuller) and her mother (Flossie Appleby) in the late 1930s.

Yahoo news is reporting this morning that a man has been arrested for accosting his wife’s face with a cheeseburger. During a heated argument, the man lost his temper and began smearing a greasy cheeseburger over her face. Apparently, it erupted into a full-fledged food fight.

Read the short article here.

As a writer, I tend to pay way too much attention to non-verbal communication. And many sensitive souls - like me - are guilty of this, too. In fact, the experts say that 70% of all communication is non-verbal. I’ve noticed that when I see wedding videos and/or attend the weddings in person, that there are two kinds of men: The kinds of men who gently feed their wives their first bite of wedding cake, and the men who think that a woman’s wedding day is a swell time to act stupid and cram that cake into her face, embarrassing her, embarrassing himself, and proving to his friends and family that his new wife just married a real horse’s ass.

When did we lose our manners? When did we stop behaving well in public? And when did men get license to start treating their brand-new wives so unattractively at such an important moment?

I have observed that there’s an interesting semi-scientific insight that comes with the “feeding of the wedding cake.” Those men who do the cram often end up divorced. Those men who do the gentle feed, remain married.

Coincidence?

Nope.

Click here to learn more about Rose.

Hordes of people have asked me, “Why do you think of yourself as ugly?”

The fact is, I don’t.

However, during my years in the world of internet dating, at least 30 men (out of 70) rejected me because (they said) they didn’t feel “chemistry” or I didn’t have “The Look.” This is really an indelicate way of saying, “You’re not pretty enough for me.”

I chose the title (Ugly Woman’s Guide to Internet Dating) because I have met *SO* many women who gave up on internet dating because of men’s ugly comments to them. The hits on their self-esteem were persistent and unrelenting. Ultimately, these women just threw in the towel and gave up their dream of life-long pair-bonding and decided to get another cat. I understand their pain.

My book is not about ugly women. It’s about the fact that in this internet dating culture, women are judged first and foremost by their thumbnail profile picture, often to the exclusion of all else. And what can you really learn about someone’s character, spirituality, maturity or goodness by looking at ¾” picture?

Nothing.

Like most women, I’m “average” looking (hence, the term). And in the process of these 70 first dates, I became disgusted with the fact that these men were only interested in women who had “the look.”

So I did a little experiment.

Continued at, “Why do you think of yourself as “ugly”? (Part II)

Buy the book here.

There’s a wonderful book titled, “The Good Old Days, They Were Awful!” It’s an interesting book with many stories of how life “back in the day” was not all peaches and cream. I agree with that - to an extent - but there were some bonuses to life back then. However, as far as issues of sanitation, we’re miles ahead of our ancestors who lived in the early 1900s.

Here’s an ad from the American Carpenter and Builder Magazine, from 1912. (Story continues below photos.)

1912 American Carpenter and Builder ad

Close up of the modern toilet

Take a better look at this contraption. In short, the (ahem) “human waste products” were dropped into a steel box directly under your house (aka basement or foundation). After a time, you’d stir the (ahem) contents in this box and add chemicals a couple times a week.  See the handle beside the toilet (on the floor)?  That’s your stirrer. And see the large pipe behind the toilet? In a perfect world, that’s a vent pipe that directs odors out of the living space. In a perfect world.

I suppose for those who were accustomed to donning warm shoes and making the long trek to the outhouse in the backyard, this “chemical toilet” was better. I suppose.  But in the real world, that thing must have stunk to high heaven. And what poor soul was charged with crawling under the house and cleaning out the box twice a year?

I love studying the good old days and I love writing about the good old days. However, when I finally learn how to travel back in time, I think I’ll take my modern plumbing with me.

And you thought your kitchen was small? The ad below came from a 1925 architectural magazine and the ad was promoting the fine, smooth drain board (on the right). After The Great War (also known as The War to End All Wars, as President Wilson assured us), there was a fantastic housing shortage. Housing analysts estimated that 1-2 million housing units were needed immediately to ameliorate the housing shortage caused by World War I. And there was something else going on after World War I.

Hyperinflation.

For a few months immediately following the Armistice (11-11-1919), hyperinflation hit America hard. The price of building materials increased 100% in some places. Because of this and because of the housing shortage, many people converted their spacious single family homes into boarding houses and installed a few of these tiny kitchen units to accommodate their new paying tenants.

Notice, that’s a refrigerator on the right side and a gas stove on the left, and that’s a Veribrite Drain Board (for kitchens of all sizes) on the right top.

This is one wee tiny kitchen (From 1925 American Carpenter Magazine).

Part of the fun of traveling to 23 states and giving 200 talks on Sears Homes is seeing all kinds of wacky and wild stuff. One Sunday morning in 2003, as my host was driving me back to the airport (to return home to the Midwest), I saw this Sears Madelia (see second photo below). It was in Zanesville, OH (or a nearby town) and we were actually several blocks beyond this building when I told my host, “Please turn around. I think I saw something.”

He reminded me that we didn’t have much time and I told him I understood and this wouldn’t take but a second. And there - in all its painful glory - was this badly butchered Sears house. It’s actually a Sears Madelia and it was not that popular a model for Sears. (Sears sold 370 designs of kit homes from 1908 - 1940.)

The first picture (first image) is a happy, healthy Madelia in Wood River, Illinois on 9th Street. There are 24 Sears Homes in a row, a remnant from the days of Standard Oil’s purchase of $1 million worth of Sears Homes for their refinery workers. The second picture I’ve titled,

A Madelia trapped in a tavern’s body.

A happy little Sears Madelia in Wood River, IL

And here’s the Madelia trapped in a tavern’s body.

A Madelia trapped in a tavern's body

This next house is a Sears Crescent in Norfolk, Virginia. It’s a happy little Crescent with good self-esteem.

A happy Sears Crescent

And this next picture was taken by Rebecca Hunter, a kit-home expert in Elgin, Illinois.

An unhappy Sears Crescent in Illinois

Here's a Sears Westly, as it appeared in the 1919 Sears catalog

Unhappy Sears House in the Midwest. Too much plastic in one place.

One of my favorite movies of all time, perhaps my all-time #1 favorite movie is, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

In this post-WW2 film, George Bailey gets to see what his town, Bedford Falls, would have looked like if he’d never been born.  Without George’s positive influence and his ever-fledgling Building and Loan, the modern subdivision of Bailey Park would never have been developed and countless citizens would never have had the opportunity to become homeowners.

Without the Bailey Building and Loan, George finds that Bedford Falls is full of substandard rental properties. And because there are so many rental properties, there is less stability in the family structure and in a broader context, there is less stability in the whole community.  In this alternate sans-George world, Ernie the cab driver does not live with his family in their own “nice little home in Bailey Park,” but instead, his home is a decrepit shack in Pottersville and it’s implied that this hardship is partly to blame for the fact that Ernie’s wife “ran off three years ago and took the kid.”

The streets of this alternate-Bedford Falls (now named Pottersville) are lined with liquor stores, night clubs, pawnbrokers, striptease shows and pool halls. Gaudy neon signs flash “girls, girls, girls” and illumine the night-time corridors of Main Street. Citizens are neither calm nor law-abiding and brusque policemen struggle to keep peace and order.

George’s revelation that he really had a “wonderful life” stemmed in part from the realization that his meager efforts to give people the chance to become homeowners gave them a feeling of accomplishment, prosperity, security and pride. By extension, the whole community benefited in important, significant and enduring ways.

The early Sears Modern Homes catalogues stated this basic philosophy in different ways, but there was an elementary core truth therein: Homeowners have a vested interest in their community and communities with a large percentage of homeowners will enjoy a greater proportion of  prosperity, stability and peace.

Perhaps Sears was, to small communities in the Midwest, what George Bailey was to Bedford Falls. Sears empowered and enabled tens of thousands of working-class and immigrant families to build their own home. What would countless Midwestern towns have become without Sears homes?  How many towns in the Midwest were spared the fate of becoming a Pottersville? Probably many.

Sears Modern Homes made a significant difference in many communities throughout the Midwest. I’m sure of that.

I purchased this picture on eBay for $3.00 many years ago. What a thrill to find an original picture of a Sears Home from the 1910s!

This house came out of the Sears Roebuck catalog and was shipped in 30,000 pieces.

The house was shipped by railroad and after the boxcar arrived it was moved over to a siding. You then had 24 hours to unload all those pieces of house!  Typically, it took many trips to and from the train station to get the boxcar unloaded and that’s why Sears Homes are often found within 1-2 miles of railroad tracks.  Each piece of lumber was stamped with a letter and numbers to facilitate assembly (see image at bottom of screen).

A 75-page leather-bound instruction book, with the homeowner’s name embossed in gold on the cover, gave precise directions on the proper placement of those 30,000 pieces of house. The book offered this somber (and probably wise) warning:  “Do not take anyone’s advice as to how this building should be assembled.”

In 1908, Sears estimated that a carpenter would charge $450.00 to erect your spacious two-story foursquare, with its hipped roof and a lone shed dormer in the attic. However, Sears also promised that a man with an elementary understanding of construction techniques would be able to assemble the house.

According to their calculations, a painter would want $34.50 to paint the two-story house.  The plasterer’s bill would be around $200, they figured, which included nailing up 840 square yards of wooden lath and applying three coats of plaster.

Masonry (block, brick, cement) and plaster were not included in the kit, but the Bill of Materials List advised that 1300 cement blocks would be needed for the basement walls and foundation.

The salutary effects of living in a modern home were extolled throughout the pages of the Sears catalogs. Beyond the financial freedom and comfort in old age that owning a Sears home would surely bring, Sears promised that their modern homes would improve the health, morals and well-being of its occupants.

The term “Modern Home” was part of the vernacular in the early 1900s. It was a descriptive term indicating that a house had modern amenities (that we take for granted today), such as a primitive, centralized heating system, electricity and indoor plumbing. In some cases, the houses were more modern than the communities in which they were built.

An original photo of a Sears House from about 1912 or so

Here's the catalog page from a 1913 Sears Modern Homes catalog

Picture of marked lumber from a Sears House. The mark is usually found about 2-8" from the end of the beam and is often in black ink. The "D" represented that this was a 2x8, C for a 2x6 and B for a 2x4. This mark, together with that 75-page instruction book facilitated construction.

To buy an autographed copy of  The Houses That Sears Built, click here. It makes the perfect Christmas present!

Did I mention that it makes the perfect Christmas present?