THE HISTORY IN YOUR BATHROOM WALL (1950)
Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of our clients’ homes.
The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations.
Do you know the history of YOUR house?
********************************************************************************************************************************
Olga Roswell managed to receive “very poor” marks in her French class.
She was “interested,” though, in Shakespeare, was “fair” in history, and she performed “fairly good” in mathematics.
All of this academic patchiness, came to us from the St. Michael’s Girls’ School in Bridgetown, Barbados, via Olga’s “Christmas Term, 1950” report card.
And this report card Olga managed to “conveniently” leave behind while she was visiting her Aunt Caroline in Brooklyn the following year.
The report card, actually, fell out of the 2d floor bathroom wall during our extensive home renovations, and its discovery and associated story is now local lore and has become a treasured part of the history of our house at 738 Macon Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
As such, the story has been featured in one of our Brownstone Detectives House History Books in the chapter about the family that owned the house.
And Aunt Caroline’s former profession, unknown to us at the time, would soon become the missing piece of the puzzle that – once realized – caused everything to make sense.
FINDING STACEY MAUPIN TORRES.
Almost a year ago, as part of the work the Brownstone Detectives does in locating and interviewing former home owners and their descendants, we tracked down a descendant of James and Caroline Gill, the couple who owned 738 Macon Street from 1951 – 1974.
Stacey Maupin Torres, a great-niece of the Gills, regaled us with stories of her aunt and uncle, and she told us of her own time spent at 738 Macon Street in the late ’50s and early ’60s – much of which is included in our book.
The point most integral to the mystery of this report card, though, was what Stacey’s “Aunt Car” had once done for a living. In addition to that profession, it also concerned its relation to a certain niece’s report card, upon which there was no academic subject that came close in importance to the subject of English.
For, you see, Aunt Car had once, herself, been a schoolmarm back in Barbados. And, according to that very same report card, Olga had achieved, in the subject of English, the very dispiriting grade – “Fair.”
Now, as you might guess, a schoolmarm can be a “stickler for grammar.” And according to Stacey, Aunt Caroline most definitely was.
“I got millions of wacks on the back of my head and smacks on the hand for all kinds of (grammatical) ‘infractions’ we take for granted today,” Stacey continued. “So, I learned fairly fast.”
And so Olga, too, may have learned very fast.
Whether Aunt Caroline ever saw Olga’s grades – before they disappeared into a wall of the house – is a mystery that may never be solved. But those walls at 738 Macon Street may very well have been a formidable balm to Olga’s peace of mind – as well as an infinite comfort to the backs of her head and hands.
Blood, though, is thicker than water, and even a “fair” grade in English – divulged – would not have kept family members apart.
And so it was that eight years later, in 1959, Olga boarded a steamer at the age of 27, travelled to the U.S., and became a full-fledged American citizen.
Olga passed in 2009 – and with her went – the Mystery of the Report Card Hidden in the Bathroom Wall.
(Report card photographs: Robin Lester Kenton)
———————————————————————————————————————–
Brownstone Detectives is an historic property research agency. Our mission is to document and save the histories of our clients’ homes. From our research, we produce our celebrated House History Books and House History Reports. Contact us today to begin discovering the history of your home.
