After I got the job at IBM Yorktown, I needed a place to stay during the week until we found a house in the area. Someone in the personnel department had the job of finding leads to short-term housing. There were always people living near the lab who were happy to rent rooms to IBMers, for if you can’t trust an IBMer, who can you trust? With my leads came a document that basically said “IBM takes no responsibility for whatever terrible things may happen to you there”.
Mrs. Fraser & Katonah, NY
One of the leads was to a room with private bath in Katonah, a quiet town on the commuter line to New York City and about ten miles from the lab. The room was expensive for the time, $300 a month. On my way over to check it out, I saw lots of roads that looked good for running. When I got there, I saw that the house was in a green, wooded area next to one of New York City’s beautiful reservoirs. The owner, Mrs. Fraser, showed me the room, which had an easy chair, a TV, a table and a bed — what more could I want? It was on the lower level of the house, with a private entry by sliding doors facing the woods. When I drove up from New Jersey the next Monday morning, I brought my suits and my running gear and moved in.
Mrs. Fraser’s husband owned a business in Europe and spent most of his time there, so I didn’t meet him for a few weeks. I don’t know how he felt about having a non-dweebish IBMer in the house with his wife, but I know my rent helped out with the bills.
On the day I have come to think of as BPD, Bachelor Panic Day, there was a surprise, late-season snowstorm, and at 10 o’clock in the morning IBM sent everyone home. Virtual bachelors like myself, who now had nowhere to get lunch, rushed the vending machines, emptying them completely of junk food and canned soup. When I got back to the house, Mrs. Fraser invited me to have lunch with her and her daughter, home from school on a snow day. It was the first I’d ever been upstairs.
Normally, there were plenty of small restaurants and diners where I could stop for a meal after work. I had a bottle of port wine I bought to keep me company in the evening, and on general principle I hid it so that Mrs. Fraser wouldn’t see it when she cleaned. I went for a morning run twice a week, saw lots of deer and once got lost in Pound Ridge Reservation – not Hansel-and-Gretel lost, but lost enough that I had to flag down a passing car and ask for directions.
For the Fourth of July, I was worried about traffic and decided not to drive home. I drove over the state line into Connecticut, where the town of Wilton was having an old-fashioned Fourth, with beer, fireworks and a parade. Norman Rockwell would have been completely at home in Wilton.
House hunting
The way it worked out, I drove home to the shore on Friday night and back to the lab on Monday morning. The trip took two hours each way and could be difficult, especially the trip home Friday evening. But, at only twice a week for a few months, it was tolerable. During the week, I’d look at houses with a realtor, Irene. She was really sharp, and after a while understood what I liked and what I didn’t, and we generally didn’t waste each other’s time. If she showed me a house I thought was a strong “maybe”, I’d bring Mimi up to Westchester on the weekend so we could look at it together.
One place I was shown was a townhouse in Bedford Hills. It was nice, but as we were about to leave, I realized the kitchen had a clear view of the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, a maximum security prison surrounded by razor wire and only a quarter-mile away. When I said I wasn’t in love with the view, the seller’s agent reassured me by saying “Oh, they can’t get out.”
On one of our cross-Westchester drives to see a house, we passed a beat-up Volkswagen bus parked alongside the road, where a woman had set up a sort of flower stand. She may have had other flowers too, but there were roses, lots of them. Mimi said “Oooh, look at the roses!” I said “Yeah!” in agreement, and kept on driving.
On the way back, she said “There’s that rose lady again!” and when I didn’t respond, she gave up and said “Can we get some?” Well, I can take a hint, and I pulled over. I bought a dozen roses from the lady, who was acting all goofy, as through love was in the air and I was buying flowers for her instead of from her. I got back in the car and handed the flowers over to Mimi, saying something like “Here ya go.” Yes, I am aware this all makes me sound like a jerk. Mimi didn’t say anything, and both she and the flower lady seemed disappointed in my presentation. For the rest of the day, Mimi called me “Mr. Romantic”.
Driving in New York
Seeing a car with Jersey plates driving around Westchester County was like a thumb in the eye to the locals there. Also annoyed sometimes were the State Police. One Saturday morning out house-shopping with Mimi, I was doing about 75 on one of the expressways, along with everyone else, when a cop pulled me over. Once it became clear he was going to write me a ticket no matter what, I said I couldn’t help but wonder why he hadn’t pulled over the black Jeep that just passed me doing about 90. He replied “I didn’t see him. I saw you.” After that, I decided it was time to become an official New York State resident, and switched my plates and driver’s license from New Jersey to New York.
A lot of New Yorkers drive like idiots, and that includes both driving too fast and driving too slow. New York didn’t yet have the common-sense law that says “keep right except to pass”, so I’ll chalk up the slow-driving-in-the-left-lane idiocy as mostly the state’s fault.
After I switched over to New York plates, whenever I was back in Jersey on the Parkway, maintaining my speed in continuous traffic and passing in the left lane like I’ve been doing since I was seventeen, there was always some Jersey jerk coming up behind me and flashing his lights to get me to move over. By definition, if you have New York plates and are in the left lane, you are driving too slow. You just can’t win.
As I often say while recounting Everything That Happened, all good things must come to an end, and one day Mrs. Fraser knocked on my door and said their son would be coming home from school and they’d need the room by the end of the month.
I went back to the personnel department and told them I needed a new place to stay. They gave me the number of a woman in Peekskill who took in transient IBMers, Mrs. Garrison.
Mrs. Garrison
Peekskill is a working-class town on the Hudson River. Mrs. Garrison’s house looked old but was well maintained, with a long set of stairs leading up from the sidewalk. She appeared to be in her early 70s, and mentioned she was a widow. She began showing me around the first floor, starting with the front entryway. On the table there was a framed photograph of two men dressed to go fly fishing. She said the man on the left was her late husband Everett, and the other was Hoagy Carmichael. “Hoagy Carmichael?!” I said. Carmichael was one of America’s greatest singer-songwriters, hugely popular from the 1920s through the 1950s, and I reflexively crooned the opening of his theme song and greatest hit, Stardust:
Sometimes I wonder why I spend
the lonely night
Dreaming of a song…
Mrs. Garrison got all teary-eyed, and said “I never thought anyone as young as you would know that song.” I gave her my standard response to people that I somehow favorably surprise, a gentle “Well, I know some things.”
(FYI, Willie Nelson sings a lovely version of Stardust in his familiar, reedy voice.)
She showed me the room and I took it, even though I’d have to share the bathroom with two other IBMers who had rooms there, and pay a few dollars extra for electricity if I wanted the window air conditioner hooked up. Writing about charging for electricity makes her sound like a cheapskate, but she wasn’t; she was just trying to get by on her Social Security and some income from her roomers. She was a pleasure to chat with in the evenings, sitting in her ‘parlour’. The other IBM roomers were basically children, and had no interest in anything an old lady might have to say.
Mimi and I eventually found a place we liked, an almost-new townhouse in the sleepy village of Croton-on-Hudson. The price was higher than we were comfortable with, and we tried to negotiate. The owner was an IBMer who was retiring, and he would not budge an inch. I think he expected the housing market would improve enough to meet his price if he just held out long enough. We hadn’t found anything else we liked, and now we had an offer to buy our house in New Jersey, so we bit the bullet and signed for the full price. The market was indeed improving, because when IBM cancelled my project eighteen months later and I transferred to Boca Raton, we priced the townhouse high, so high that Irene thought we were delusional, and made a profit.
Jumping back a bit, the day we moved into the townhouse I stopped by Mrs. Garrison’s to say goodbye, and I made sure to bring Mimi along to meet her. Mimi knew the words to Stardust too.