It's Raining Documentaries at the Vonnegut House

Three years ago, a bunch of friends bought a rotting house already stripped of some of it's flooring and copper wiring and piping, to save it from demolition. It had resident raccoons and parts of it were sinking into the ground.  They made it a home again not expecting much, but somehow, in addition to other successes,  three years later it's going to be, or already is in, 3 separate documentaries. One is out and two more are coming soon,  all three likely coming out within a years time of each other. I almost can't believe what I am writing. And yes, I am talking about our house, the V House, ol' 814 East Shore Drive in Culver.

One of the Documentaries is national in scope and distribution ambition, Unstuck in Time by Robert Weide, to come out next year, 2016 as a major documentary release after it's big Kickstarter Splash that made National News . The project was discussed in about every national newspaper and magazine from the Wall Street Journal to Newsweek.  

When this came out, the House heard about it from two family members of different interested parties. They told us some guy is making a splash with a Vonnegut documentary, and we decided to send them a donation, thinking why not, it's good for the brain and it could be good for business. Weide is known for Producing the HBO cult comedy hit Curb your Enthusiasm with Larry David, the man who inspired the character George Kastanza on the hit TV show Seinfeld and it's co Writer with Jerry Seinfeld. One of us decided to reach out to Weide saying hey, we restored this house, thought you might like to know, about a year ago. He got back to us within minutes showing footage of our house from 1994 and sending us the Tralfamadore clip we featured in our earlier post which warmed so many hearts. Unstuck in Time expected out next year, 2016, but one funny hickup is that the Kickstarter Campaign was so successful since it made national news, that they are swamped with sending out the rewards, he admitted to us. We were part off the problem. They promised so many cool books at different price levels we actually greedily gave a few different gifts to fill up the bookshelves!

In some of the footage just for the kickstarter campaign you can see the old door knocker that says Vonnegut on it we removed from 814 and put on a shelf to bring the house back to an older time before Ralph, the homes last real owner before us, Kurt's Cousin, put it on there in the 80's.

The next Documentary is regional, A Writers Roots: Kurt Vonnegut's Indianapolis by Kevin Finch to be released on our Indianapolis Public Television Channel 20 WFYI on December 28, 2015, when Hoosiers like a little mental stimulation after all the sugar of Christmas time.

It looks like a thoughtful examination of the Hoosier in Kurt, and how it affected his literary voice.  The trailer alone shows Morley Safer of 60 Minutes fame so they did a good job interviewing the right people you can tell. Kevin and a cameraman came by the house this fall, in fact, we had it on our schedule so we wouldn't rent it:

AVAILABILITY

Events and Rental Availability Calendar at the Clemens Vonnegut Jr. House.

check out July 21st.  Kevin and a cameraman came by and filmed in and around the house hosted by Matt our Foreman and Lindsey our Property Manager, and they filmed for 2 hours on Vonnegut's Adriatic.

Now the last documentary may not be big time, all fancy pancy guys in suits sharin' their big opinions, but it's by someone near and dear to the house, so much so that it might not have happened without him, since he took risks big and small to be a part of the V house in ways better left unsaid, and contributed time and effort and even his brother for a while, but Ol' Rick Mehl CMA '95 had been working on a podcast for years with two of his hometown buddies from SE Chicago, one of whom is Sci Fi Writer Ryan Sean O'Reiley, and their mutual buddy 'Wilk' Wilkinson, No Deodorant in Outer Space. The podcast as the name implies is a supposed to be a fun critique of sci fi movies (you can't smell in outer space, so why would you need deodorant.. get it?) and focuses on book and movie combos.. trying to review and find the differences between every sci fi book that became a movie of vice versa.. it's niche, but someone had to do it.

So sometime last year they did Slaughter House 5, which many consider Sci Fi, almost in part because of Vonnegut's creation of his alter Ego Kilgore Trout, even though many think of him as a parodist and philosopher, but the play on time and physics (if it's not a mental reaction to trauma mind you) in Vonnegut's most popular movie/book does make is Sci Fi, so the guys not only reviewed the book, but they decided to try their hand at a Documentary the same weekend they came down to the house from Chicago to do their podcast in the V House this past fall of 2015.

I sent out the trailer so people would get teased, but the whole more than hour long well produced conversation is available right here, the first of the three off the press:

https://nodeodorantinouterspace.wordpress.com/2015/09/21/video-special-culver-indiana-and-vonnegut-a-documentary-2/

The writer of this particular post has been learning about the history of the home and area for 25 or more years now, but the conversation between these three gentlemen still fleshed out new ideas and concepts for him, and I highly recommend you catch this work when you get a chance. It's easily as informative as the previous two works, impressive given that it's the first ever work of this sort by these guys, with some fun b role and video production skills displayed as well by their friend Doyle. We appreciate Jeff Kinney lending his time and insight as well. and yes, that's not some fancy studio (although I could've been fooled!), that's our living room!

Three great documentaries, one great house.. almost mind boggling! One plays on home town pride and midwest sensibility, another on the deep ideas of almost paternal guidance and paternal validation that Kurt Vonnegut gave to non conventional thinkers and the Boomer Generation, and the third gives insight into a simple lake and place, Lake Maxincuckee and Culver that not only influenced Vonnegut but many other national figures and it's stories, from Indian lore to modern history, and all were filmed in part or in whole at 814 East Shore Drive, The Clemens Vonnegut Jr. House.. Enjoy some fine winter watching!

The Clemens Vonnegut Jr. House Wins a Daniel McDonald Preservation Award

It's with great pleasure that we announce that the Clemens Vonnegut Jr. House and home received a local award for Preservation last Friday night along with 5 other deserving projects in Marshall County from  the The Wythougan Valley Preservation Council at their annual meeting.

The Wythougan's are the preservation group of Marshall County, and the word appears to be a native american name for the Yellow River Valley, although I might be making that up, however there is a park in Plymouth by that name as well. The river goes by a slightly different native word according to wikipedia, but might have morphed into this:

The river's name possibly derives from a translation of the Shawnee name for the river, We-thau-ka-mik, meaning "yellow waters",[7] a description perhaps owing to the presence of sand in the riverbed.[8]

 This Shadowy Group of Masked Crusaders, apparently currently championed by none other than County Commissioner, Preservationist and Architect Kurt Garner himself (we meet again, sir...) gives not only awards, but grants, and hold events including tours and even sing alongs in an old restored church in Marshal County. It's independent, but serves as kind of an Indiana Landmarks for Marshall County, to put in a plug for a great state organization which featured the V house in a tour last year.

Lindsey Pick received the award for us during their annual meeting, held this year in the restored Culver Railroad Station. We are pleased to have been considered and selected and glad to see Jeff Kinney, a friend and neighbor of the house, receiving one as well for his general but tireless and insightful work in identifying, recording and explaining the history of the Culver and Lake Max area.

It ain't complete without a picture or two. We are happy to see Lindsey chuckle..

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from the web page of AM1050 and 106.1 WTCA

They are, (from left to right) Anna Gilsinger for restoration and preservation of the Arnold House in Bourbon, Ann Davis for restoration of the facade of Harriet’s Closet in Plymouth, Lindsey Pick with Culver’s Old East Shore LLC on the Vonnegut Cottage restoration, Jeff Kenney for his role in preserving and promoting the history of Culver and Lake Maxinkuckee and Phyllis Schoonover for the Norris Farm-Maxinkuckee Orchard restoration. The final Daniel McDonald award winner was Calvin Bailey for his efforts to restore the Mobilgas Station on West Jefferson Street in Plymouth, who was unable to attend.

The Big Question for Many: Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and The Clemens Vonnegut Jr. House

So this is a tricky dilemma for the Vonnegut House. It's tricky because we don't want to give the impression that the house ever belonged to Kurt Vonnegut's parents or to him, but we know the name Vonnegut conjures up one person to almost everyone. His fame might be what made this home uniquely restorable among so many good candidates on the lake, and it's not a mistake to assume he spent some time on the shores of Lake Maxinkuckee, including at our house.

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To be frank, and then go into some neat redeeming detail, Kurt's direct line of the Vonnegut Family lived in the home across the lawn to the north, the pretty Yellow one with the stone foundation some 50 feet north, now owned by a very nice family from Michigan. Clemens Jr. was the famed author's Great Uncle if my calculations are correct. These are 'those' Vonnegut's, and yes, he spent his childhood summers, until World War II moved him on, among the 5 or so houses his extended family owned right here, including ours. 

The Vonnegut House is named after Clemens Jr. for many reasons, for one he built it, and was kind of a quirky guy we fell in love with, but one of them is that we don't want to give a false impression that this was Kurt's House. The whole extended family was interesting, which is why they had one if not three famous family members (Obviously Kurt Jr., his brother Bernard who invented the chemistry in the process of Cloud Seeding, and Kurt Jr.'s son Mark who gained some international renown with a good book or two.). The rest of the Family achieved a lot of  recognition in Indianapolis as prominent Citizens in it's nascent days, significant businessmen in Indy's growth, and as a bunch of unique thinkers. They were one of the families that became significant in civic life by starting businesses that grew with the town, like the Hardware store, the casket company, a brewery, an architectural firm, and many may know that Clemens Jr. was actually Indiana Representative Clemens Vonnegut Jr. due to one term in the State House representing part of Indianapolis. They made a National and perhaps International mark when Vonnegut Hardware became the exclusive vendor of the crash bar mechanism, the emergency door bar you see everywhere in public buildings which was invented as a result of the Chicago Theater Fire by a friend of theirs, which likely was the main driver of the family's fortunes.

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A son like this, one with so many questions and so unique a perspective usually doesn't come from an ordinary family, and in this case he didn't. Kurt will be the first to tell you that his family wasn't entirely healthy, nor average in ways he might have appreciated, but they were unique and they created not only his unique experiences until he left home, but a row of nice houses on what was a beautiful but fading frontier in the late 1880's. To be honest, Indiana stopped being a frontier likely sometime after The patriarch of the family, Clemens Sr. Came over from Germany in the 1850's, and Indianapolis was reaching a population of about 10,000 people, but Indiana was still a place of opportunity and unpredictability, wild lands and great forests, and they were riding the cusp of it. There was no direct train to Culver until a few years after the Vonnegut House had been built.

Did Kurt spent time in the Clemens Vonnegut Jr. house, or sleep in it?

pretty much without question. By his own words:

“…The closed loop of the lakeshore was certain to bring me home not only to my own family’s unheated frame cottage on a bluff overlooking the lake but to four adjacent cottages teeming with close relatives. The heads of those neighboring households, moreover, my father’s generation, had also spent their childhood summertimes at Maxinkuckee, making them the almost immediate successors there to the Potawatomi Indians.
”

according to his writings, the children treated all the homes as home, and he ranged from one to the other as children might range through an Indian village.

It's also accepted that he spent his first Honeymoon in the home to the north, with Jane Marie Fox, right after he returned from the Second World War. Since his branch of the family had fallen on relatively hard times and sold their particular home during the depression, he was lent the home as a favor by the subsequent owners. It's said one of his romanic honeymoon meals was at the old Shack on the campus of then Culver Military Academy, now broadened to Culver Academies, with the shack now moved under the dining hall to accommodate the colossal Huffington Library where it once sat charmingly by the lake within view of his home.

And the coup du grace, (not that we are uniquely obsessed with Kurt, anything but! However, it's fair to say we appreciate him a lot and he did inspire us a bit.) is this video sent to us by a man named Robert Weide, famous for producing the hit TV program Curb Your Enthusiasm featuring Seinfeld Co Creator Larry David. Well before his success with Larry David, Wide began a Documentary about Vonnegut in the 80's, and he brought him to Culver in 1994 to get some reminiscences of by his own admission his happiest childhood memories here on the lake. You might recognize the little platform to the right of our porch as the place of discovery of one of the most interesting concepts of so many of his books:

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This Documentary is expected to come out in the next few years after life took Weide on a long diversion, and we are hoping to show it in the newly revamped Culver Theater.

After shooting wrapped up for the day back in 1994, our neighbors to the south, the Hrycak's will tell you that they stood there in awe as Kurt came by again and knocked on Ralph Vonnegut's door, which is our door, The Clemens Vonnegut Jr. house door now, and came in to hang out for a few hours with his cousin on the porch. As far as we know, this it the last time he came through Culver, but according to him, his heart was always here:

“I made my first mental maps of the world...on the shores of Lake Maxinkuckee. Because everything about that lake was imprinted on my mind when it held so little and was so eager for information, it will be my lake as long as I live. I have no wish to visit it, for I have it right here. ”

— Kurt Vonnegut

We hope this answers the question... if you want to learn more, there are a number of books both by Kurt Vonnegut and others that explore his time on Lake Max, including We Never Danced Cheek to Cheek. His work Hocus Pocus is quite apparently set on a lake inspired by Lake Max, and Slapstick mentions the academy as the current castle of the King of the Midwest in a post apocalyptic future. He also apparently mentions Culver In Timequake, his collection of biographical essays. Renovating Vonnegut also goes into deeper detail on the Vonnegut family in regards to Lake Max.

This link also leads to some good information from the Culver Library and Antiquarian Society including some more very personal quotes by Kurt about Lake Max and Culver.

A Good Stopping Point for Summer

When you are running a business and restoring an old home, as you might imagine, the two purposes are constantly at odds. It costs a lot of money to restore an old home, and businesses are supposed to be about making money. Throw in the environment, which we are trying to safeguard in all that we do, and it adds a third purpose to the business, further complicating the mix of priorities, but in a fun way. like a puzzle.

An associated dilemma is when is good enough good enough? A friend of mine used to either quote of misquote Voltaire and say that Good is the Enemy of Great. In other words, if all you want is good, you will settle for it all the time, but Great is a heck of a lot more expensive.

Getting back to the house, we would love to polish it and re-polish it, keep improving and refining, but at some point, we have to actually rent the place to pay for it!  Since we roared from a tough but weird Indiana winter, not nearly as bad as the one before but still not an early thaw, to a rainy Indiana spring it was tough finish our exterior like we had planned in time for the beginning of our in earnest rental season beginning with the big academy weekends in late May, reunion and graduation weekends  (sometimes early June for grad weekend), and then off into summer.

We had chosen to restore the original roof as best as we could figure, taper sawn untreated cedar shingles. We had found evidence of some sort of shingle both in photos  and in some built over old roof sections and then the revealed wall section that was the subject of the last post.

The oldest picture we have of the home, 814 east shore drive, taken sometime between 1889 and the 1920's when a second story was added. We use it for clues and for style inspiration.

There was some debate that they might be oak. A quote of 80k for oak shingles for the house made us hope they weren't, and further investigation found them to be way too light for oak, and the grain seemed to match cedar. Now if we were the National PArk Service, we would go on to ask what kind of cedar? By the 1890' and 1920's, the time of the two early building periods on the Clemens Vonnegut Jr. House, much of the southern Cedar had been logged out, and we were getting it from the transcontinental railroad in the West. but then someone reminded me that Cedar grows in the midwest too, and is still harvested locally. That's all find and good but we finally gave up on the taxonomy of cedar, and just went with the cedar we could get from a local distributor, west, south, canada, wisconsin... as long as it keeps the water off. We decided on untreated, since if you keep your roof dry and hoze off moss in the shady spots every few years the treatment, often a sad chemical soup on top of Cedar's already great water resistant properties, just add a few years. It will allow the roof to age naturally and take on a nice even patina over the years, we hope.

Anyhow, you might imagine, putting shakes on is labor intensive, and perhaps since we got untreated, not the common choice, it took a looong time for them to arrive. If you go with the standard American roof solution, asphalt shingle patches made from oil and sand, a peppy crew of latins can have it on in like 6 hours. However cedar shakes need attention, and this is a complex roof, not a simple ridge job on a development in Levittown. You need to line them up right, and set them wide enough apart that they can expand and contract with the temperature and water they might soak up while not having it be too random, and cover the seams of the ones below so you don't get leaks. It takes a mind for geometry and for us that mind lies in the head of a guy named Matt Salyer from Hibbard, our lead carpenter, whom our original foreman Garth identified as having a knack for the three dimensional. Matt and the guys went to work juggling weather, the desire to strip off all the old roofing at once ( a satisfying job) but not wanting a bad rain to ruin the interior he had worked on for a year (Ok.. a year and three quarters) and create the need for a mess of blue tarps Katrina style, then he had to repair soft spots, rotten eaves, even some roofline sags in a very visible spot, and get the thousands of shingles on and lined up like a military parade, only shingles don't follow directions very well, so you have to do it yourself. Meanwhile, they had to restore the siding as well, detailed above, and paint the whole house before the renters arrived and our Historic Restoration Grant writer Kurt Garner had to snap photos in time to meet a state deadline for our now two year old project to be certified for a tax break. It was hard work, but they (just barely) got it done, a busy month and a half or so..

There might have been a section or two yet to patch the observant eye might have caught, but we won't tell anyone, and it's done now..

Whew.. now e can focus on the landscaping.. and that dang copper tub!