I Was A Mail Order Homeowner

When I was a kid, the postman's arrival could be a big deal.

I had mailed off my three cereal box tops or twenty Bazooka bubble gum wrappers to get that special toy, and then the waiting game began.

For days, neither of my parents had to walk down the long driveway to pick up the mail, because as soon as a delivery was made, I ran to that box like a greyhound after a rabbit. If anyone in the family was watching, they knew from my body language whether my package had arrived. They either witnessed an immediate slumping of shoulders, or an excited dash back toward the house.

If a child can get that excited over the delivery of a cheap toy, I can only imagine Roy Sizer's reaction 84 years ago when a train pulled into the Milton depot with his mail order purchase.

A house.

Mr. Sizer, the previous owner of my property, ordered the dwelling in which I now reside from the pages of a catalog. We know this from wood pieces cut out of our dining room wall during remodeling. The wall boards are stamped with the equivalent of a shipping address, “From Montgomery Ward & Co., Davenport, Ia. to Roy L. Sizer, Milton, Wisconsin.” Other pieces were stamped with descriptions and part numbers for easy assembly.

This discovery sent me on a flurry of research. Kit houses or as Ward called them, “ready-cut houses,” were not uncommon. According to the book, “Houses By Mail,” over 100,000 were built in the United States between 1908 and 1940, the majority from Sears. Montgomery Ward's share, under their brand name Wardway Homes, was approximately 25,000.

So while our house is unusual, it's certainly not rare. A major selling point was the price. According to historians, Montgomery Ward advertising promised that the typical homebuyer would save about one-third the cost compared to traditional construction. And it was obvious that Mr. Sizer was cost-conscious from the first time we entered this house. Touring the basement, it was pointed out that the floor boards had been used for framing the foundation.

Another plus for buyers was the convenience. You could place one order with Ward and get everything including the kitchen sink. From screens and shades to roofing, wiring and refrigerators, you could literally get every single thing you needed except masonry materials.

Though I have viewed several Wardway Homes catalogs online, I have yet to find our exact house, possibly because it was customized. One home that does bear a resemblance, particularly in floor plan, is a 1930 catalog model called “The Maywood” - a steal at $2295 or monthly payments of $45.

But it appears that the bargain price was still too much for Mr. Sizer's successors (he sold the home later in the 1930's). The property abstract lists Montgomery Ward & Company as the owner of the house for a brief period in 1940. That entry was always a head-scratcher, but the discovery of our home's origins solved the mystery.

You see, Ward not only sold you a complete house, but offered financing as well. I dug up the abstract and sure enough, this house had a Montgomery Ward mortgage, which was apparently assumed by later owners. The probable explanation for Ward's brief ownership is a foreclosure. Regardless, Ward didn't keep the house for long and may have rid themselves of it cheaply because the couple that bought it in 1940 paid cash.

Fifty-two years later, that couple's estate sold it to us. And though this old dwelling has its quirks and non-standard oddities, I am thankful that Mr. Sizer built, and later owners maintained, a solid house that my family calls home.

And I sometimes muse about two train cars full of building materials chugging into town, and how quickly a young boy might have run from the station to announce its arrival.

The 141 Acre Classroom

(Published in the Janesville Messenger, 6-8-2014) 

People are often surprised when they find out that I grew up on a dairy farm. Apparently, I just don't seem the agricultural type.

And at times during my childhood, I certainly didn't want to be. A small family farm was a 24/7/365 proposition. Dairy cattle don't take vacations. And when you're a sole proprietor like my father, you can't afford to hire someone to do the milking and the chores for a week. My father's yearly vacation was generally a single day, when someone else milked the cows and he accompanied my uncles to Arlington Park to play the ponies.

We farmed 141 acres, and my adolescence included chores like hauling milk pails, stacking hay bales and shoveling feed. Like the dour farmer in Grant Wood's painting, I used a pitchfork...and once managed to spear my toe with it. And then there was manure, lots and lots of manure. We scraped it, shoveled it, spread it, walked through it, and sometimes wore it.

Of course, there was an aroma that accompanied said product, and that was one of the embarrassments of my youth. I still remember one night that I was out with friends after milking the cows, when they informed me that my hair reeked of barn odor. The horror...the horror.

Those were the things I focused on when I was young. What I didn't appreciate at the time, and didn't realize until years later, were the life lessons I was learning from my parents. In retrospect, they were more valuable than anything I picked up in a classroom.

One lesson was teamwork and dedication. Dad and Mom were a strong team. Dad ran the farm, and my mother was the ultimate farm wife and his full partner. He took care of the physical farm work as well as the business and accounting, and she took care of the meals, the kids and the house, as well as jobs like plucking and cleaning chickens and washing and sanitizing milking machines. When the kids had all left the nest, this woman who never had a driver's license learned to work a tractor so she could help in the fields. It was a beautiful relationship. She was the Oates to his Hall, even when they were haulin' oats.

We also learned about providing for your family through hard work and sacrifice. Dad toiled and labored every day, even when he was sick and hurting. Combing through his tax forms after he died, I was shocked at how little that work actually paid him. He had to be frugal, yet we never wanted for anything. And somehow, he saved and invested so wisely that my mother, widowed at 58, has not had to work a single day in the 29 years since his death.

Dad knew farming was tough, and he could see that the future of family farms was not bright. So he encouraged my brother and I to not follow in his footsteps, and we complied with his wishes. Thus, we are the first Lyke generation in at least two centuries – and possibly more – to not make our living providing food. If he had his own wish, it would have been a generation earlier. Dad wanted to go to college and study ag science. But despite being class valedictorian, a snafu with required high school courses cost him the college scholarship he had earned and desperately needed. He made sure that would not happen with his children; he saved and paid for our college education.

Our farming life is far, far back in the rear view mirror now, but I think about it often. I sometimes wish I could revisit those years and relive them with the wisdom of age. I would whine less, work more, ask a lot. And be much, much more grateful for the examples being set for me. 

It Runs In Your Genes

(Published in the Janesville Messenger, 5-18-2014)

Had things gone differently in 1362, this column might have been written by Jim von Heinsberg.

I like to dabble in my family's history and genealogy. There is something fascinating about knowing what ultimately led to your existence. Thanks to the miracle of the Internet, this information now is much easier to find. Maybe web browsing lacks the romanticism of rummaging through courthouse files or graveyards – both of which I have done – but sites like Ancestry.com or a well-worded Google search can pan more gold with a fraction of the effort.

Recently, when I was searching for some background on my great-grandfather, I stumbled upon something totally unexpected – a photo of my father's tombstone on a website called FindAGrave.com. Most of my Rock County ancestors and relatives were cataloged as well, complete with family information. Do your own search and you might be surprised at what you find.

The Lyke family's presence in Rock County dates back to 1856. Prior to that, we were in New York for the better part of a century-and-a-half, in a part of the state settled by a large contingent of Germans from the Palatinate region.

When I was vacationing out east a few years ago, I made a side trip to New York to search the archives for data on my ancestors. What I found in the files was five different spellings of our last name. My great-great-grandfather, who is responsible for us being in Wisconsin, was most often listed as “John Like.”

The Lyke name has had a crazy history of revisions, from minor letter transpositions to major overhauls. All American roads seem to lead to Johannes Leick as the original Palatine emigrant around 1710. He was followed by several generations that included a John Lyke (the Anglicized version of Johannes' name).

But before Lyke and before Leick, there was Everhard von Lieck, who first showed up witnessing a document in 1362. According to the online entry, “his seal of 1380 shows the lion of Heinsberg...the same design that the brothers Lambert and Everhard von Heinsberg had. From this we can draw the conclusion that he was...the descendant and legal hier (sic) of Everhard who was fiefed with Oberlieck, meanwhile having laid down the name 'von Heinsberg' and named himself 'Lieck' after his residence.”

I like the sound of “von Lieck.” Had I known about that sooner, I might have even adopted it. It conjures up images of epaulets and swords. But wait...a coat of arms, too?

Score!

I found the Leick coat of arms, as well as the earlier Heinsberg, both with the same snazzy medieval lion. I am no longer Jim Lyke, ad salesman and part-time writer...I am armor-clad James von Leick, laying waste to castles. It is much more satisfying than finding out your ancestors were ax murderers or horse thieves. Or in the case of Albert Brooks in “Defending Your Life,” discovering your past life as a lion's lunch.

As soon as I got excited about my noble ancestry, however, I discovered that unlike most of Europe, in Germany you didn't need to be a member of the aristocracy to have a coat of arms. Any burgher could have one. Nein!

Genealogy research can also create questions rather than answer them.

On my mother's side, the story was that her Danish grandfather changed his name from Jacob Rasmussen to Rasmus Jacobson once he came to Wisconsin. Information I found now sheds doubt on that. Rasmus' father was named Jacob Pedersen. According to the Scandinavian naming traditions that were still in place at the time, Jacobson would have been his last name at birth. What we always regarded as fact is now a mystery.

Curious about what mysteries and stories lie in your past? The answers might be a click away. One thing I have concluded from my research: “Heinsbergminded” just doesn't have a ring to it.