The Bedroom Window Incident

By Nancy Endress

My room was on the second floor, directly above the "front" or "north" room. It measured 12 feet square, with a brown painted floor originally covered with linoleum and a thin shaggy looking pink rug (to coordinate with the rose colored walls) placed in front of the dresser. After I left home, the linoleum was removed and replaced with a recycled room-sized gray wool rug after the first floor was carpeted with wall-to-wall.

There was a transom above the door (painted shut), and an attached small walk-in closet 4x6 feet in size. A four-drawer dresser with an attached mirror that tilted in or out (circa 1920) stood close to the wardrobe door. Two twin beds covered with scraggly pink spreads were pushed against two walls to form an L shape. This arrangement made bed-making difficult, but it looked totally cool and afforded much more space! A small dark brown varnished table and chair, used for studying, stood in another corner. A kidney-shaped dressing table with a piece of the same bedspread material hung from one of the pull out arms on the dressing table, in an attempt to cover the two open shelves on the right side of the dressing table. A backless stool with a woven cane seat sat in front of the dressing table. The windows were low to the floor, with the sills just 12 inches above the floor and hung with dotted Swiss Priscilla curtains atop heavy dark green blinds. The hot air duct was encased in a small wooden box about 16 inches high, a foot wide, and several inches deep. It was an excellent conductor of sound from the radio located in the living room below, as well as carrying every oompah and oomph whenever Dave practiced his tuba. This more often than not made it difficult for me to study or read in my room. On more than one occasion, when my ability to concentrate was totally worthless, I would fling open the door to my room, dash down the short hallway, thunder down the narrow stairway, crash through the door into the living room and shout my displeasure at all the noise going on!

When older relatives visited from Ohio, I was the one who had to give up my bedroom, since the visitors were used to sleeping in twin beds. I was never very happy about having to give up my room, but that didn't seem to matter, and I usually ended up sleeping on the couch in the living room.

Sometime in the spring of 1950, Uncle Ernie and Aunt Eva came to visit for a few days, and, of course, slept in my bedroom. I was quite fond of both my mother's brothers, mainly because they were so different from Mother herself. They smoked, drank, and cussed out loud -- three things that were not done in the Hoff household. There was no alcohol in our house, but mother did allow smoking indoors and grudgingly provided saucers for use as ashtrays. Uncle Clarence smoked cigars, while Uncle Ernie preferred cigarettes, as did his chain smoking wife, Aunt Eva. Mother often cadged cigarettes from them when they visited, as she had heard that putting tobacco under wool carpets worked as a moth deterrent.

On the day of the bedroom window incident, Dave and I had arrived home about 12:15 from high school, with hearty appetites and expecting something to eat. We found the back door locked, the front door locked, and the storm door in front of the outside stairway door was unlocked, which meant that the second door was locked. The outside stairway door was used often while housecleaning, and we never locked both doors at the same time. If the glass/screen storm door was locked, then the inside door was not, or vice versa. We checked the windows on the front porch, but they were all locked from the inside. It was getting later by the minute and neither of us had money to buy food at the small grocery across the street. What to do?

Daddy had been working on the house roof for several days, and a short wooden ladder was still propped up against the back porch. I was really hungry and determined that I was not going back to school with an empty stomach!

I enlisted Dave's help to hold the ladder steady, and climbed onto the roof over the back porch, and from there to a gentle sloping roof leading onto a small gable. I made my way to the top of the gable, and slowly but carefully down the roof on the other side. I was close to my destination -- just a short 6 feet jump down to a small flat area covered with a tin roof just outside two windows -- one to Dave's bedroom and the other to my bedroom. I had come this far and there was no going back, so I took a deep breath and made a successful jump down, landing on the tin roof. Because Dave's window had a full size screen on it with four slanted nails holding it in place, I chose to enter through my window, which had only a half size screen. I wiggled a nail loose that was holding the screen in place, and pushed up the window so I could climb into the room.

I had just put one leg into the room when a man's voice bellowed out: "What the HELL is going on here?"

Half in and half out of the window, I looked up, and saw Uncle Ernie, wearing his undershirt, sitting up in bed, having been awakened by the noise I made getting the window open!

I'm not sure which one of us was more taken aback, but I explained myself as well as I could, and we both calmed down. He stayed in bed while I finished climbing inside, and after going downstairs, discovered that the outside stairwell door was not locked, so that Dave and I could easily have gained entrance through the door in the first place. That was the end of my mountain goat roof climbing!