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HOUSING crisis? What's that? Now before you start throwing things, let me explain. I know the Arthur Lakes of Santa Monica, California, are not the only family in America who have been struggling with the roof over the head problem. And I know a lot of other families haven't found any solution yet.
We wouldn't have either — except that we were desperate enough to take desperate measures. We bought a haunted house!
We began to get frantic about a year ago. Pat and the kids and I had been very comfortably settled, thank you, in a pleasant little house — strictly in the Dagwood tradition, short on the closets but plenty of charm — on the rim of Santa Monica canyon overlooking the Pacific.
Everything was ducky until the family began to grow. Nothing for the columnists mind you — Marion Rose is four now and Arthur Patrick is almost six, and we have no plans for more Winchell items — but just people.
Nice people, people we like. But people need bedrooms and a chance at a bathroom and some of those danged closets.
First, Pat's father fell sick and we brought him to our house. That meant nurses, and Pat's stepmother, and a defiant old bull dog Pat gave her dad for a present several years ago.
The skipper of our boat, "The Blondie," came back from the Army, homeless, and moved in with us with his wife and his daughter, Jeannie, who is four and a great
pal for Marion Rose. Then we got a new housekeeper who came equipped with another child, this one a little boy just right for a playmate for A. P.
It got very noisy. We began to go to our meals in shifts. It began to look as though we'd better think about moving. But where, in 1947?
Then, one evening when Pat and I were sitting on the terrace waiting for our turn at the victuals, we hit upon the great idea. Smack across the canyon, the dead eyes of a half hundred dark windows stared at us from a big, old, empty house. About the size of a nice hotel.
We had lived in our house for five years and had never seen a light in the place.
"Look," I said to Pat, pointing.
"Ummmh," she replied unenthusiastically.
"Well, we could go and see it," I went on. "What could we lose?"
"Our heads," she said. Practical Pat.
I began checking the next day, just the same. There were practical points on my side, too.
I drove by first — couldn't see much. The place was surrounded by a six-foot-high, three-foot-thick wall overgrown with burned up ivy and half dead moss. Through a wrought iron gate across the driveway, I could see the house a quarter of a mile away, a mammoth thing with vaulted windows like a church, giant archways, a tower thrown in for luck.
Well, there would be room enough. . .
I checked some more. A real (Continued on page 101)
•House of -haw Ness
Arthur Lake needed a roof for his family. It didn't even matter that the roof he found leaked . . . and sheltered a ghost, too
By ARTHUR LAKE
With all this magnificence came one drawback; a ghost. But the Lakes felt one more wouldn't matter . . .
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