855 Ardmore Ave, Akron, Ohio

(I’m strapping my “Building Blocks” carpenter’s belt back on after several weeks away traveling in Ohio and celebrating my daughter’s wedding. It’s good to be back on the job.)

In 1915 the house at 855 Ardmore Avenue in Akron, Ohio was new and modern. (It had a bathroom off the kitchen!) And the couple that bought it for $4000 was new and modern also, up and coming young doctor Bob Smith and Anne Smith, recent Wellesley grad. The newlyweds had high hopes for themselves and for their new home; into it they would welcome children, neighbors, and a life of purpose helping the sick and saving lives.

But sadly, both the house and the couple had to spend the next 20 hard years in neglect; neglected marriage, neglected repairs, neglected house payments, until finally in 1935, their young dreams of saving lives were finally realized. Children they did have, but instead of neighbors the Smith’s visitors during those first 20 years were bootleggers and police and concerned colleagues. Dr. Bob descended into alcoholism soon after moving into the new house and for two decades his meager and tenuous income from his practice went to booze, and his family and the house struggled and cracked and fell apart.

Dr. Bob tried various ways to stop drinking, including a church group, the Oxford Group, but with no lasting success. But hope for him, and soon after for the house, came in 1935 when a rum hound traveling salesman, who had only recently stopped drinking, came to Akron on a futile business trip, and in his frustration was tempted to relapse at the hotel bar. Instead he picked a minister’s name out of the phone book, called asking for help, and the minister put him in touch with Henrietta Seiberling, who was Bob and Anne’s good church friend. She invited the stranger salesman, Bill Wilson, to come over and talk with her friend Dr. Bob, who was trying to stay sober also. Maybe they could help each other.

Bill and Bob became instant friends and mutual support, and a couple months later, in June 1935, Bob and Anne invited Bill to come live with them at 855 Ardmore. Anne cooked and made coffee and the men sat at the kitchen table and talked. Soon they were inviting other drunks to come and talk at 855 Ardmore, and Anne made more coffee, and offered these loners and losers a bed for a while. Bill lived upstairs in one of the small bedrooms for six months. When he and Bob and Anne weren’t detoxing drunks and drinking coffee with them in the kitchen, they were at the old (then new) Royal typewriter that still sits on the dining room table. Daughter Sue Smith, then a young adult, did much of the typing of what would become the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous.

When you visit 855 Ardmore, as I did last week on my Ohio trip, it is like going to shrine. This now 100 year old home, lovingly restored and recently place on the National Registry of Historic Buildings, honors Bob and Anne, their lives and work. Which ultimately did become the mission of helping the sick and saving lives, including their own.

And it is a shine that honors the building itself. AA’s love Bob of course, but this is really about the role of the house in this history and mission. The house is like a costar, a character in the drama known as AA. Not just the Smiths, but the house itself welcomed and housed and fed and forgave and encouraged hundreds of alcoholics and their families, for the next 20 years, from that fateful June 1935, until Bob and Anne died in the 50’s.

A shrine and a landmark are not quite the same thing. 855 Ardmore is both. A landmark is supposed to be “authentic” to a certain historical period. You recreate a certain era and sort of freeze the house at that time. I’ve visited Martin Luther King’s boyhood home in Atlanta and it too is frozen in time, the same time actually, the 30’s, for the preteen Martin. You can sort of imagine the lives lived in these landmark homes, but there is something a little eerie about the emptiness, the absence of contemporary life. The past and present meet in the careful clean rooms, and the silence. Although they lived in the house for 40 years, Bob and Anne’s house is today frozen in the late 30’s, with magazines from the period on the coffee table, only 30’s products in the kitchen, etc.

A shrine is more like an altar. It’s a place where visitors come to say thank you for a life lived, and where they might ask for help in the spirit of that life. A shrine is not just a marker of the past but a kind of gateway to the future.

Tourists come to landmarks, pilgrims come to shrines.

I was both, last week. I saw a museum house, a model 1935 kitchen. I saw a holy spot, where lives had been saved. And I saw a living space today, even though no one lives there anymore. The volunteer at the Smith House welcomed me at the door with the AA catch phrase, “Welcome home,” and then invited me into the kitchen. “Are you a coffee drinker?” he asked. “Have a seat where Bob and Bill and Anne sat, have a cookie, tell me where you are from.”

And the house itself welcomed me, with quiet peace, lovely wood, beds and books and Bob’s old doctor bag and Anne’s Bible. It is not just frozen in time, not just a shrine. There is life there now.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter