Bob Carter and Howard Hall

Bob Carter, 90 who was born in Cedar Rapids and moved away a couple of times, vividly remembers his first meeting with Howard Hall, the local businessman who grew Iowa Manufacturing into a huge company and lived at Brucemore, the mansion on the hill.

It was 1937 when Bob was just 18 and had built a replica of the Great Republic, the 1853 clipper ship that was the largest ever made. The model was on display at Armstrong's Department Store when Howard Hall spotted it and gave Bob a call.

"Can you bring it out to Brucemore?" Hall asked.

"What's that?" Bob responded.

"It's where I live."

Oh, yes. In those days Bob and friends referred to Brucemore as The Douglas Estate. Howard Hall had only moved into it earlier that year, having lived in the adjacent garden house for 13 with his wife, Margaret Douglas Hall.

Bob took his ship replica up the winding drive to Brucemore and rang the bell. A butler answered, asked what his business was and had him wait for Howard Hall.

Hall wound up buying the ship from Bob and soon had him help build the Hawaiian Room at the estate and rebuild the house that overlooked the Cedar River at the Palisades near Mount Vernon. Bob also built a replica of their yacht, Hallmar II, that was kept in Miami. (See today's Ramblin' column in The Gazette.)

 While Bob had plenty of respect for Howard, he really enjoyed meeting Margaret.

"He squired Margaret Douglas around in his Model-T," Bob recalls. "And they married and lived in the garden house."

When Margaret's mother died, they were required to move into the main house.

"Margaret didn't want to move from the garden home," Bob says. "She cried and cried."

But to Howard it was a dream come true. He had told Bob he wanted to marry the richest girl in town and live in the biggest house.

Whenever Howard was around, Margaret seemed very quiet, as was the custom of the day, Bob says. But he really grew to like her.

"She was a queen," Bob says. "Very quiet. Very refined. Very dignified. Very cultured. Very private."

It was Margaret who, after she died in 1981, designated the mansion on the hill to become city landmark.

For information about Margaret and Howard Hall and their Brucemore years,

click here.