Recalling familiar real estate

Funny what you remember about houses you knew well.

My friend Corbett Reynolds, who owned an old Victorian home in Columbus, Ohio, was always unveiling new rooms that he'd claim he'd just discovered. He'd invite us over and reveal them, whoosh, as if by magic.

Corbett had purchased the three-story brick house in 1970, and lived and worked there until he died in 2002. The daily newspaper often found reasons to write about the house.

On a good day, it boasted eight bedrooms, four full baths - some of which occasionally functioned - and three full kitchens. Electrical wiring was by knob and tube, or by extension cord.

One back room displayed his Fiestaware, a wall of shiny blue, red, orange, green and yellow.

How good was that collection? When catalogs were put together, the publishers came to Corbett's to take photos.

The rest of the house displayed the art he'd created or picked up somewhere. Every room was chockablock with sculptures, paintings, sketches, elongated lamps, tubes of neon, maybe an enormous leather chair or couch, a massive silver samovar ….

Corbett seemed continually to be in the process of painting a wall or ceiling. Usually black.

“That's to better show my art, Mikey,” he'd explain.

In truth, he more likely was trying to conceal crumbling woodwork.

Corbett did much of his work in the house's cavelike basement or out in the carriage house.

Ah, the carriage house. Here you could find props he might be constructing for an exhibit or for his next Red Party - an annual dance extravaganza that attracted upward of 2,500, and in its final years was held in a giant 1940s ballroom.

The parties, for which Corbett charged an admittance fee, lasted until dawn or until the fire marshal arrived. The later was more often the case.

One long-standing resident of the carriage house was an almost-life-sized, bright red fiberglass elephant. Ears spread and trunk thrust forward, it was a fearsome creature.

Corbett had mentioned one year that he'd wanted an elephant for a party. I told him about a garden shop in the northeastern corner of the state I often passed on the interstate, going to my parents'.

I was sure I'd recently seen an elephant there.

So two days later Corbett and one of his henchmen drove a flatbed truck the 300 miles round trip to buy said elephant.

Back in the carriage house, he painted it nose to tail Red Party red.

The day before the party, they loaded the elephant into the truck and took it to the dance hall. It wasn't until they got there - after one car wreck and a long explanation to attending police as to why they were carrying a red fiberglass pachyderm - that they realized, with its ears immovably spread, this big elephant was not going to fit through that doorway.

Corbett, pretty upset by this time, drove home for his chain saw. Back outside the hall, he proceeded to decapitate the elephant, then reassemble it once inside.

He later claimed he'd always planned to sell the elephant after the party to the county Republican Party or to a nearby miniature golf course. Neither sale ever took place.

Every time I saw my friend afterward, he'd bring up the elephant, poke me in the chest with his finger and declare, “And it's all your fault, Mikey.”

My favorite part of Corbett's house, though, was the foyer. There for a while he kept a fountain he'd been contracted to design and build for a new local hospital.

Corbett in turn had hired an engineer to work out the actual waterworks. It was mostly white and very elegant.

The fountain was installed just before the hospital's ribbon-cutting. It was turned on, the water sprayed upward, the water gently arched downward into the waiting pool. And more water, and then more ….

I've forgotten the total cost in damages to the hospital's new lobby. But when I saw the fountain, now dry, back in Corbett's foyer and asked what had happened, he replied, “Well, the other guy was supposed to figure out the plumbing!”

The other reason I fondly recall that foyer is because that's where my wife and I were married, on the steps leading up to the second floor.

On the morning of the ceremony, an elderly man showed up at the front door and asked Corbett if he could come inside for just a moment. He explained that, many years before, he and his wife, now gone, had been married in that very house.

I'm sorry he couldn't stay for our wedding. That would have been a nice touch.

The house, too, might have appreciated the serendipity.