Preface

The boy grew up, left the Inn, went off to school, got married, raised a family and then got old.

In The Inn with the help of his psychologist, our memoirist comes to grips with why he ‘s compelled to spin one story after another, share memories, questioning himself all the while as to why anyone might be the slightest bit interested in his tales.

As The Inn begins he recalls his most optimistic grandfather who lived there in New Windsor, Maryland, just across from the writer’s residence, that 42 room hotel built in the early 1800s. He remembers the Sunday dinner when Grandy shared the following thought with one of the town’s resident naysayers.

“You know, Emma,” he said. “I think I’m going to write my life’s story.”

Miss Emma, an old maid schoolteacher who was a regular freeloader at his grandparents Sabbath feeds, helped herself to another piece of her host’s fried chicken and said, “And, Preston, WHO would read it?”  

That becomes our memoirist’s question. Why should he, even at his shrink’s suggestion, compile these tales of his, write his life story? Why would anyone be interested? Who would read it?  The psychologist leads him down a path pebbled by the all important questions---Where’s the hook? What makes his life’s stories original or in fact of interest?

Although a town that might make Norman Rockwell break out his canvas and brushes, in the end the answer wasn’t just the idyllic rural village of New Windsor, Maryland. Although it, in fact, did boast a population of characters that our writer recalls being what storybooks are made of. 

Then what was it?  The breakthrough comes when our author finds some old composition books from his childhood and realizes that he grew up rattling around in the centerpiece of this village--in this story box of sorts. The Dielman Inn and its owner was a magnet to the town, a place where local characters dropped in daily for a cup of Joe to chair rock on the building’s high porches to shoot the bull and spin their tales. Others came and stayed.

Little did our eavesdropper, the boy who had the run of the place, know that some 60 years later he and his sister would inherit this “treasure,” one of Maryland’s most threatened historic homes. This was the edifice where his mother attended Miss Ayres School in the 1920s and grew to love more than Peter loved the Lord. And the building his father---when out of ear shot of his mother—called a White Elephant. In the 40s when the boy and his family unloaded their moving truck it was the Dielman Inn, owned by a family of national and international repute---writers, artists and musicians.

Back when the joint was jumping (early 1900s) it served as a summer retreat for New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington’s elite. The rich and the famous came to bathe in the town’s healing sulfur springs, to paint, to ride horseback, play croquet, mahjong, bridge and backgammon---to enjoy the Inn’s evening musical recitals and minstrel shows. And to belly up to the hotel bar. Hell, years later on a summer’s night one might bump into H.L Mencken and Theodore Dreiser, who were “bumping” the Bloom sisters, who lived right down the street. Its yearly guest list included the war hero who captured Geronimo.

In 1946 when the last stick of the family’s furniture was unloaded, the building’s salad days had dried and wilted. But the owner, Louis Dielman, was still in house, the man The Baltimore Sun called one of Maryland’s most influential historians---a writer, photographer, druggist, philanthropist, and raconteur with a brilliant wit. Mr. Lou not only waived the rent for the likes of the boy’s family, who were living pay check to pay check on a high school shop teacher’s salary, but during the summers it was his habit to comp in old regulars, elders who had long been the building’s vacationers, then roll out the welcome mat to an assortment of other passersby, visitors the boy’s father referred to as a collection of “mixed nuts.” And just to jack up the Inn’s traffic a bit Mr. Lou lowballed the rent for another gathering place, a unique barbershop/home and gardens store housed on a prominent corner of the building.

Mr. Lou enjoyed regaling the boy he called Bud with tales of days gone by. So these stories and the game of baseball was their glue. They both loved great debate. Mr. Lou rooted home his Dodgers through The Baltimore Sun’s daily box scores. If Campy went three-for-four the old man would take a drag on his pipe and say, “Best catcher in baseball.” Looking over Mr. Lou’s shoulder the kid would counter by bringing attention to the fact that Yogi had hit two out the day before to beat the Sox. The boy, being a bit of a front-runner, loved the Yanks.

The barbershop’s men’s bathroom---which was filthy---was off-limits to the boy. So on summer evenings in the 50s “Bud” often found himself sequestered in a toilet stall in one of the Inn’s high porch restrooms paging through baseball’s Bible, The Sporting News. During these sessions he might be taken off-task, distracted by the buzz of local gossip. Most often wedged there behind closed doors on the neighboring hoppers were Mr. Lou’s easily identified “summer city guests.” Miss Metty wore a brown open toe shoe, Miss Elizabeth, a red lace up, Miss Carey, a dark blue flat. And that old maid schoolteacher Miss Emma featured a tired grey bathroom slipper.

So the Inn was the catalyst, a social story box of sorts---its high porch rocking chairs, the big party room and those high porch restrooms, the barbershop----where locals and residents flocked to socialize with Mr. Lou. But our memoirist had to watch his step when exiting one of the hotel’s dozens of doorways. Just outside lay New Windsor, Maryland, and over his years there---from ’46 to ‘65---he found himself tripping over characters who would generate more stories than a would-be raconteur could ever hope for.

There was the infamous Bumblebee, the Maryland “treasure” who buzzed while cutting out paper dolls behind his back; The Powerful Katrinka, the town’s door-to-door enema woman; Siegfried Weisberger, the eccentric Baltimore tavern and bookstore owner whom H.L Mencken featured in his weekly newspaper columns; Mr. Feather the Cane Carving Man, a walking talking Maryland legend; Delia, the folk-art-sculptor who washed and ironed for his mother; Eva the trash picker who displayed the Inn’s and other New Windsor discards on the porch of her shack; the tramps---Pete, Slim and Mr. Mullins; Elmer the tenant farmer whose view of life prompted Mr. Lou to call him The Human Farmer’s Almanac; BALmore, a salesman who dropped by with inappropriate stories from time to time to entertain Mr. Lou; Frank the Four Leaf Clover Finder, a man who took great pride in his secret for finding the lucky legumes; Darlene Daniels, a woman who could cuss with any self respecting sailor; Mr. Brice, a yarn spinner extraordinaire, who managed to find himself present at more historical moments than Forrest Gump. One character, who made it his habit to “take the temperature” of the town and deliver gossip, was called Thermometer. Mr. Lou called him 98.6. And, among others, and certainly not least, Marie and her Talking Parrot act.

And so during this mental cleansing of sorts, as he travels back in time---inside the Inn and out—the memoirist pauses to recall these characters and a tale or two.

For austere historians this may well be a good time to check out of the Inn. But for those looking for a good reminiscent stay, well on one of our memoirist’s last visits to the Inn, foraging through the attic, he had that good fortune and uncovered a few of those dust blanketed notebooks, journals that proved to be the perfect nudge for this trip of his down memory lane.

So welcome to The Inn. This is our author’s story of this historic edifice, his love for his resident raconteur and mentor Mr. Lou, for his family, New Windsor, Maryland, and the characters that peopled it.

Introduction

This memoir begins near the end. My father and mother inherited the Inn, which Louis Dielman, the centerpiece of this story, had in typical Mr. Lou fashion bequeathed saying that this was “…a present from the devil, a candidate for condemning what he shouldn’t wish on his enemies’ let alone a family he loved.”

Years later when my parents, as Mr. Lou would have put it, “went on to Glory,” they passed this rambling 1800s vintage antique on to my sister and me. But that’s another story; the one I’m sharing here may have never been told had I not been rummaging through the Inn’s musty attic where I discovered those ancient notebooks.

I took a seat there in the attic in the very chair that Mr. Lou sat in on that high porch, out there looking down on the town, where he carried out most of his Maryland historical research. I wiped the cobwebs off these books, tablets that had clearly been stashed there since the late 1950s. The stories and notes brought tears of sadness as well as laughter. This was it, the starting point for that memoir I’d been struggling to structure. Were all the tales of the Inn and New Windsor on these dusty pages? No, but scraps from that bountiful historic tablet would get me going.

As I sat there I recalled July 6, 1958, my 15th birthday, the day Mr. Lou startled me with a wrapped package, this gift that would---years later---keep on giving. The usual 15 Birthday Silver dollars, his annual present, were stacked next to it there on his high porch research card table. This was a surprise package. In previous years it had always just been the silver dollars---one for every year---along with one of his postcard cards featuring Happy Birthday clipped from a newspaper or magazine followed by a sketch of his signature pair of black horned-rimmed glasses.

I tore into the package and to my surprise, found a number of large notebooks. Centered over their black and white marbled covers were labels that read COMPOSITION followed by several lines for the writer’s name. This clearly smacked of schoolwork, and I opened them with trepidation, hoping to read something that Mr. Lou had written. The lined pages in every book were blank. He waited until I had leafed through the stack and taking a draw on his pipe he said, “Now, Bud, you are a storyteller. So, here’s your birthday gift to me. Every day I want you to enter a story in these pages.”

“Like some kind of school project?” I managed.

“You could approach it that way. But here’s the thing that I’ve learned over my ninety plus years. Those of us who appreciate a good story shouldn’t just tell it. We should write it. If we don’t….well can you imagine how many good ones of mine that have gotten away over the years?”

I was busy with that thought when he continued to talk, “You have an ear for stories and you tell them well. But now when you enter them here then you’ll be….”

“A writer?” I said. “I can’t spell worth a hoot.”

“Don’t worry about that for now. And don’t look at this like it’s some kind of school project,” he said.

“I hate school,” I said.

“I know, you’ve mentioned that a time or two. What I want you to do is to take the advice of this old man. When you enter your stories, don’t concern yourself with getting them right, just get them written.”

“Don’t worry about the spelling?”

“No, now, Rosmitcha. I’ve got some research to finish up here before your mother insists that this poor old miserable sinner drags his decrepit body downstairs to watch a teenaged boy blow out a cake full of candles.”

And that was it. Rarely did a day go by that I didn’t either write a current story or one from my vast archives, tales that I’d been storing up over the years. And somehow, thanks to Mr. Lou’s strategy, I never looked at these entrees as homework, or for that matter anything to do with that most hated word---school.

During this process I decided to allow the Inn’s and New Windsor’s characters help shoulder the load, serve as vehicles to tell my stories. And the very first one may not have won a blue ribbon, but it wrapped the Inn and the town together, tied them up in a nice little bow. The day after my birthday, with one of my new storybooks under my arm, I strolled out on the high porch to ask Mr. Lou a very basic question. I was concerned about whether these entries of mine should be in pen, or more practically in pencil where erasures could be made should I want to adjust them a bit.

There, staggering around Mr. Lou who was busy working at his research table, was Darlene Daniels, the foulest mouth in town, cussing and carrying on. Her mop of dirty white hair was flying in ten directions and she was spitting as she talked. Darlene had obviously just come up from The Beer Garden where she had been clearly overserved.

“Well, Lou, I guess you heard about the viewing last night at Hartzler’s Funeral Home?”

Mr. Lou kept his head down and continued his research. He allowed that he in fact had heard no bulletins from Hartzlers.

“Well, you know Nan passed and so she’s all laid out and Jake, that big bozo of a husband of hers, is standing by the casket shaking hands like he was running for town council.”

“And?” Mr. Lou said, turning a recently researched card over and placing it in one of his alphabetical boxes.

“Well, Nan was always on Jake about wearing his suspenders or at least a belt. And so what do you think?”

“No belt,” said Mr. Lou.

“Or suspenders and as he reached out to shake one of the mourners’ hands, he sneezed, and I’ll be a son of a bitch if his pants didn’t fall all the way to his ankles. And with half the town looking on, there he is with that big rear end of his shining right up in poor old Nanny’s face. Now, what a way for Nan to go out, and if I had a nickel for every time she told that old man to wear a belt, hell Lou, I’d be a #@*%ing millionaire.”

I looked at Mr. Lou, and he looked at me. Before I could ask him about the pen vs. pencil issue he said, “Well, Bud, there’s one; now get busy.”

Chapter One

Moving Inn

Back in its heydays in the 1920s and 1930s our new digs met the textbook definition of an Inn.

But on that steamy New Windsor, Maryland, morning in the spring of 1946 when we landed, when defining hostelry, the old edifice was missing a few checks. It was clearly still an establishment that provided lodging. But if you didn’t count Fred Schneider’s Barbershop and Home and Gardens store lodged there in the end of the building, it was no longer commercial. No food or drink was served. And thanks to Mr. Louis Dielman, our “Inn Keeper,” the Cairns family and other assorted visitors---who came and went during my childhood stay---never paid a dime for rent.

I had just turned three that summer, and my memory of moving day was of pedling my little red fire truck up the street having just vacated our family’s former residence. We’d been politely given our walking papers by New Windsor’s Methodist church. This was fair enough because although tithing renters we’d been living at a discount in the Lord’s House, which in fact was St. Paul’s parsonage. When the parish landed a new minister in need of housing, we were sent, and rightly so, packing.

Enter Mr. Lou, who owned the Dielman Inn., a man in his 80th year, whom I would grow to adore. As I looked back, I had to think that although my family had been given the bum’s rush from one of the Lord’s houses that this one we were being welcomed to was owned by a landlord where the emphasis had to be on Lord.

IT GOES ON FROM HERE!