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Condolences to a great TKE group
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my condolences
Lenoxxx
Now condemned, TKE house has colorful history
By MATT CONNOR - For The Express
George Durrwachter, right, who was instrumental in TKE’s purchase of the William H. Mayer house in the 1960s, talked about the historical building with TKE brother Scott Kulah this week. Kulah was one of the last Lock Haven University students to live in the fraternity house.
BILL CROWELL/THE EXPRESS
LOCK HAVEN — If it’s possible for a house to have a dark night of the soul, the William H. Mayer house is having perhaps the longest such night on record.
Today it stands in a truly miserable state: boarded up windows and doors, wet furniture and garbage moldering on the front porch, “condemned” notices attached to the exterior walls, all but a few tiny scraps of its architectural integrity stripped away.
But the house, located directly across from Ross Library at 245 West Main St., has one of the most colorful and eccentric histories of any home in Lock Haven. You’d just never know it from looking at it today.
Most recently the headquarters of the Theta-Gamma Chapter of Tau Kappa Epsilon (TKE) fraternity, the house has been severely impacted by the 800 raucous college males who had called the place home over the past 45 years.
Today it would take a fortune to bring the property back up to code, let alone restore it to its former, pre-TKE glory. Many local observers fear the house will be torn down to make room for modern apartments. Some say razing it might be the best option for that particular house, which was once bright, cheerful, and home to some of the town’s most prominent citizens before its long, slow decline.
It’s said that many high-powered figures in the Republican party were once members of the national TKE fraternity, including the late President Ronald Reagan. Those G.O.P.ers would no doubt be thrilled to know that Lock Haven’s TKE house was built by a man who was a Presidential appointee of the “father” of the Republican party, Abraham Lincoln.
William H. Mayer built his fine home at 245 West Main in 1860, during a period when he was one of the leading merchants of the city. The asymmetrical 2-story wood frame structure on the corner of West Main and Third Street was built in the Gothic Revival style, with its steeply pitched roof and pointed gable end windows. According to the 1984 Lock Haven Historic Sites Survey, the house once had coupled columns on the front porch and sawn wood porch brackets. There were gable finials and bargeboards and, before the brown wood shingle siding was added sometime in the twentieth century, the house’s most distinctive feature was its vertical tongue-and-groove wood siding.
Mayer deeded the house to his brother, Charles A. Mayer, a prominent local judge, on May 30, 1870. William then moved to Chippewa Falls, Wisc., which is probably why he put the house in his brother’s name that year, most likely charging him with its sale. By that year William was already a Navy veteran, having enlisted during the Civil War in 1863, ultimately achieving the rank of Sergeant Major before he was appointed by President Lincoln as Paymaster of the US Navy. A Democrat, William resigned that position at the close of the war.
In Chippewa Falls William became involved in real estate and lumber and returned to Lock Haven six years later, in 1876. Beginning in 1880 he began operating one of the largest furniture stores in Central Pennsylvania, on what was then known as “Mayer’s Block” opposite the Fallon Hotel. He was mayor of Lock Haven for several terms in the 1890s, and, according to the Commemorative Biographical Record of that period, William “gives to his administration the energetic, economical and far-sighted management that a man of fair judgement brings to the conduct of his own affairs.”
“His sound judgement and impartiality,” the Record also stated, “make him an excellent mayor, and has won the support of all classes.”
At the time of his death just a few months after the close of his final term as Lock Haven mayor in 1899, William H. Mayer was vice president of the Lock Haven traction railroad. His funeral was held at the home of his brother, Charles, who by then had been appointed president judge of his judicial district.
NEW OWNERS
For 75 years after Mayer sold the home, the enormous house at 245 West Main would be home to some of the most well-known families in the area. There were the Lovelands, for example. Thomas B. Loveland ran a successful planing mill on Corning Street in Lock Haven which employed about 30 and supplied custom crafted wood products to homes and businesses as far away as Philadelphia. He bought the house in 1870 from Charles Mayer.
And then there were the Cloughs. Dana B. Clough and his wife Lucinda purchased 245 West Main from the estate of Thomas Loveland in 1898. Dana’s brother, William Clough, was Lock Haven’s District Attorney. The couple’s son, Clarence, later became vice president of the Castanea Paper Company.
Next to purchase the property were James H. Krom and his wife, Jessica Cole Prindle Humes Krom, a Jersey Shore resident. James was the proprietor of a tobacco shop on the corner of East Main Street and Fallon Alley. It was said that his establishment was a meeting place and center of discussion and debate among the men of the community of the day. Its trademark was the traditional wooden cigar store Indian that stood sentry outside of the shop. Another unique feature of the store was Krom’s collection of photographs of the most prominent citizens of Lock Haven of the era. One of Jessica’s children from a previous marriage (to the late Samuel Humes, vice president of the Jersey Shore Banking Company) would grow up to be the prominent local judge Samuel Hamilton Humes.
In 1942 the house was sold to May Sleicher, the recent widow of Harry Sleicher, an executive at the General Refractories Company and later the North American Refractories Company. A main product of the refractories business is heat-resistant brick. Harry’s interest in this industry probably came from his father, William Sleicher, who had been president and chairman of the board of the Queens Run Fire Brick Company in Lock Haven, at one time located on Water Street opposite Immaculate Conception Church.
On July 20, 1946, the house on the corner of West Main and Third Street was sold to Newton W. Fredericks and Flora Umberger Fredericks. The Frederickses had lived next door, at 241 West Main, since 1904. Newton Fredericks worked for his family’s brick manufacturing company (Fredericks & Munro) before building and managing the Garden Theater on Jay and Main Streets. The Garden opened to much acclaim and excitement in October of 1912. Renamed the “Garden Building,” in 1997 it was sold to the county as office space.
Mill Hall resident Rolinda Fredericks Hanley is the granddaughter of Newton and Flora Fredericks. She adored her “Pops” and “Gammy,” who lived into her 104th year, and visited them frequently.
“I used to love to go and visit Gammy,” Rolinda said. “I would sit on her foot stool and we would chitty-chat. I was so amazed that this was a woman who was courted by my grandfather in a carriage with a fine harness team, and gaslights and all, and lived to see a man walk on the moon.”
She said that Newton and Flora had planned in their wills to leave their home at 241 West Main to their daughter, Flora (known as Flossie), and her husband Richard Seltzer.
“But at one point in her life, Aunt Flossie bartered with her parents to trade her inheritance of the 241 house to the house next door, at 245.”
Rolinda’s cousin, James Seltzer, of Pine Creek, is the son of Richard and Flossie Seltzer. James believes that Flossie’s parents bought the home in 1946 specifically for their daughter.
“I was born in 1949 and they were there then. So I’m thinking if Newton W. Fredericks and Flora bought it in 1946, that’s probably when my parents moved in,” he said. The house remained in the elder Fredericks’ names until 1957.
A GRAND DAME
Flora Umberger Fredericks, Rolinda Hanley said, was one of the grand dames of Lock Haven society for much of her life.
“She played cards at the country club till about the age of 97,” Rolinda said. “She stopped because of her hearing aids. I used to drive her to Williamsport to have her hearing aids checked, and you didn’t rush her. She was not from an age when people rushed. Those old timers had such a sense of humor, such a sense of grandeur.”
Flossie Seltzer, now 96 and a resident of Oakridge Personal Care Home in Mill Hall, said her mother “was beautiful. Oh, she was just lovely. And men just went crazy after her.”
As proprietor of one of the oldest active movie theaters in Pennsylvania, Newton, too, was highly regarded locally. When the Garden opened in the early years of the Twentieth Century, it was hailed in the Express as “one of the best built, strongest and safest public buildings in Clinton County, a distinct ornament to the city and an enduring credit to its owner and manager, Mr. Newton Fredericks.”
The newspaper went on to say that “Mr. Fredericks is to be congratulated upon completing such a handsome, safe and sanitary quarters for the amusement loving public of this vicinity, and it is no surprise that both the theater and the ballroom are booked ahead for several weeks. We wish Mr. Fredericks every success in his new undertaking, of first-class dramatic entertainment, vaudeville and motion pictures, with the possibility of a roof garden attraction in the future.”
Rolinda Hanley said the grand old Garden Theater “was still part of my grandmother’s estate when she passed in 1981. It was hit hard in the 1972 flood, but we redid it. We replaced the seats. I can’t tell you when we stopped showing movies there.”
She remembers the house at 245 West Main St. largely through holiday visits to see her Aunt Flossie and Uncle Dick.
“I had a picture taken of myself in front of an ecru colored marble fireplace in that house,” she said. “I was dressed as Little Bo Peep because I was in a school play.”
James Seltzer remembers the sheer size of the house, which was especially impressive to a young boy between the age of infancy and 11. At that time, he said, it was a two-family house.
MANY ROOMS
“It was pretty interesting,” he said. “At one time that was a whole house with 27 rooms. Somewhere along the line they turned it into a two-family. There were 12 rooms on our side and 15 on the other side.”
Asked if she enjoyed living in the old house at 245 West Main St., Flossie Seltzer said, “Oh heavens yes, I enjoyed it. It was there on the corner. It was half a house for each family, two families lived in it.”
The Seltzers, James said, lived on one side of the house and “Unkel” Joe Anderson and his wife, Bunny, lived on the other.
“My Dad and Unkel Joe were an interesting pair,” he said. “They used to put out absolutely spectacular Christmas decorations. They were just phenomenal. They used to have Santa Claus figures. People used to bring their kids around to see it.”
Indeed, “Unkel” Joe Anderson, the proprietor of “Unkel Joe’s Woodshed” in Flemington, turned the house into a holiday showcase every winter, with the help of his friend and neighbor Dick Seltzer. The house regularly won the Community Christmas Lights Contests that were held annually in Lock Haven at the time.
“At Thanksgiving time, before Christmas, they’d put everything up and it was just wonderful,” Flossie Seltzer said. “The traffic in the street was held up tight because people would stop and look. Oh my gosh. We brought in a playhouse and painted it red and then we had it all decorated for Santa Claus to come with his candy and pass it out.”
Flossie said that the little red playhouse remained on the corner of Third and Main Streets through the holidays, and children were encouraged to leave notes for Santa inside.
“I spent hours filling little bags full of hard candy for the kids,” Flossie said.
It was a time when everyone on the block knew each other well, she added: “We were all friends, the neighbors. We didn’t squabble. We had nice people around.”
Lock Haven resident Lillian Anderson, who was “Unkel” Joe’s second wife, chuckled recently when asked about her late husband, who died in 1981. She herself never resided at 245 West Main, but she said Joe frequently told riotous stories about the time a terrific wind storm hit one winter, sending his displays of Santa, reindeer and other holiday figures scattering on the front lawn of the house.
According to Elizabeth F. Auchenbach’s book, “A Final Peak at the Past,” Joe once began an ambitious boat-building project upstairs at the house. All through the winter Joe labored to create a beautiful motorboat that would make him the envy of the other summer boat enthusiasts on the Susquehanna. When he had completed the project, he called Dick Seltzer to come over and take a look.
Dick looked it over from stem to stern, noted the size of the windows and doors in the room in which Joe had built the boat and said, “It’s great, Joe. But how are you going to get it to the river?”
“The house was just so huge,” James Seltzer said. “We lived on the eastern side, and my grandmother lived next door. We lived on the side closer to her. When you got to the top of the stairs and looked left and right, it was like living in a hotel. There were six bedrooms on our side of the house.”
SOLD TO TKE
Around 1960, the Seltzers sold the house to the TKE fraternity via a 10-year article of agreement. If some of the neighbors might have raised their eyebrows over the sale, it little concerned the Seltzers.
“Actually, my memory of the sale is that my parents were interested in getting into the country,” James Seltzer said. “Quite frankly because the house was the size that it is, it was difficult to sell. Since this was 45 years ago, there was less appreciation for historic buildings than there is today. I don’t recall any apprehension about selling to a fraternity. My recollection was that they were just happy to have a buyer.”
Acting as an advisor for the TKE fraternity at that time was Dr. Gerald Robinson, a former Vice President for Academic Affairs at LHU.
“The group that bought the house started out living back down by the old hospital on the corner of First Street and West Main,” Robinson said. “They were in there first. They rented it, and the man who owned it was Don Sheer. He owned a garage in town and was quite a businessman. This quite large group of students, for whatever reason, rented that place from him. I think that it reached the point where the rental was more than they could handle. So some of them took the initiative to try to find a new place.”
The place they found was 245 West Main, Robinson said.
“At the time, the house was owned by a man and his wife by the name of Seltzer, Dick Seltzer. They negotiated to purchase it from him. Quite interestingly enough, the ringleader in that was George Durrwachter, who just donated a large sum of money to the university for the Alumni Center. George is an orthodontist in Williamsport, and he’s also on the Council of Trustees for the university. He’s a very great person.”
This early group of TKE brothers – they numbered about 50 or 60 – were supported by a large number of local individuals who, Robinson said, “wanted to see them succeed. They included a fellow by the name of Eddie Wentz, who was a businessman in town; Tom Bossert, one of the present county commissioners; Paul Clense, who is on the faculty at the university; a fellow named Dewey Moorehouse, who was a professor in the Phys Ed department at Lock Haven University; Dr. Wayne Hoy, who was the superintendant of schools locally; and Allan Lugg, the present attorney in town. I was also one of them, but strictly in an advisory capacity.”
With the close supervision of Robinson et al, the young men of TKE, at least initially, took great care of their new home. Joe Coldren, a former director of admissions at LHU and also a TKE alumnus, moved into the house in 1962, soon after he pledged the fraternity. He lived there for three years before graduating in 1965. He is now a local real estate consultant.
“The house was in pretty good condition when I lived there,” Coldren said. “The reason it stayed in pretty good shape for as long as it did was because of Dr. Robinson. He was extremely tight with managing it and making sure we didn’t destroy the place.”
At that time, Coldren said, the house had been converted back to a single family home, and the attic on the third floor was made over into dorm-style bedrooms.
“The only place where it probably needed some work was the third floor, the top floor, where all of the bunk rooms were, where we slept,” Coldren said. “The second floor had all study rooms, which were newly furnished and in very good condition.
“On the ground floor even our fireplace worked. We used to charm our women in the fireplace room. At that time Via Hughey was our house mother. She had her own apartment in the back of the building and we had our own dining hall where we ate breakfast, lunch and dinner. She was mother to us all. She took good care of us and we took good care of her.”
Coldren also remembers “the old Shaker shingles, which were really one of the attractive things about the house, along with the windows with the nice mouldings both on the exterior and interior. Those were pretty well taken care of in those days.”
GOOD NEIGHBORS
The TKE fraternity members maintained a warm relationship with their next door neighbor, Flora Umberger Fredericks, who had been widowed in 1952. It became a tradition for the young men to sing to Flora every year on her birthday.
“I have pictures of the TKE boys serenading Gammy on her birthdays,” Rolinda Hanley said. “They would bring flowers and come over like a glee club and sing. They loved her to death. Whenever they had a party, she pulled the blinds and took her hearing aids out!”
Indeed, the increasingly elderly Flora took the fraternity’s weekend parties with remarkable aplomb, Rolinda said.
“She once told me, ‘What are those barrels they get refreshment in?’ So I said, ‘They call them kegs, Gammy.’ And she said, ‘I saw one flying out the back door and that’s when I thought I ought to close my blinds!’ “God love her. They would shovel her walk and do all this because she was good to them and they were polite to her. They just loved her to death.”
Upon her demise in 1981, members of the TKE fraternity acted as pall bearers at Flora Umberger Fredericks funeral.
But as the decades passed, Greek life on college campuses across the nation shifted from a kind of preppie culture that emphasized academics, athletics and music to more socially-oriented groupings that embraced partying. That, observers say, is when the house at 245 West Main began its long decline.
“As the years have gone by, any building needs repairs,” Robinson said. “It’s a constant job. It is with my home and anybody else’s. Money got tight for the fellows, and there were more fraternities on campus. Competition was tighter, too. I think that membership declined and costs went up and it began, as I can see it, to deteriorate. It’s too bad, it really is.”
Earl Bright is alumni president for the Theta-Gamma Chapter of Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity and a 1992 graduate of Lock Haven University. He’s now principal of Robert Reid Elementary School in Middletown, PA. Bright said he thought the house was “amazing” during the time he lived there.
“The sheer size of the houses in Lock Haven are unbelievable,” he said. “The property there at 245 West Main St. was amazing: 37 rooms, 17 flights of stairs, from basement to first floor, first floor to second floor, second to third.
“There was a grand front staircase and also a rear staircase. That was part of the trivia we had to learn when we joined the organization. Anything that was more than two steps was considered a flight of stairs. On the second floor there are two small staircases that only go up three steps, but we considered those staircases.”
Asked if any of the TKE brothers ever concerned themselves with trying to maintain the property, Bright said, “That’s something that came up constantly. Unfortunately there were some guys who barely took care of their own home, when they lived with their parents, so they didn’t take care of their home in college, when they didn’t have that parental supervision.
“So it was a constant struggle for guys who wanted to keep the house nice. That’s one of the things that we’re struggling with now. I’m sure there are some people who think we should seek some kind of historical designation for it, to possibly get some funding to renovate the property. But in order to get that, you have to try to bring it back to a fairly original state and there are specific things we must do to the property. That was something that people didn’t want to put their resources into.”
TALES OF SPIRITS
Like many of the old Victorian-era homes in town, the William H. Mayer house has for many years been surrounded by tales of the supernatural. Without any prompting, former residents of the home openly talked about the possibility that spirits walk the long, dark hallways of 245 West Main St.
“There’s a rumor that the house was haunted,” Bright said. “The story behind it was that, supposedly, one of the families that used to live there had a son who was mentally retarded. In that day and age, it was a real social stigma to have a child that had any kind of issues relating to mental retardation. So they kept him confined in a room in the house. The legend says this little boy’s name was Enoch. I don’t know how true that is and I don’t know how that came to be, but that’s what we were always told.”
Interestingly, Bright’s story may have a tiny grain of truth to it. Though there’s no evidence that a mentally challenged boy ever lived in 245 West Main, the tale may have sprung from the true story of an actual shut-in who once resided at the home.
In 1942, the recently-widowed May Sleicher, who owned and lived in the house, died at Lock Haven Hospital, where she had been a patient for several days. Her daughter, Muriel, was then left virtually alone in the house for the remainder of her days.
As the daughter of privilege in Lock Haven, Muriel had graduated from Lock Haven High School and was promptly sent to some of the best educational institutions in the U.S., including the Briarcliff Manor school for girls and Cornell University. Just prior to graduation from Cornell, however, Muriel was badly stricken with chronic arthritis, and for the next 20 years her painful condition kept her increasingly confined to her home at 245 West Main St .
By the time of her mother’s death in the early 1940s, Muriel was completely housebound and completely bed-ridden, according to the obituary that appeared in the Express. How she alone managed the home during the next few years is unknown. It’s been speculated that Muriel’s worsening condition might have caused her to neglect her formerly grand house, and that local children may have developed legends and tall tales about the lonely old structure on the corner of Main and Third Streets and its sole, unseen occupant.
In nearly 50 years of retelling, the stories may have been embellished to the extent that a lonely bedbound woman named Muriel became a fictional housebound mentally retarded boy named Enoch.
“In one part of the house there was a staircase behind a wall,” Bright said in recounting the story of “Enoch” that had been passed down to him by older TKE brothers. “The staircase went up to nothing, and that, supposedly, was where Enoch lived.
“Now, that staircase could have been there because of a renovation project. There are numerous reasons why it could have been there. But supposedly that was the staircase up to Enoch’s little world. There was a room up there that could not be accessed unless you tore the wall down and went up the staircase.”
Interestingly, the back stairway was also the source of ghostly speculation to another former resident, James Seltzer.
“We used to have a lot of fun in that house, though frankly after dark it was a little spooky,” Seltzer said. “There was a front and back stairway. The back stairway was pretty much closed off, but there was a door to the back stairway, and it used to give us the creeps. We used to say that’s where the boogeyman lived.”
He added that “I often got the feeling the house was haunted. It was a spooky place, it really was. I was always afraid to be by myself upstairs at night.”
Appropriately, given the ghostly tales surrounding the property, the brothers of Tau Kappa Epsilon began an October tradition of inviting people into the house for a good scare.
“Around Halloween we would turn the house into a haunted house, which we would do as a fund raiser,” Bright said. “We’d take people through the house, which would be pitch black, and have all kinds of gags and scary things set up. Then we’d have a big huge party afterward.”
But these days the parties are over and 245 West Main has finally gone quiet. The William H. Mayer house is vacant and condemned and the TKE chapter at LHU is no longer active on campus. Members of the alumni association still hold out hope that the fraternity can be revived and the house brought back up to code and saved from the wrecking ball, but at this point the odds that the house could be saved seem pretty long.
“They posted the TKE house and to fix that house up it would be an enormous expense,” Joe Coldren said. “I’m just concerned that whomever buys it will tear it down. It’s a shame that things have gone in the direction they have. It’s too bad.”
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