.JPG)
She also let me know that Shirley, of Larry and Shirley, had just died.
And so this post is to serve as an obituary, of sorts, for Shirley Stewart Baldwin, nee McDowell, 1921 - 2012.
Who are Larry and Shirley, you ask? This is a good question. I've never met Larry or Shirley, but that's Shirley there at the left, sitting on a pony in front of what I assume is the Piedmont house in which she was raised.
We bought our house from Larry and Shirley a year ago. The original builders of the home, they had lived here for 45 years and didn't seem to have remodeled much anything cosmetically since the time they'd had it built, so this house has been a pretty major project that we're still tackling, piece by piece, every day.
And so, I have to assume that both Shirley and Larry just liked things the way they liked them.
Per Kay, who used to take them to Doctor appointments and help them out with errands, Larry and Shirley were both in their '90's when they moved to assisted living. Larry suffers from severe dementia, so Shirley was the one who made all the arrangements. They had no children, and apparently had no other close family. When we were purchasing the home we were dealing with a legal firm that Shirley had hired to sell the house, though Kay did tell me later that both she and Shirley read the "love letter" that I wrote to accompany my offer. (And in Bay Area real estate that love letter can be the reason a seller chooses you over someone else, so you'd best make it good.)
One strange quirk in our home purchase was that, after I spied a few pieces of awesome mid-century office furniture that I wanted (Larry had excellent taste in chairs), the realtor hired by the law firm asked us if we just wanted to take the house and all its contents.
I said "No way!" just as my partner said, "Totally!"
And, since she was the one doing all the heavy lifting with the remodel, she got her wish.
Now, realistically, this was a terrible idea. We were now dealing with a home stuffed with 45 years of accumulated stuff, and we had our own stuff to deal with, and we had a major remodel to do and were doing a lot of it ourselves, and we had a 5-month-old baby. It was like cleaning out grandma's house, except that these weren't our grandparents, so there wasn't any context and nobody was sure how much stuff was really in there (answer: holycraplots), and there were plenty of other things to do, and we were under a deadline.
That being said, when you have to go through the stuff that a loving couple has accumulated in a home that they built for themselves 45 years ago, you do get a sense of who they were, and it does sort of impart a sense of responsibility into you to do right by the house and by its previous occupants (especially when you were chosen to buy a house priced under-market in a hugely competitive zip code with almost no inventory, and you went in under asking).
And so I feel compelled to tell the world a little more about Shirley Baldwin, who attended high school in Piedmont (I have her yearbooks) and, at some point in her youth, seems to have sat on a pony so that her family could take a portrait.
Shirley and Larry absolutely loved this home. They designed it, had it built, spent a great deal of time and expense with a landscape architect to plant it, and took meticulous care of it. They moved here from Oakland in 1966 (we have documents from their old house, too), and - as referenced previously, and as we found when we pulled carpet to discover even more linoleum - changed very little in all the years they lived here.
Bear in mind, though, that while this house was covered in the original wallpaper and linoleum, there was a new roof and a new water heater and a new furnace and new double-paned windows (huge score), and all of these things were top of the line. Larry and Shirley had excellent taste in the things they chose to purchase, which I've come to believe goes along with Shirley's thoughtful and meticulous nature.
Shirley was in fact so meticulous that about 2 months after we moved in we received, in the mail, the spare garage door opener that she'd accidentally taken with them when they moved. Oh, Shirley. You rock. And in the desk, we found an envelope labeled "house" in Shirley's writing, with swatches of the original carpeting and wallpaper and other building materials in it. Cool.
Shirley seems to have enjoyed cooking; her cookbooks are dog-eared and notated, and there were a lot of them. She also had an impressive collection of Pyrex and Tupperware, which I gratefully still use. They really just don't make them like that anymore.
Shirley also had an endless supply of baggies, aluminum foil, wax paper, and other kitchen supplies that we kept and still have. She labeled the open boxes with "Open" on their ends in Sharpie, so that she'd know which box of the 5 to pull out when she needed some foil. I love this about Shirley; the consummate organizer, I can only imagine the sigh she'd let loose if she saw my sock drawer.
We also found the original landscape architecture plans, because Shirley and Larry planted the hillside and then fenced it from the deer. They didn't fence the property line; they just fenced the planted area. This means that we're treated to a picture window that looks out on mature plants but can still see the deer cruising by, because Shirley apparently realized that it was less important to fence off every last square foot than it was to watch the deer and other critters that live here while still keeping the flowers safe.
Shirley loved nature. You can tell not only by the way the house is designed, with indoor/outdoor spaces throughout, but because she also loved greeting cards. Boxes and boxes of greeting cards, some 40+ years old, were found here, and a lot of them contain wildlife scenes and bear the names of the various wildlife and marine charities to which she donated.
But one card we found, I should note, is quite naughty. Oh, Shirley, you didn't.
I like to think that this naughty card had friends that were sent to other blushing housewives around here, but something tells me that this card was just one that Shirley picked up along the way and kept for herself, always dreaming of sending it to someone, but not quite daring to.
Shirley did have a little bit of a wicked sense of humor, though, because in addition to that card we also found a set of peek-a-boo cocktail glasses with ladies of various professions on them (Hula Dancer, Secretary, Fairy), and those ladies don't have clothing on if you look at them from the inside of the glasses. What kinds of shenanigans went on around here in the 60's and 70's is a topic that can never be known by anyone but Shirley and Larry, but those glasses are one of the absolute greatest things we found in this house.
Most her 1939 classmates from Piedmont High had some sort of activity, sorority, sport or group listed, but Shirley does not. Maybe she was shy, or maybe she wasn't athletic, or maybe she just didn't see the point in padding a high school resume when she and her fellow female classmates were probably being trained as housewives and not much else. She was pretty, though (that's her in the middle), and has a lot of signatures in her yearbook, so it would seem that Shirley McDowell was well-liked by her peers. Shirley was a sentimentalist and kept lots of things that other folks throw away, but I hesitate to call her a pack rat because the things she kept were so organized and in such excellent working order. The 1960's Singer sewing machine still had its instruction manual, and the old Royal typewriter had ribbons and carbon paper, all labeled and organized, in the desk. Everything we found was like this: packed in original packaging, instruction manuals intact, and labeled in Shirley's handwriting, which was much the same as it is in her yearbook, only eventually, as the appliances and their assorted marketing materials became newer, the writing became a bit older, a bit more uneven, a bit wobblier; a testimony of times going by, as told by a stack of instruction manuals.
Both Larry and Shirley loved, loved, loved being out to sea. They had a boat called "Misty" and were members of the Encinal Yacht Club for years (we donated a bunch old yearbooks of yachts and other vintage Encinal paraphernalia to this club). Kay told us that, being unable to have children, Shirley and Larry essentially channelled that energy into their boat. We inherited marine maps, books, ropes, and a lot of other yachting-related odds and ends, all preserved and organized and labeled.
In their day Larry and Shirley enjoyed entertaining, and the wet bar housed not only a collection of naughty glasses (among others), but stacks of cocktail books with awesome 1960's imagery. We also found bottles of Trader Vic's mixers that might be older than I am.
And, more than anything, Shirley loved Larry. A box of their love letters and seemingly every birthday and anniversary card he ever gave her was testimony to that, as were the photos of them on various cruises. Those we were fortunately able to return to Shirley, without actually meeting her: we found them in the house before escrow closed, so put them out for her to find again.
The childhood portrait of Shirley and her pony is one of the things that I've been wondering whether or not I should get rid of, because the convex glass makes it look as though her eyes are following you around a room. But something still has me hanging onto it. I don't know what to do with it, exactly, but I feel strange tossing it out, so it lives in the office closet for now while we decide whether or not having it here is inviting Shirley to come back for a visit - which, having moved here from an 1898 Victorian full of mystery noises and voices and other unexplained phenomena, wouldn't be the strangest thing that's ever happened to us in our home, but truthfully we were sort of happy about leaving the paranormal behind for a change.
In any case, with nobody else to do it and being in the unique position to get up close and personal with Larry and Shirley through the belongings they'd accumulated here over 45 years, I figured it was only fitting to tell the world a little bit about Shirley Baldwin.
Shirley Baldwin was a thoughtful, sentimental and fastidious person who took great pride in and care of the things around her, and lived her life to the fullest with her husband.
I never met her, but I wish I had.
