PORTLAND, Maine (May 29, 2017) — Landlord stories are rarely nostalgic. I was fortunate to close my decade-long apartment period with two amazingly positive experiences. When I moved to Portland, Maine 35 years ago — abandoning Greater Boston for what I then considered the ends of the Earth — I lived the first 2-3 weeks at the expense of my new employer, in the city’s lovely West End. The leafy environs there reminded me of the Back Bay. I lived above the carriage house attached to the super cool Pomegranate Inn, a B&B owned by aging, urban hipsters and strewn with modern art.
My studio over the carriage house was so spacious and funky, I fantasized about staying there forever. I met Landord Hall of Fame nominee Frank Rodway only because, eventually, I had to find my own place.
Back in 1992, Frank was owner and proprietor of Thomas Brackett Reed House, a 19th century brownstone once inhabited by and eventually named for a former Maine Congressman and Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. When I met him, Frank was a small, trim, 60-something fellow with a vaguely military bearing. Before he walked me upstairs to the third-floor apartment then available for rent, I mentioned my two cats, Scott and Zelda. “Oh, well, we don’t take pets here,” he said.
Frank showed me the place anyway, which gave me the chance to pursue an historical charm offensive. The 1-bedroom space was great: 13-foot, pressed-tin ceilings; windows stretching from the baseboards to somewhere above my head; hardwood floors; $525/month — heated! What’s more, I had just finished The Proud Tower, Barbara Tuchman’s magisterial history of Thomas Brackett Reed’s very heyday: turn of the 20th century, when America was slowly transitioning from insular, adolescent republic to imperialist bestrider of worlds.
We mixed it up, Frank and I, trading Mark Hanna anecdotes, book citations and recommendations. Half an hour later, as he and I were walking downstairs, I mentioned that it was too bad about the cats. “Oh, don’t worry about them,” he said.
Landlord Stories: In Memoriam
Frank Rodway passed away this past January at the ripe old age of 91, the result of a fall on icy pavement as opposed to simple old age. I was among five former residents of Thomas Brackett Reed House who showed up to his memorial service in South Portland. I mean, who does that? Or rather, what sort of landlord inspires that sort of gesture?
TBR House was a different sort of rental property: An historic landmark, for starters, watched over by a guy, Mr. Rodway, who knew the history but also how to engender esprit de corps.
His quite elegant building had a guest apartment on the first floor that tenants could rent for $25 a night. I routinely stashed my parents and visiting Greater Bostonians there. Every Christmas, that guest room and the entire first floor played host to Frank’s holiday party, a shindig that routinely proved the event of the season. Current and former residents alike renewed acquaintances and partook of Frank’s legendarily strong punch.
I should never have known Steve Weatherhead and his lovely wife Annetta; they departed TBR just before I arrived. But I met them at these holiday parties, along with eventual golfing buddy Michael Moore. At Frank’s funeral service, Steve recalled these parties among other things, but not before answering the question that opened his remarks: “I mean, who goes to their former landlord’s funeral?” Well, if it’s Frank Rodway, you go. He was one of a kind, as this obit (clearly written by the man himself) attests.
All about the Eaves
Another former TBR denizen in funeral attendance was one Mary Fowler, my upstairs neighbor and the first real friend I made in Maine. She remains one, but I thought of her again, in the immediate aftermath Frank’s memorial, when Mary Tyler Moore passed away. Mary Fowler and I had a running joke, each of us claiming to be the Mary to the other’s Rhoda.
“Hal,” she would start in, with not inconsiderable finality, “Rhoda was the loud Jew and Mary was the tactful WASP. And my name is Mary. Clearly, I am Mary and you are Rhoda in this relationship.”
“But May-uh,” I’d respond in my best Brooklyn accent, “while all that is true, you live upstairs in the apartment crowded by charming eaves, while I reside in the open and airy apartment downstairs. Cultural heritage has nothing to do with it. It’s all about upstairs, downstairs and picture windows. All the action takes place here, in my apartment. There are no eaves here. These are 13-foot, pressed tin ceilings. It’s all about the eaves!”
These weren’t idle observations because, in my house growing up — a place wherein very little commercial television was deemed suitable for viewing — The Mary Tyler Moore Show and, for that matter, The Dick Van Dyke Show were both sanctioned programming.
I’m confident that I know every last episode of the MTM Show, from the moment she walked into WJM with her long hair and hippie-short skirts (“Murray, get me that list of words Ted mispronounced on the show last night.” Get a load of the top one, Lou. “Chicago?!”), to the episode Rhoda moved out — and onto her own show. I remember when Mary and her ’70s bob moved to that high-rise, modern apartment downtown. Characters came and went, got their own gigs (“Phyllis”), became more prominent over time (Sue Ann Nivens was just a bit player at first), or fell away without so much as a goodbye — sorta like folks who eventually hid their lives away by moving out of Thomas Bracket Reed House.
I absorbed dozens of sitcoms through the years, some darned good, some quite retrograde. But never did I attach myself emotionally to characters quite like I did with Mary Tyler Moore. I was young and impressionable, but when Gavin McLeod took over as captain of the execrable Loveboat, I felt culturally betrayed. It seemed beneath him — then I learned he was born again… Rhoda had, by contrast, gone off to New York City, got married, then divorced, and pretty much stayed in character all along. That spinoff made sense; that’s what people did. That’s what Mary Fowler, Steve and Annetta, Michael Moore and I all did.
When the curtain finally came down on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, after delivering a predictably classic final episode (not an easy trick; try watching the last episode of M*A*S*H or Happy Days), I had trouble adjusting. MTM’s turn as the icy mom in the film Ordinary People was clearly great acting, a little too great. Apparently the real Mary would later develop (then beat) a drinking problem, too. It was all too much. What Mary needed was a good Christmas party where we viewers could get together with all the actors and sort the real from the imagined.
Lifestyle Cardboard Cutouts
The basement at Thomas Bracket Reed House was a dark and dank place, a little dank for storage it seems to me now. Against the musty north-facing wall, a bank of coin-operated washers and dryers rattled and hummed. We residents were obliged to go down at least once a month. One of those times I was taken aback by Frank Rodway lurking in a corner.
Actually, it wasn’t Frank but a life-sized carboard cutout of the man, a vestige of his own, unsuccessful run for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1966 (“Let’s be Frank: Rodway for Congress!”). I was quickly taken with this black-and-white rendering and asked Frank if I could rescue it from obscurity and keep it in my apartment. He seemed flattered, assented, and there it stood in a corner of my living room for most of the three years I lived in TBR House. I even took it with me to the place I ultimately shared with Sharon, once we got engaged.
Marriage reveals a lot about a person. Like good taste. Turns out that a goodly portion of the furnishings I brought to the marriage Sharon never truly loved. The Frank Rodway cutout she found particularly “creepy,” apparently. Somewhere along the line, this admittedly bizarre tribute to my last landlord got junked.
I thought about all this while sitting in the South Portland funeral home listening to Frank’s many nieces and nephews (he had but one daughter, who died young) tell stories about their sui generis uncle. Frank may have been a bit older, Mary Tyler Moore probably a bit taller. My lasting image of him was cardboard; of her, pixelated celluloid. But they now reside together for all time in some pressed-tin corner of my mind.
