The following was written by my late wife Elaine. She wrote a long book, a diary really, from which this is one passage:
After we were settled in the new house and there was more time, I thought about piano teaching again. I had found out that Monroe Co. no longer hired a piano teacher for private lessons in schools, which I was hoping to do. The only piano teacher in Union then was Miss Sadie Mann, an elderly lady who became a close friend.
When we first met, she assured me that there was indeed room for another piano teacher and she encouraged me to take students right away. At an auction sale of her things after her death, nobody else bid on her 15-volume set of hard-covered music encyclopedias (International Library of Music for Home and Studio), so they came to me for $40, and it’s been helpful to have good reference material at hand, and hundreds of famous piano pieces at many levels: a fitting musical reminder of Sadie. I still miss her. I also bought her set of silver-plated serving spoons and forks which almost match my sterling set, and a china cabinet with glass lift-up shelf fronts where I keep my prized family things.
I looked for a place in Union where students could come for lessons, and we bought the discontinued “colored school” – which is what it was called in the days of segregation – on the road to our house, but just three doors from Union. After its use as a school, it was a storage place for the Board of Education; then it was a junk shop owned by an absentee landlord in Lewisburg, and we bought the building from him. We had to find a good way to get rid of an old VW bus on the front lawn, occupied by a “homeless” man. Dave paid him $50 for the van and moved it up the road to a junk yard. Sometime later, Dave saw the van upside down with a sign, “No Trespassing” placed on it by the Junk Yard owner; the van’s ex-occupant had tried to move back in.
Dave and Jonathan worked hard creating this very nice place, both inside and out. We wallpapered the two rooms I used for the teaching studio and the waiting room. Dave and Jonathan used their carpentry skills and strong backs to build pillars and half-gables, wooden rails on the porch, and a flower box for the wall. They added wrought-iron railings on the stairs.
To be continued…
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About the Author: RD Blakeslee is a nonagenarian in West Virginia who built his net worth by only investing in that which can be enjoyed during acquisition and throughout life, as opposed to papers in a drawer, like stocks and bonds. You can read more about him here.
Photos: Courtesy of the Blakeslee Family
Some 35 years later, that old schoolhouse has undergone another “repurposing”: It has been expanded and is a now thriving church.
I hope that means there is still beautiful music inside the building.
Thank you for sharing.
Elaine and I attended a worship service there after the transition, and we and the congregation sang the old Baptist hymns we learned in our childhood.