[MR] Another Master Daniel tale, anyone?

[rmhowe]

My parents and the Barretts bought an old estate once belonging
to a former member of the Confederate Cabinet in Flat Rock, NC.

Unfortunately it was too unsound to restore, and was later demolished
for a housing tract and lake.

The house and outbuildings were full of 19th C antiques which the
Barretts sold in their antique store. Mr. Barrett was a contractor.

One of the outbuildings, perhaps a former servant quarters, was
being explored by my mother - maybe 150 lbs and Mrs. Barrett,
who was closer to 200. Mrs. Barrett walked across the middle
of the floor just fine.

Mom followed and didn't.

She went through to her armpits and found herself hanging
over a thirty foot deep well under the floor.

Eventually they got her out - after she had time to get fairly
mad about the whole situation.

Her theory always was Mrs. Barrett must have had -much- larger feet.
They seemed to grow in size each time my mother recounted the tale
until they sounded much like snowshoes.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

When I was a sophomore at NCSU (1971-2) I was one of five guys who 
took an old laundry, a pizza inn, and a pool room and made it into 
the first Darryl's Restaurant. This would be the one at 1907
Hillsborough St., Raleigh. The underside of the buildings in that 
block has a series of rooms connected by tunnels students lived in 
in the earlier part of the century. There was a trap door access 
over one of the rooms (with a bunkbed in it no less) in what ended 
up being the men's room of the restaurant.

I busted out the huge archways with a sledgehammer between the
buildings where the bar and passage are. Took me two days through
eighteen inches of brick. Then we spent a few days cleaning bricks
and shovelling what was left into trucks. The base of the bar was
built out of the antique bricks. I never noticed what happened to
what was left.

One of the nicest guys I ever worked for was Thad Eure Jr., one
of the three co-owners of the restaurant, and the son of the
longest ever Secretary of State for N.C.. The same guy who they
have the big charity walk for each year here. Died about fifteen
years ago.

Poor Thad was standing quietly at the urinal one day minding his 
own business when the maw of hell opened beneath him and he dropped 
about eight feet onto a pile of the disappeared bricks. I suppose 
his partner had had the bright idea of dumping them through the 
trap door and vinyl tiling over it. It took Thad a while to recover. 
(Damned shame it was him and not the responsible party. The same 
guy let off support on a jack holding a rack of four
big barrels we were attaching to the ceiling and damned near
crushed two of us under it. General lack of attention and
intelligence.)

The fickle finger of fate strikes - and having struck moves on.

Now a certain little woman I know has this interesting problem:
Every now and then the floor just jumps up and whacks her in the ass.
I must say that is fairly unique. Not everyone ticks off floors.
Perhaps they do it for amusement. I mean - who knows what floors
think about, see, or resent? I'm not sure just what the moral
lesson could be here, but there must be one.

Me? Well, from time to time the air sucks me sideways or backwards...
Getting old is fun. I'm still surfing stairs more than 40 years later.
I really need to replace that handrail to the basement the carpenter
took out a year ago and install a rapelling harness.

Magnus

Rutlands at aol.com wrote:
> 
> Unto the Kingdom's populace does James of Rutland send greetings.
> 
>      As some of you know, Daniel and I have bought the ramshackle little
> cottage at the foot of our driveway, and are in the midst of renovating it
> for a rental property.  The New House is not coming as fast as it was
> supposed to, and Dan is not feeling well-- and therein lies a tale.
> 
>      Master Darwin-In-Action Daniel and the Flapping Floorboards of Fate,
> or,  Gravity Works Whether You're Paying Attention Or Not.
> 
>     Seems Dan & I met with the contractor Thanksgiving AM at the new house.
> Under half of the main room of said house is crawl space: a five foot tall
> basement under the rest, dug to put the furnace in when they got rid of the
> wood stoves.  The floor on the N half of the room was termite-damaged, and I
> was supposed to take it out.  So with Dan standing right beside me, I asked
> the contractor to take his Sawsaw (sp?) and cut between & parallel to the
> joists.  This would allow me to take the boards out in little pieces, as
> opposed to the whole boards-- much less hassle.  Dan was right there &
> agreed.  He then watched the cuts being made.  Then he went down to the
> cellar to disconnect the furnace pipe (we trashed it & are putting in gas)
> and I stepped along a joist over to the part over above the crawl space &
> started taking out floorboards.  From the cellar I hear, do you MIND?  That's
> two feet from me....
>      So Dan comes back up, and nothing will do but he has to look at the hole
> I started.  He walks out over the "cellar" section, not on a joist but on the
> sawed place between two of them.  The whole section of floor flips up and Dan
> goes down between the joists to about halfway between waist and armpit.
> Screeching like a banshee-- if you can imagine a five-year-old banshee.  I go
> over and try to haul him out- "Give me your hand."  NoOoOoOoOo.....
> I'm having trouble lifting him- and then I realize-- "LET GO OF THE JOISTS
> ALREADY!!! "   ...... NoOoOoOoooooo.....   He got out of it remarkably
> lightly, all things considered.  Lovely goose egg on L leg, and as of today,
> more bruising was still showing up on the legs, but nothing pulled, torn, or
> broken, so saith the Dr.--
>      Will end with the old proverb about "we grow too soon oldt und too late
> schmart"...James of Rutland.
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