The El Reno House, Part II

When people found out I lived in a house that was over 100 years old, some of them ask me if I was worried about the house being haunted. The truth is, in El Reno, I was much more afraid of the living than the dead.

There are several low income sections of El Reno, and on the first of each month (when welfare checks arrive), some of those people liked to buy beer from the convenient store near my house and then drink it on my property. On the first few days of every month, I would find beer cans, paper sacks, and occasionally sleeping people in my yard.

Behind our house was a small shed, with tin walls and a dirt floor. As the nights got colder, we began seeing evidence that someone was sleeping in our shed. I made a point to shut the door each night before bed, and each morning the door would be open. Inside the shed we frequently found empty beer cans, used cans of paint, glass jars of gasoline, pillows, and other random objects (none of which were mine). I put a padlock on the door once and someone broke it off. We decided that if people were that desperate for a place to sleep, better in the shed than in our house.

And then, while mowing the lawn, Susan discovered a “sleeping pad” someone had set up between our house and the evergreen bushes that were next to it. That was a little unnerving, especially since the space was right below our bedroom window. This happened during the colder months. In the spring and summer, drunks would simply pass out on our sidewalk. Eh, live and let live.

After six months, the novelty of living in a big, old house where nothing worked wore off. It wasn’t as if we were living in a 3,000 square foot house; we were living in an 800 square foot apartment inside a 3,000 square foot house. Staying in one small area made it easier to keep warm/cool. With straw, newspaper and corn husks as insulation, the house was difficult to heat and cool. During the winter we ran electric heaters to stay warm; during the summer, we used box fans in front of a window air conditioner unit to keep cool. If you weren’t directly near one of those two things, you froze in the winter and burned up in the summer. And sometimes, you did anyway. There wasn’t a ceiling fan in the house, nor was there a ceiling strong enough to support one. Every single window and door whistled when the wind blew.

We rarely ventured out of our apartment into the other parts of the house. I can’t remember going upstairs more than just a couple of times, and I don’t think I went in the studio apartment more than once. When it got cold during the winter, we turned over the entire back apartment (a living room, a kitchen, a dining room and a bedroom) to our stupid dog, Leroy, who ungratefully filled it with poop and fleas. In retrospect, it wasn’t one of our better ideas. The carpet in that part of the house was a dark green color, which I think made Leroy feel more comfortable while pooping on it.

As might be expected for being 127 years old, the El Reno house had few amenities. As I mentioned yesterday, there were five bathtubs in the house, but not a single shower. The house pretty much always smelled like natural gas and I’m sure there were leaks all over the place. There was no dishwasher, nor was there a washer or dryer. I’m not sure there was even a place to hook one up, and if there had been, we barely had any water pressure anyway. Susan did all our laundry at the 24 hour laundromat near our house, which was where all the beer drinkers and paint huffers hung out when they weren’t living in our shed. Without a working dryer in the house (my go to technique for de-wrinkling clothes), we went to work wearing wrinkled clothes more than once. I actually got written up at work once for wearing a wrinkled shirt.

Although we had no dishwasher, washer, or dryer, we did have an oven. (Actually, five.) One evening while I was watching the Chicago Bulls play in the NBA finals, I heard what sounded like a shotgun going off in the next room. Susan had tried to light the gas oven with a match, and came pretty close to blowing her face off. She was still stunned when she walked into the living room. Her hair was smoking and the blast had burned off her eyebrows. She looked like Daffy Duck did after being shot in the face by Elmer Fudd.

Susan and I lived at 202 S. Barker for almost a year. In August, 1996, I accepted a position and moved to Spokane, Washington. I loaded my computer, some wrinkled clothes, and a bunch of CDs into my Dodge Neon and drove 1,800 miles northwest to start my new job. Susan stayed behind and, with help from friends and family, packed up all our belongings and began the process of selling our house. I definitely got the better end of that deal.

Susan moved to Spokane a month after I did, but before the El Reno house had sold. Now the way I tell the story is, while the two of us were in Washington, the realtor let a potential buyer cut holes in the wall to check out the condition of the plumbing pipes. While banging around on the pipes, the potential buyer ended up busting an upstairs pipe, which caused the upstairs to flood and the downstairs ceiling to cave in. If you ask Susan, none of that happened and I am bat shit insane. She literally has no recollection of any of that happening, and I can’t believe she doesn’t remember it.

Either way, the house was purchased by an architect who planned to restore it back to it’s original state. I guess you could call it the House of Dreams, because we sure dreamed about getting rid of it! When we originally bought the house we learned that one of the other bidders was the church across the street, who had hoped to bulldoze it and turn it into a parking lot. Things would have been a lot simpler for everyone if that had happened.

According to the original blueprints, the house was originally two-stories and square. The side apartment (that Susan and I had lived in), the rear apartment (where Leroy the dog lived) and the upstairs studio apartment had all been added on over the years. A few years later when we revisited the house, everything that wasn’t original had been removed. What remained was a small, two-story house. The siding was removed, all the wood and windows were replaced, and then … nothing.

I took that picture back in 2003. Here is a picture of the side of the house when we lived there, back in 1995.

And here is a picture of the same side of the house in 2003, while construction was still on going.

Note that everything to the right of the bay window is now gone.

As far as we can tell, all the external wooden walls were replaced with new wood and covered with new siding. That was done around the time these newer photos were taken (2003). We still drive by the house from time to time, but we’ve never seen anyone ever living in it. We’re not sure why someone bought it, restored it, and has left it empty for fifteen years. Maybe nobody told them about the drunks hanging out in the shed.

So anyway, that’s the story of 202 S. Barker in El Reno, Oklahoma. And here is a picture of the house from Google Maps, still unfinished, in 2010.

UPDATE

As of 2017, it appears renovations have almost been completed. All the old construction has been stripped, and the house has been repainted. The porch that was once so rotted my foot went right through has been replaced. Most of the trim has been reattached added to the house. There’s a color blemish on the side where a second porch and door once stood. The old tin shed out back was torn down and replaced with nicer winter accommodations for the alcoholics and paint huffers.

Twenty years after we moved out it still doesn’t appear anyone else has moved in.