Two Lucky People - miltonsown.com

1 Two Lucky Peoplean excerpt from Two Lucky People pgs. 170-175 Friedman s memoirs about Capitaf and their love for New England{Rose} Although we bought the land in 1965, we did not start to build for a year. In dreaming about plans for our future home, we remembered Milton s enthusiasm about the lodge at the Freedom School in Colorado Springs. In 1963, he had given a series of lectures at the school, .. Milton stayed at the main lodge, which not only served as the chief meeting place for large groups, but was also Lefevre s home. Milton was enchanted with it, and shared his enthusiasm with me when he re-turned.. On a subsequent trip to the West Coast, we stopped off in Colorado Springs to visit the Freedom School.

2 I was as enchanted with the lodge as he had been.. This was not a conventional house. First of all it was hexagon. Each side was twenty-two feet long and it had a cathedral ceiling that was supported by a hexagonal fireplace in the center. In building our own house we used redwood plywood rather than logs for the siding, and modified the plans by adding a summer wing. The hexa-gon was well insulated and electrically heated for year-round use. It contained a very large living room, a small bedroom, one and a half baths, and a kitchen, just enough for the two of us. Lefevre s fireplace was constructed of fieldstone, ours of cement blocks faced with Ver-mont tricolored slate. It was not only a joy to look at, but extremely efficient.

3 The hexagon was heated with baseboard electric heating. It was an all-electric house because, at the time, the rate was lower the more electricity one used, very different from the situation later. On one occasion, when the power was off for nearly two full days, we were able to stay comfortable with the fireplace as our only source of heat because the house was so well insulated. The summer wing consisted of four bedrooms, each opening on a balcony with a magnificent view overlooking Lake Fairlee, two miles to the south. Milton used one as his study. The wing was not winterized; it was for summer use only. It was not the kind of house that country builders were accustomed to constructing but we were dreamers and our dreams came true.

4 We tried to get estimates from a couple of Hanover builders but were discouraged by the range of the estimates, so decided to take a chance with a local builder on a cost-plus basis. Building permits were not required for anything at this time in the New England countryside. We signed no contracts: everything was on trust, and we have never since had so satisfactory a result. I was fond of saying that the only papers we Two Lucky Peoplean excerpt pgs. 170-175 Friedman s memoirs about Capitaf and their love for New Englandsigned were a collection of little pieces that had my name at the bot-tom. There was one other paper we had to sign, and that was to give the electric company permission to put poles on our land to bring us electricity.

5 We tried to persuade them to put all the wires underground but they talked us out of that when they suggested that if something happened to the underground wire in the depth of winter, with the ground frozen and snow several feet deep, it would be very difficult to get the electric company to come to our aid promptly. We discovered later that there were many blackouts-generally because trees fell over wires. They did agree, however, to put the wires underground at the house level. We got used to the poles and they did not really interfere with our view. We hired a neighbor to cut down some oaks, birches, maples, and butternut trees in our forest, and persuaded a local lumber company to mill them and have the planks kiln-dried.

6 We then had the living room paneled in inch white oak, the kitchen in butternut, and used the birch and maple to have much of our furniture-beds, dressers, and so on-built in. The final result fully matched our dreams. As a result of our experience in Orford, I had two specific con-ditions. One, we would not start building until we were assured of enough water from a drilled well. Two, the house had to be mouse-proof. The first condition was satisfied when, after watching nervously while the well drillers went down one hundred and then two hundred feet without getting a trickle, suddenly, on September 16, 1966, the drill hit an aquifer yielding more gallons of water a minute than we could ever need.

7 Water rose in the well so that the pump was actually installed at the hundred-foot level. For the mouseproof proviso, I had only the contractor s assurance, but that was enough. We has a mouse in the house only once, when the house was broken into during our absence, and the door leading into the house from the basement was left wide open. After our dream house was finished we thought it would be nice to have a pond on our property. This was not a problem since there was a marshy area with natural springs below the surface. So we had a four-acre pond dug that was fourteen feet deep in the center and was fed entirely by springs. We stocked it with trout fingerlings two summers in a row but never ate a fish.

8 The neighbors were never sure whether an otter or a raccoon was the thief but we gave up after the second try. The man who put in our pond also raised mallards and he brought us four but they too did not survive. He clipped their wings so that they would not fly away while getting habituated to our pond, but unfortu-nately that meant that they also could not get away from predators who liked the taste of baby mallards. The pond was splendid for swimming and provided a home for our aluminum canoe. We named our dream house Capitaf, hoping that the royalties from our book Capitalism and Freedom would pay for it. And in the long run, we think they did. Our brief visit after it was completed in late 1967 was an experience that I have never forgotten.

9 We decided to spend the Christmas holidays at Capitaf before going to Washington, , for the American Economic Association meetings in Decem-ber 1967. (We had brought a load of furniture up from Chicago that spring.) Before we went to Washington, the weather was fair and there was no snow. On our return after the meetings, we discovered at the Lebanon airport that a heavy snow had fallen in the interim. That didn t keep us from doing a big shopping so we would not have to shop for the rest of our stay. Since the roads from the airport to the foot of our property had been plowed, we had no problem until we came to our own driveway, which had not been plowed, and on which the car immediately got stuck.

10 We had no choice but to take our bags of gro-ceries and start hiking up the quarter-mile, steeply-sloped driveway in our city clothes- high heels for me, no boots for either of us. I made it but have never forgotten the struggle. To add insult to injury, after I got to the top of the hill without falling, I landed in the snow about twenty feet before reaching the house!{Milton} I arranged to have my salary adjusted so that I could teach only two quarters and spend the rest of the year on research. Accordingly, we planned to spend June to January at Capitaf and January to June in Chicago. After two years of very heavy snow, however, with my spending too many hours clearing the snow from the driveway with our four-wheel-drive Blazer and snow plow, we decided to accept reality and change our schedule.