The Billy Chair
A family friend used to refer to our place as “the house of chairs.” We do have quite a few of them I guess, though often at our Friday Night gatherings there don’t seem to be enough. At least not in the library which is the central ‘visiting spot’ of the house. On those occasions when there are more people than seats, we round up chairs from other room until we are out of space, at which point the most agile tuck down onto the carpet.
Perhaps our friend called it that because so many of the chairs have a story. There’s the chair with the caned seat that once belonged to Reverend Yeats. He lived here at the turn of the last century when the house was still the parsonage for the Baptist church across the street. Years later, his daughter remembered that he sat in that particular chair to write his sermons and she gave the chair to my mother. “It belongs in the old parsonage,” she said.
And there’s the chair that the Headmaster of Roxbury Latin School sent to my dad as a ‘thank you’ for hosting him here in Oysterville many years ago. Dad had graduated from Roxbury Latin in 1928 (I think) and, though he remembered the school fondly, he strongly advised me to take Spanish, not Latin, when I reached high school age. In retrospect, it’s one piece of paternal advice I wish I hadn’t followed.
In one of the upstairs bedrooms are two wicker chairs that my grandmother brought from their California home when they moved here in 1902. They were part of a living room suite that included a settee (which is also upstairs) and a large round table (which is no more). For some reason, my folks used it as an outdoor piece, oblivious to the fact that wicker and rainy weather are not compatible.
Medallion on the Billy Chair
Then, there are the captain’s chairs my grandfather favored, the Morris chair that Nyel always chooses and… But of all the chairs in in the house, my favorite is the “Billy Chair.” That’s what it has always been referred to and by the time I was old enough to care about why, my mother couldn’t remember. It’s a wooden rocking chair with two distinctive decorative medal medallions – one on each ‘ear’ at the top end of the arms. “Those medallions show it’s a Billy Chair,” was all she could tell me.
Just last spring on a Community Historian field trip to the Colbert House in Ilwaco, Parks Interpreter Donella Lucero pointed out a table “made by the Billy Brothers.” My ears perked right up but, unfortunately, her information came from a piece of paper taped to the underside of the table. She didn’t know anything more definitive, but thought the brothers were furniture makers who lived and worked in Ilwaco in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.
Somehow, in my mind, I have them a bit confused with the Keno twins on Antiques Roadshow – you know, the ones who always advise not to refinish old furniture for fear of lessening its value. The Billy brothers and the Keno twins would be glad to know that our old Billy rocker is still going strong and with every nick and scrape of the last hundred years still intact! It’s probably where I’ll be sitting next time you come to call!
Dollink, it’s all about chairs, isn’t it? The Red House has some memorable ones, too, especially the one that Aunt Martha (Whitcomb) Mitchell decimated on a fit of laughter when she fell back into the closet splintering the rocking chair and amazing all we children as we could see, above her flailing legs, her garters!