Transcription
Irene
Wednesday, 12-15-76.
Dear Family,-
When I had to move out of my Room 8 at Wilson’s because they close down all their cabins and motel rooms at the end of deer season every year, I started the evening before and then spent most of the next day packing up for the temporary move to the Blue Gables Motel in Cedarville and then the permanent move to Akron for the winter. During the 7 months I am Up North, my Room 8 is my office (I bring up from Akron all the files I’ll be using,as [sic] well as my check books, savings account books and C.D. accounts, and of course my trusty IBM electric typewriter, my black & white TV (as yet I have not endulged [sic] myself with the luxury of a color set), my radio and other items I use almost daily. My Volare station wagon is smaller than my previous Chevie wagons, so I had to leave behind a few things that I’ll bring back to Akron when I go up for the Annual Ice Carnival in February. Whereas it took me a full day to pack up, it has taken me five days to unpack and get reasonably settled ((9 suitcases, 2 large boxes, several small boxes and packages, and my heavy typewriter and TV). I/still have not gone through all the several piles of my accumulated mail, but just as I read through our 1915 Class Notes in the back numbers of the Alumni Weekly, so did I also go through the Class Notes in the back numbers of The Lawrentian, and I am glad to give you the following from the Lawrenceville Class of 1945:
BILL SEIBERLING has returned from 14 years of foreign assignments with the Goodyear International Corp. in Colombia, Turkey and Taiwan to live in Freeport, Illinois as Production Manager of the local Kelly Springfield Plant. Bill’s children are all in college here and he is enthusiastic about settling down to small-town U.S. living.
Bill, your Class Secretary is Rene G. Varley, P.O. Box 405, Montross, Virginia, 22520. Right after his news about you, he wrote: “Which brings me to a point of concern over the fact that so few of our classmates are sending in word of themselves. You may have noticed no L’45 notes in the last issue. The reason was nothing had been received.” I know how our Class Secretary is after us to send in news not only about ourselves but also about any classmates with whom we correspond, so how about coming to the rescue of your Secretary with a good news story about your Heavensworth [sic] children.
Now, while I am on the subject of Class Notes, I may delay the mailing of this F.L. in order to attach to it a copy of an article written for our Lawrenceville Class Notes of 1911, ending with how Ab Walters, who was on all of my Cedar Lodge house parties, was the one who gave Mother the Anglo-Saxon name Stan Hywet, meaning stone quarry or, more literally, “stone is here.”
Yours for treasuring the friendships of your school days,
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Cindi RokeLanguage
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The following was published in The Lawrentian in connection with the Class Notes of the Class of 1911:
STAN HYWET HALL
The Ancestral Home of Four Alumni
One of the great mansions of this country is Stan Hywet (pronounced Stan Heewet), the acknowledged authentic example of English Tudor Revival architecture of the Elizabethan era. It was built in 1911-1915 in Akron, Ohio, by Frank A. Seiberling, who at the turn of the century founded the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co., and later the Seiberling Rubber Co. Mrs. Seiberling was an artist, a patroness of music and an admirer of great architecture. During the building of this manor house of sixty-five rooms with its beautiful lagoons, gardens, and supplemental buildings on an estate of thirty-eight acres, she travelled extensively with Mr. Seiberling in Europe seeking and collecting rare art treasures, tapestries, and authentic furniture for the mansion. The result was not only a residence but also a seat of culture where many leaders of industry, music, and art were entertained. Over the main door entrance was inscribed in stone “Non Nobis Solum” (Not for us Alone). This truly represented the Seiberling intention of building this pillar of Americana.
This was the boyhood home of the following four Lawrenceville Alumni brothers, all Dickenson House – Willard P. Seiberling ’11 and his brothers Fred ’08, J. Penfield ’17 and Frank A. Jr. ‘27 (Fred deceased). After the death of their father in 1955, the family turned the mansion over to a cultural and educational foundation to operate the estate as a tax-free public shrine under the name of The Stan Hywet Foundation. Recently all the rare interior furnishings were also given to the foundation. It is open to the public at certain hours and thousands of visitors are now enjoying this memorial to American industry and culture.
An interesting Lawrenceville sidelight of this vignette developed as it was being written. Ab Walters ’11 was a close friend of Willard (Shorty) Seiberling and visited him a number of times during the building of Stan Hywet. On completion, the Seiberling family asked friends to submit a possible name for the mansion. Ab was taking an English philology course in college and became interested in Anglo-Saxon terms and words. The mansion was built on the site of an old stone quarry, the Anglo-Saxon word for which is “Stan Hywet.” Ab submitted this name, and it was chosen by the family from a dozen submitted as being both applicable and euphonious.
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Dear Family:
Particularly because of the last paragraph of the above, recording the personal history connected with the naming of our home, this should be filed in your “Treasure Chest” along with the Stan Hywet brochure I gave to each of you last year. If Mother and Father had not made it possible for me to have House Parties up at Cedar Lodge, and if Ab Walters had not been on each of those House Parties, our home would have been given some other name, not as appropriate as Stan Hywet.
In gratitude to my Lawrenceville and Princeton classmate, Ab Walters,
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Cindi RokeLanguage
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