15 Fall From the Attic Window? Song: “If I Fell”. Photo: House in MI.

This is the house (above) where I wrote “The Feelings Within”, “Misty Reflections”, “The Purple Palasades”, and more, in the late 1960‘s. I taped them on my father’s Wollensak reel to reel recorder in the music/tv room, which was right above our driveway while I was going to Grosse Pointe High School (which is in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan). In my tenth grade, there were over 6,000 students attending my Grosse Pointe high school. The next year, when the new high school was finished, my high school became Grosse Pointe South, and the new high school was Grosse Pointe North, which greatly alleviated the overcrowding. I miss my Grosse Pointe home and school, which was the best of my four high schools.

My dad published a monthly hospital leaflet called “Serving You”, and when he received them from the printers, he organized them in our attic, which stretched clear across the length of our house. Some weekends I stayed home, and didn’t go with him to and from Ohio while he built Brandywine Ski Area. But, I usually got to go, and often sat next to him with my hands on the steering wheel, and my foot on the gas pedal while he slept in the driver’s seat. I loved to drive the three hour drive on the turnpike from age 13, on.

One weekend when I stayed in MI, my job assignment was to bring down all of his tri-fold hospital brochures from the attic, and put them neatly into my mother’s station wagon, while keeping them all in perfect monthly order. The only things in our attic, were those brochures all stacked in chronological monthly delivery order inside my dad’s old yellow army footlocker which had a very tight top, and handles on both ends. With my dad gone, and not there to insist that I bring them all down “by hand” as he instructed me to, I had the bright idea to save a lot of time by bringing them all down all at once. They fit perfectly up to the very top of that footlocker. I discovered, however, that even with the footlocker empty, the footlocker would only fit down the folding attic ladder stairs, sideways, and with the top off. It simply wouldn’t fit between the folding metal guards on the wooden stairs. So, I had to either think of another way, or do it as my dad instructed me to do it… the agonizingly time consuming way… hand held. There had to be another way for a 15 year old to do this, instead of taking the whole weekend bringing them all down three floors by hand, while keeping them all organized in chronological order! As I pondered in thought, I happened to see a brand new clothesline hanging in the attic in an unopened clear plastic bag.

It made me think that if I were to attach one end of that clothesline to the footlocker end-handle, with the other end wrapped around me, and then have someone tip the footlocker out of the attic window, I could walk that footlocker down the outside of the house while walking across the attic floor using my body as a counter weight. However, I also thought about the possibility of that footlocker falling open, or crashing open on the driveway below, and that would take a heck of a lot more time getting those monthly editions of “Serving You” back in chronological order. I “nixed” using any of the house’s antique attic roof supports for a pulley system, because the wood up there was so sharply edged that it might have frayed the clothesline.

I didn’t want to spend the whole weekend bringing brochures down three stories by hand, and all of the way through the house. So, I took that rope out, neatly packed all of those tri-fold, dated, color brochures into that footlocker, banged the top on very tight, dragged it across the attic floor, opened the attic window, and balanced that fully packed footlocker on the windowsill. Then, I summoned my mother, and convinced her to climb up the wobbly old folded wooden stairs into the attic, and heartily assured her that it would be okay for me to do this “my way”.

My mother stood next to the footlocker balanced on the attic window. As she was telling me that she thought that this was definitely NOT a good idea, I checked that the rope was wrapped two times through the handle end of the footlocker. Then, I doubled it up around my waist, secured it through my blue jean belt loops, and for extra insurance that it wouldn’t break or fall, I tied some tight “Houdini” type knots, and wrapped them around both my arms and hands as I walked back to the spot where the footlocker originally sat. As I walked across the wooden attic floor dragging the clothesline attached around my body, it took up all the slack. After explaining to my mother, again, that I had accurately guessed the length that I needed, to stand away from the window inside the attic, so that, when she tipped the footlocker off the edge, I could simply walk it across the wooden attic floor, and gently walk it down to the ground, I talked her into sliding the full footlocker out past the other half of the windowsill, and gingerly, she did so. She pushed it off the windowsill.

Unfortunately, I overlooked two very important things in my haste to finish this time-consuming work assignment. 1. By doubling up the rope for strength, it made the length of the clothesline HALF of the length that I had originally estimated was the distance from the third floor window, to the ground, and…2. The weight of the footlocker, with all of the brochures inside, weighed more than I did. Because I just wanted to get the job done as quickly as possible, and because of how strong I felt I was, it completely outweighed any common sense, which I didn’t have much of as a teenager. (Did any of us?).

When I impatiently convinced my mother to tip the footlocker off of the window ledge, she reluctantly did so… but… then… Whoops… Instead of WALKING across the floor, I went SLIDING across that attic floor, straight toward the open window, as fast as that footlocker was falling toward the ground! I can never forget the priceless expression on my mom’s face as I slid high speed towards her, and that window. Fortunately, the footlocker hit the “skirt roof”, and stopped on the way down, at the same instant that I reached the open window frame… (If you look closely in the photo,

you can still see the indentation which the footlocker made hitting the ledge, even 50 years later.) Because of that ledge, the footlocker didn’t pull me out THROUGH the window, and I survived.

Lesson # ? learned: Do not try to lower a footlocker, that weighs more than you do, by attaching your body to it with a rope that is shorter than the distance you want to lower it, and/or drop it out of a 3rd floor window. This obviously confirms the fact that, contrary to what I felt (as most teenagers do), I did NOT know everything.