Houses in Antwerp

In last week’s column we talked about Dr. Caine and a letter from one of his granddaughters. After we go on north on North Main Street from the Caine’s house, the next house was the home of Harry Carr. He had married Florence West in the 1930’s. They had two boys, Wayne and Lee. They also had a daughter, but she only lived to be five or six. Harry and his father, Everett, managed the gas station uptown that is now the drive thru. At that time it sold Johnson’s Winged 70 gasoline and later on it became Hi-Speed by 1941.

The next house was home for the Ray Tracy family. He dealt in copper, aluminum and other metals. They had two daughters Martha and Sue and a son, Kelly. That little corner house was not there at that time. It was built after WWII by George Clemmer. If you look close that is in a ravine. It comes from the west and in behind three houses and then across Oswalt Street and down to that large hallow and to the river. That was called the Lindenmuth Ravine because it starts on the west side of the street by the Lindenmuth house.

On the north side of Irwin Street is where Ab Guysinger lived. He and Bessie had two daughters, Rosetta and Phyllis. Rosetta married Robert Boesch and Phyliss married George McKeever. I remember Phyliss was a fine athlete and a good basketball player. Mr. Guysinger was the manager of the Oasis Bar and Grill that had just been moved to the present location from over south where the Haver building now is.

The next house to the north was the home of Ray and Marsha Zuber. They had two daughters—Dorothy, who married Cloide Ehrhart and Zella, who married a man named Saldeen and lived in Twin Falls MN. Ray had a team of horses and a wagon and did dray work. The next house is the house of Max and Hope Smith. It was built a little later. They are fine folks and were selected as “King and Queen” for last summer’s “A Day in the Park”. They are both over 90 new and doing pretty darn good. They had a daughter who married John Chilicote. She had a son named Rob.

The next house was home to Dr. Spreagems. I know they had one son named Terry. Doc had his office down what is called now the Neat & Clean Laundry. Doc was called away to the Army at the start of WWII. Then in the 1940’s they moved to Cincinnati. He was a well liked man.

The next house was home to Tom and Phoebe Carr. They had Lyle, Maxine and Richard. Prof. Richard and his wife Marie Slushier still live in Antwerp.

The brick house is next and Mr. and Mrs. Orlando Foust lived there. But before that, in the 1930’s I think was the home of Mr. Hartwell. They had a couple of boys, I didn’t know them very well, but I think they drilled wells for drinking water.

The next house on the corner of Wilcox and North Main was where the Jenkins family lived. He was a engineer on the Pennsy Railroad. They had a daughter, Sue, and a son, Rex. Mrs. Jenkins was a daughter of George Clemmer, Sr. They moved to Ft. Wayne and a number of other folks have lived there. A family named McCreery and later on Jack and Annie Taylor.

The next house where the Gale Jordan family lives, was built by and the home for Frank Hemenover. He was a construction man and built a number of houses here in town. Frank and Ida had two daughters, one lived in Bell- flower, IL. Bertha married Don Hallock and lived here in town. That whole family has always been a part of my life. The next house was built by Bob Johnson in 1950 and wasn’t here at that time. One summer there was a Putt- Putt Golf Course on that lot. The next house is where John Hudson lived. He dealt in furs and hides. I remember he once gave me a quarter for a dead “a’possum”. They had one son named Bud.

The fourth house north on the east side of SR 49 after you pass Wilcox Street was the home of Oliver and Cleo Reeb. I think Dick Shull lives there now.

Oliver Reeb was the son of Mr. and Mrs. Adam Reeb, They had Thomas, Oliver, Mondus and Hattie. Hattie married Russell Brown and lived on the River Road west for years. All three of these boys were a vital part of the big baseball era in Antwerp in the 1920’s-1030’s. Tom was an outfielder and a good hitter. Mondus was a good pitcher. Later on he served as Paulding County Treasurer. Then their family moved to Texas. Oliver was a veteran of WWI. After his return he pitched a lot of baseball and was called to play in the Appalachian League. One hot day the weather suddenly changed from hot to chilly, he didn’t have a warm-up jacket and his shoulder stiff - ened up. He couldn’t throw right after that.

Later he married Cleo Burroughs in 1924, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Emory Burroughs. Oliver became Rural Carrier on Rt. 1 out of Antwerp and Cleo became a school teacher. Mostly she taught in the one room school houses in Scipio Township. I think they closed that school called Center Scipio in 1950. The Fett boys built that house in 1924. Oliver told me that 50 cents an hour was the wage at that time. They had a son, Maurice, born in 1934. Oliver and Cleo had a cottage up on Hamilton Lake in the Penn Park Area. That was good bass fishing all along that shoreline and we hit it pretty regular. Well, Pauline and I rented his cottage for a week one summer about 1950 and we took our bird along. We had a blue and white parakeet named Chippie. Chippie lived to be 13. (My friend, Lorsey, had a cockatiel that lived to be 29). Well, this bird could talk a little and he had a very sharp “wolf call” whistle. He had a routine of saying all his words and then three or four squawks and end up with a loud whistle that you could hear for a city block. We sat his cage out in the screened in porch and he would do his thing.

The people in the next cottage were fine folks who owned a hardware in Fort Wayne about where the Georgetown area is now. On this day, Mrs. Kruse had on a light-weight colored jacket that went about halfway to her knees but perfectly acceptable for wear at the lake or beach. She was an attractive lady.

I picked up a couple of casting rods and started for the steps that led down to the lake because about 4:30 in the afternoon the bass would start hitting. She met me, I guess about the property line and said, “I have more clothes on under the smock. She showed me that she had on a ladies bathing suit like they wore at that time. I nodded and she went back to her cottage and I just stood there. After a few seconds of bewilderment I went on down to the lake. In a minute or two I realized why she acted like that. She thought that I was whistling at her. She had heard our parakeet doing his thing! Well, I knew better than to try to tell her it was a bird that whistled at her and not I. Well, that lady went back to Fort Wayne and always thought, “that young whipper-snapper whistled at me”! I swear, I didn’t do it. Well, it’s like Ben Franklin said when he closed his first Five and Dime Store, “you win some and you lose some!”

The Rees had a boy, Maurice, born in 1934. As a teenager he chummed around with Terry Spraegems who was the son of Dr. Spraegems and a Perry boy whose father, Ralph, was with the Antwerp Furniture Co.

After Maurice graduated from high school, he attended a Barber College in Toledo and then went to barbering in Woodburn. He married Marilyn Garmen and they had two boys. Maurice passion was restoring old classic cars. He spent hundreds of hours restoring a couple of Model T Fords. With one Ford, he won 1st place in a National Meet in Detroit. He was rightfully proud of that achievement. After he passed away back in 1973, his wife donated both of those cars to the Sauder Museum in Archbold, Ohio. So if you visit this museum you will see both of those beautiful autos and a little sign in front of them that says “Donated by M. Reeb”. Yes, they are part of our history, and will continue to be so for years to come.

Oliver and Cleo Reeb, along with another lady, were killed east of Antwerp at the corner of the Harmann Road and US 24. This was in May of 1973. Their son, Maurice, died of cancer in December of that year. His family lived in Bryan after that. It was a very sad ending to one of Antwerp’s Historic Families.