[In May 2005, during Lucy-Desi Days over Memorial Day weekend, Mary and Bill Rapaport -- she's a Lucy-Desi Center Board member and both of them are big fans and Jamestown, N.Y. area supporters -- were kind enough to invite me to sit in on an interview they did with Jamestown's Post-Journal. My transcript follows.]
Mary: I was sick about six years ago with cancer, and I started watching a lot of Lucy on TV during the night…I always watched Lucy, but I was watching more because it was always on during the night, and it got me through a lot of stuff.... My husband got me a membership to the Lucy-Desi Museum, which I found on the Web, and our involvement just grew and grew. I started collecting Lucy memorabilia and current merchandise as well. I come down to Jamestown often on weekends and help out in the Museum Gift Shop, which I love to do.
Lucy's (Celeron, N.Y.) house (above) went up for sale, and Bill and I decided we didn’t want anyone else to have the house except the Museum, so we put in an offer and bought the house. We’re renovating the house back to 1922, when Lucy lived there. As original as we can get it. Fred Ball and Cleo Smith (who were here this weekend) are going to help us get the inside of the house perfectly correct, with their memories [of living there] and then we’re going to donate the house back to the Museum so that everyone can enjoy it. New York interior designer Eric Cohler (who’s also designing the new Museum headquarters) is coming tomorrow to help us with colors and period furniture, and draperies, fabric and wallpaper, so that we can get the house as close to the 1920s as possible.
Bill and I talk a lot about Jamestown needs a lot of help coming back, there are beautiful buildings downtown and such nice people here – we really wanted to help in some way, and when we heard the recreated sets from the 2001 50th anniversary "I Love Lucy" traveling exhibit were available....
Bill: We met with them in Denver and the Museum made arrangements to get them at a very good price, but they needed to raise the cash to purchase them, and a place to put them, because the new Museum space isn’t available yet -- and even when it is, if they put the sets in there, there won’t be room for much else. At about that same time, the old Rite Aid building (in downtown Jamestown) became available, and Ric Wyman [the Museum's executive director) had the idea of putting the two together. He approached us....
What I like about the location is the Grant building (where the new Museum will be) is very close by. The two will be anchors for the entire downtown area when they’re done. We had been planning to help with the sets anyway, so this was something just a little bit extra for us to do.
I used to live in Jamestown, in the late 70s, early 80s, and at that time Jamestown was still a vibrant small town. Twenty-five years later, it’s a shell of its former self. When someone told me, 25 years ago, that Lucille Ball was born here…and asked "how come they don’t do more to celebrate that?"...None of my friends knew or cared about it at the time…so I have a kind of personal link to all of it. The various foundations have been very positive. It's all going to help open up downtown, get more people jobs, etc. It needs to happen now...that’s what will bring people and businesses into town.
Mary: After reading a lot of the books about Lucy, and then you walk into the house, go upstairs and stand in her bedroom, and you look out the back window...right now you can see the lilacs, they’re in bloom. You are her standing there…you are looking at exactly what she said she saw, 'cause it’s still there. Her linoleum is still on the bedroom floor. She walked on that with her bare feet. And so…you’re there. Soon it'll be everyone’s view. When you walk in the front door of Lucy’s house, and you know that the rod that’s there (separating the hall and the living room) was used to hang a curtain, for when she would come downstairs and perform, you cannot walk in the house without stopping, looking at the rod, and envision it happening. And then, of course, I have pictures of her in the house from [much later] where she was explaining to her husband…to Desi…about how all that worked. They're standing in the front hallway.
It’s going to be hard to let the house go but it belongs to the Museum. It’s been a series of discoveries. There’s a story, in fact, Lucie Arnaz told me this last night, there was always a mirror hanging over the kitchen sink, and Lucy used to do the dishes while acting into the mirror, with DeDe (her mother) admonishing Lucy to finish the dishes. But Lucy was having too much fun contorting herself in the mirror. When we bought the house, we found there wasn’t a mirror above the sink, there’s a window. Our carpenters took the back siding off (the house), and found from the frame there were two original windows, but neither in the middle, which means that someone had replaced the middle section with a window (where the mirror hung in Lucy’s day) and took the other two windows out…So we’ve now reversed that, so there will be a mirror above the kitchen sink, and the other (surrounding) windows are back in now.
Little details like that add to the original feeling we’re trying to give the house. I heard a story today that Lucy’s father had made her a dollhouse…and while the guys were digging up the front porch, they found a tiny cast-iron frying pan, all rusted, and a child’s doll house. We have no way of knowing, of course, but we’re going to assume (laughing) it was Lucy’s. We’re going to start renovations on the inside right after the Lucy-Desi days, once we get Eric’s input…we’re leaving it all up to him.
Copyright 2005 by Michael Karol; no text may be reprinted nor pictures taken from this site without the express permission of the author or copyright owner.
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Take me home, please.