The history and myth of my home and hill

On the top of a hill in the South Hills, 20 miles outside of Pittsburgh, PA, there is house that has been there longer than any of the others that line the gravel driveway. It is a big, brown, old, house with redwood siding. It doesn’t sit neat and square and small like some houses. It spreads its self out across the top of the hill, rectangles and ovals and squares stuck together.
The most conspicuous room has the terribly original moniker of “The Front Room.” It could also be called the First Room, or the Hunting Lodge, if my family had been more poetic, and perhaps more descriptive in its naming. The Front Room was built two years before the rest of the house in 1939, and it doesn’t entirely match. It rather looks as if the rest of the house grew out of it, like a plant growing from a seed. It is an oval shaped room, the floor covered in red tiles, and except for two doors and the stone fireplace, it is all windows. They are great big, old windows, very tall and hard to open. When people first see the room at night, they find the almost 360 degrees of windows ominous. Anything could be waiting out there, surrounding the house. But in daytime it is light and bright, with views of mostly just the woods and deer and turkeys.

The Front Room never made sense to me as a hunting lodge. The idea of a hunting lodge suggests something along the lines of my Grandmother’s Montana mountain cabin, but probably even more rugged. It should be made of logs with almost nothing decorative or pretty. Only practical things, and plenty of fur and skin and heads mounted on the wall. And I see it as dark and small inside, with a minimum of windows and glass. The Front Room has strong stones, and the windows are tougher than they look, but all that glass suggests decoration and architecture as art, instead of practicality and Your Hunting Convenience.

Mister William Hess, formerly of Germany, built our house on the hill. He probably oversaw the construction by contractors he knew and trusted, since he was a contractor for buildings in downtown Pittsbugh. Hess and his wife Corine once lived on Hazel Drive in Mount Lebanon . Not much is known about them, so it’s hard to say why they moved from there to the farm country. Maybe Hess just loved his deer hunting so much that he decided to make a life of it. It was definitely farm life—if more comfortable farm life than most. The barn now decrepit and used only for tools and old furniture, had chickens in it. There was a pump house to bring water from a spring up towards the house. The woods were smaller then, and there must have been amazing, almost panoramic view of the countryside. It’s the second or third highest spot in the county.

The truth of why the the Hesses moved, and what they did has become mostly lost. What is in its place in my mind, and in my family’s is mostly myth -- hearsay of the eccentric. When my father bought the house in 1988 he tried to find out the history of his new home and its builders. The Hesses died in the early 70s with no children to take over. Most of their belongings,( though not the house), were left to a nurse who took care of couple in their last days. That, and the family who lived in the house between the Hesses and us, meant that there were no documents or belongings in the house to help my father learn the history he wanted.
But he wanted to know more, my father; he is that type of person. So he found the Nurse, and called her on the phone. And she told him in enthusiastic, sure, tones about secret tunnels, buried gold, German paratroopers meeting in the barn, and an FBI raid on the house—Mr Hess had too may powerful radios for their liking. After all, he was a German during WWII.
Now, some of this was obviously impossible. There was no secret tunnel under the dinner table that led to the barn. The idea that Nazi paratroopers landed without anyone in history except this nurse knowing about it seems very implausible. But the gold. Oh, the gold.

I don’t remember the first time I heard about the hidden gold as a child. Sometimes it was just a lot of money, but usually it was very definitely gold. Regardless, I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know and love the story. A legend of buried treasure in my own house, and it was probably buried by Nazis. Yes, I was sure as a child that the Hesses had been Nazis. The house was finished in the undeniably historically significant year of 1939. And it was built by a German man. Just because I have a German last name myself doesn’t mean I was immune to the wonderfully baseless accusations—near certainty, actually—that if Hess was German in WWII, he must have been a Nazi.

My friends were (and continue to be) delighted by the idea of buried Nazi Gold. Sometimes we even went searching for it. There were two key places in the house, both situated in and around the Front Room. The first was the small, rectangular, metal door on the outside of the house. The door said Coal on it and was forever sealed shut. A small, sealed, shut door—who could resist it? Of course the gold was there. And if it wasn’t there, it was under the odd tile. The Front Room floor is covered in plain red tile—except for one tile that is yellow with a design. Completely different from the other tiles, nothing matching at all, we all knew this was as important as the sealed coal shuttle. There wasn’t much to do about the tile as child, we could hardly dig up the floor, but we sometimes tried to open the coal shuttle; little, weak and with poor tools, we never got it open.

A mythic house—whose history my family only knows the bare facts of. I think it was a house to get away in, though. Hess loved his hunting life, maybe, and that was someplace to get to, but what if he was also getting away from something? The politics of the time are significant, as well as mythic. The Hesses moved in permanently in 1939. Europe was going to hell, and the biggest, baddest, aggressors were Hess’s home country. Maybe Mt Lebanon got awfully small after that, there might have been looks, whispers, paranoia. Who could blame a man for wanting to get away from that? To get to a place where he could breathe easy and hunt all the deer he wanted. And if you wanted to stay away from your few neighbors --- just farmers, too—you could do that.

Or that’s bullshit. My Grandmother always said that everyone knew nice Germans during the war – they were much less alien and strange than the Japanese. Nobody would hate you just for your German blood. Perhaps Hess only wanted to breathe easy and live the farm life, with politics not an issue.

Nevertheless, my childhood in the mythic, old place was certainly shaped by its stories and history. The woods were taller, and there were more houses in sight, by the time my parents moved us in o Christmas Eve, 1988. But it was still the country, and it was still a near polar opposite from the life we were leaving in Las Angeles. There was still a barn, and 12 acres of our own. This was the country, and I grew up a country girl. Even if compared to real country folk, we were just pretending, we were the real thing when it came to the suburbanite we knew. I knew which wild plants were edible, and I ran around with no shoes on.
We were famous, too. We were the family with the unique house. People were delighted and bewildered when they saw our hill. And it was often a novelty to me, too -- especially when I could see it through their eyes. The eyes of people who were usually from the suburbs, their homes built in the last 20 years (certainly not by Nazis), and their green lawns were a half acre at most. They had no myths of buried treasure, but we did. That made us more exotic even beyond our isolation.

Though I can hear cars from the hilltop, and I can see far more houses than I once could through the trees, it still has space and freedom and breathing room. If my parents never decide to sell the place, they will always have 12 acres of space. No matter if the rest of the county builds its self up to a futuristic metropolis, we will still have 12 acres of space to stop time and progress – if we choose that.

And dammit, I still believe we will find that gold someday. It’s there somewhere, hidden, buried, but there. Just like Hess’s loyalty to the fatherland in 1939.