Who in the World is Margaret Sherman?

We found a nice house in the small town of Newton. This was the first time my two sons Champ and Victor were out of the nest. I was at loose ends especially at the time of day they would normally be coming home after school. I started riding around to see what the community had to offer.

There was huge building next to the Elementary School. No one lived in it. It looked so forlorn. It looked like something from the book Gone With the Wind. It had four large white columns edging a large porch. Every time we were out driving we would drive past that building and wonder. It had two stories. Above the second floor were the words Oates-Reynolds Memorial we decided it must have been a funeral home at one time. Finally after about nine months we found out who owned it. We looked them up to get the front door key to look inside. Something as simple as opening a door can change your entire life.

You can’t imagine how this looked. Many people had lived there through the years but no one had tried to improve it. It was in bad disrepair. (Is there such a word as that?) Although it was in a terrible state of repair, I told friend husband, "I can see a beautiful living room here." It was thirty feet by thirty feet. This building had forty rooms in it, twenty on each floor. The paint was hanging in shreds everywhere. I wanted to lease it, but friend husband knew how much work was there to even do a few rooms for us to live in. When we took the key back to the owner, we talked about leasing after we had discussed it. I asked him why the paint was hanging there like that. He said back in the thirties someone had whitewashed the walls. You could put paint on it, but in a short time the paint would be popping off. Before we leased it, I went to several painters; and each of them told me the same thing what had to be done but they knew we would never do it. When I insisted, they said, "First, you have to scrape every bit of that paint off the walls. Then sweep it down, mop it, take a metal brush to rough up the surface, put a sealer on it, and then paint it with good paint. This is what has to be done to keep it from popping off the walls."

Friend husband and I talked about this for hours, about how long it would take, etc. We had been redoing practically everything we had lived in ever since he had gone back into the Army. Usually after we would redo a house, do all the labor and furnish all the supplies to do it, the owner upped the rent or wanted their house back for them to move into, so we decided we will draw up our own lease. We put it in like this: We would pay $75.00 a month for two years. At the end of each two years we would renew the same lease at the same price to live here as long as we were stationed at Ft. Rucker. The owners signed the lease in front of a Notary Public.

By this time, August 1969 we had become well known in Newton, a town of about 2,000 people. You should have seen the reaction of the locals when they heard we had leased the Oates-Reynolds Memorial Girls Dormitory. Several of them were aghast! They said, "What in the world are you going to do? You couldn’t pay me enough money to spend even one night in that building." I wanted to know why. They said, "It’s haunted!"

I replied, "Good! I’ve always wanted to see a ghost, and we are going to need all the help we can get to even clean up the 20 rooms downstairs."

Friend husband could not understand how I could think this would ever be such a beautiful room. Even with everything in disarray, I could clearly picture in my mind how it was going to look when it was finished. Marvin and Melvin Skipper, eleven year old twins, lived next door to our first house in Newton wanted to help us. Young boys could help quite a bit. The first of September we started this job. Everyone had a scraper. We stood for hours and hours scraping. I scraped "till my arms felt like they were going to drop off. These were ten foot ceilings. Friend husband took a hoe, straightened out the blade, and sharpened it.