Backstory: Always Check for Stuff in the Attic

You can buy a property and build a new house on it, you can buy a property with a new house already on it, or you can buy a property with an older house on it that’s been lived in. If you do the last of the three, I have some advice for you. Check the attic. Sometimes you’ll find stuff left behind that’s really amazing.

I learned this lesson after buying the first house I ever owned out here. It was a small 800-square foot cottage south of the Montauk Highway in East Hampton. A very elderly lady lived in a big house next door. And one day, after I had moved in, she told me about my cottage.

“It had been brought here from an Army camp in Yaphank just after World War I. I was a little girl then and saw it come. It was hauled on a wagon towed by mules. A very exciting thing for a girl to see.

“The owner of it was a dashing young man named Lieutenant Keely. When my mom brought him a cake as a present, he told us that with the war over, the Army was selling all the barracks buildings. Any veteran could get one for $5. You just had to tow it away.”

The Yaphank Army Camp soon became the Brookhaven National Laboratory. It’s there today, still 55 miles from East Hampton.

I was there a year when I noticed there was a hatch in the ceiling in one of the bedrooms. There was no attic up there to speak of, but the cottage did have a peaked roof. What was up there under it? I got a ladder.

Amid the dust and old magazines of that crawlspace were two silver trophies offered up at a famous Manhattan dance hall. A small one and a large one. The larger one read ROSELAND, FIRST PRIZE WALTZ, CONTEST 1926, JAMES C KEELY. The smaller one read ROSELAND 2ND PRIZE, FLAPPER CONTEST 1926. There were two old 78 records you could play on a Victrola. One was titled Luck Lindebergh and the other The Eagle of the USA.

In 1927, Charles Lindbergh had been the first person to fly an airplane across the Atlantic alone.

Then there were some souvenirs. Paris had never fallen to the Germans in World War I. But it might have if the American Army hadn’t arrived to fight for the French. In 1917 there was dancing in the streets of Paris when the “Yanks” marched through town.

One item up there was a large silk handkerchief with the image of the American flag and the French flag crossed. The writing on it read LAFAYETTE – AMERICA WELCOME!

Another was what I first thought was a large brass drinking cup. When I saw it was sealed at one end, though, I realized this was the casing of an artillery shell. Up one side, someone had used a hammer to craft the brass into an image — a foot-long flower. It was perhaps the first sculpture made to honor the slogan “Turn Guns into Plowshares.”

Well, it must have been quite a party. And the lieutenant was quite a dancer. I still have both trophies.

Have a East End real estate story? Want to share? Text us at 516-527-3566. We’ll call you back, and then write it up for this weekly column. –Dan