Ernie Russom

Late in the spring of 1940 my father, Ernest Russom Jr., traveled to the Gables section of Wildwood Crest. In the community of Spanish-style houses, he hoped to rent a house for his mother, sister, aunt, and cousins to spend the summer. He and my grandfather would travel to the rented house during vacation from work at Westinghouse’s Steam Turbine Division in Lester, PA. My father worked at Westinghouse while attending college at Drexel in the evenings. He would retire from Westinghouse after a forty-seven-year tenure.

His search concluded with a five-bedroom story and a half-story Spanish Cottage on Nashville Road. The house was built in 1927, atop Turtle Gut Inlet approximately five years after it was finally sealed. It was located at what is now six houses from the train that ran along Sunset Lake. The beach began one block away, past Seaview Avenue. The smooth stucco house had a terracotta roof. The open vestibule was capped by a distinctive patinated copper dome. The house was heated by a coal furnace with four-foot-high radiators in each room. 

From the ocean to the bay, it was the only house on the south side of the street. Unimpeded sea and bay breezes kept the house cool.

The husband of the house’s owner had recently passed. The widow asked my father to buy the house for $10,000. The seemingly low purchase price was during the Depression. Inflation calculators equate this price to $211,600 today. This price was a challenge to a young man who was one month short of his twenty-first birthday.

He found a way to buy the house. Moving in on July 4th, he completed the purchase one month later on his twenty-first birthday.

The house was bought fully furnished. Clothes were still in the closets. The house has a sunken living room with exposed ceiling beams and an ornate brick fireplace. The living and dining rooms have hardwood floors with mahogany piano piping. Bedroom furniture and kitchen cabinets were metal. The small bedroom closets stored seasonal clothes. Wardrobes were kept in two second-floor closets that ran the length of the house. 

Approximately eighteen months after buying his summer home, my father left for the Pacific Theater to serve in World War II. 

During the war, a Navy Shore Patrol used the house. The Navy’s communication with the house was by a wire that ran south through bayberry thickets to the Navy Electronic Station.

When my father returned from war, the house was slowly modernized over the next forty years. The heavy terracotta roof was causing the house to settle into the sand of the old inlet. This was rectified by the installation of an asphalt roof in the early 1960s.

Metal furnishings were replaced with wooden pieces that were delivered by the local train. Old windows and wooden screens that had to be re-painted each year were replaced. Telephone service was connected. A gas furnace and water heater were installed. The fireplace now uses gas.

Through the modernizations, the original design of the house endured. The living and dining rooms’ archways, pebble plaster finishes, as well as chandeliers and sconces remain from 1927. The walnut interior doors and baseboards are finished with tung oil varnish. 

Before my father passed in 2013, he gave his permission to have a fiberglass terracotta-style roof installed atop “His” house.

Although my wife and I have our name on the deed, this family home will be passed on to our sons. In 1940, my father bought a family home. That is what it will remain. 

To join to our FREE email notification list, click here.