April 20, 2006
Staffer is living in a legacy
For Anne Eskridge, it started with the need for a different kind of house. The house she’d been living in had many stairways, she explained, and she wanted something that she and her partner could grow old in. So when the two found the modest, one-story house at 8504 43rd Avenue NE, it was love at first sight.
But one evening after they moved in, a neighbor walked by as they were working in the yard. “Hey,” he called out, “did you know communists used to live in that house?”
Eskridge, who is property and transport services manager at the University, was taken aback. What was he referring to, she wondered? A little research produced the answer. The original owner of her home was Melvin Rader, a UW professor of philosophy who was accused of being a communist during the 1948 hearings run by Albert Canwell, chair of the state’s Joint Legislative Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities.
Rader was not a direct target of the investigation, but an “expert witness” brought in from New York claimed to have seen him at a communist training camp. When the hearings were over, Rader made efforts to clear his name by getting the prosecutor to charge the witness with perjury, but New York refused to extradite him. Eventually, the Seattle Times took up his cause and reporter Ed Guthman won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories proving that Rader had never attended the camp.
Eskridge was fascinated, and began reading Rader’s book about the experience, False Witness. “We’ve been caught up in the history of Rader and what he went through,” she said. “We feel like we’re in this living legacy.”
Rader is not the house’s only claim to fame, or its only connection to the UW. Photographs of it appear in Special Collections’ Dearborn Massar Collection (see http://content.lib.washington.edu/dearmassarweb/index.html). Robert Massar and Phyllis Dearborn Massar, both UW graduates, were architectural photographers who documented the work of some of the best known architects in the Northwest from 1943 to 1963. That included James Chiarelli and Paul Hayden Kirk, who designed the Rader house. In 1949, the house was honored as the Revere Ware House of the Year; thus in the collection it is labeled the Rader Revere House. It also appears in a recent book, Carolyn Swope’s Classic Houses of Seattle.
The whole experience has been a new one for Eskridge, whose previous knowledge of architecture was restricted to knowing what she liked. “At first we just fell in love with the aesthetics and the whole beauty and simplicity of the house,” she said.
But once she learned of its history, she couldn’t help wanting to know more. She and her partner have made contact with the second owners of the house — the ones who lived there after Rader — and plan to get together with them to learn more about it.
They also plan to question neighbors. “The neighborhood is in a real transitional period — many older people are moving out,” Eskridge said. “It’s time to get the history before it’s too late.”
Meanwhile, she and her partner are considering trying to get the home declared a historic landmark. They recently attended a Historic Seattle landmark preservation workshop and believe the house meets several of the criteria for landmark status.
“We think it would be a very cool way to honor Dr. Rader,” Eskridge said.
Eskridge asks that anyone with information about Melvin Rader or the house contact her at akeskridge@comcast.net
