Upholstery Field Trip

There’s a mysterious place known to everyone around here who has gone to Quarry Park; it looks like a castle and big glass building up on a gigantic pile of granite. We had heard that it was a school, and indeed it is. It’s way up on a hill strewn with granite blocks, as you can see from these photos taken from the parking lot below.

I took the photos after our visit to Sis, a group of nondescript warehouse buildings that no one would guess was a furniture upholstery shop. The owner, Chris Sis, lives on the property and his wife works in the office. Kenny, who went to the school on the hill from K-12, is an apprentice at the shop. Today he went with Chris to pull an engine that someone needed removed from a vehicle, and then he was upstairs sewing some leather. When I took his photo he laughed and said, “I just made a mistake, actually, and am ripping it out.”

Because Chris had to go pull the motor, among other tasks, his father Robert took us upstairs to get the backing Steve was looking for. First, at Steve’s request, he took us through the main space and out into an enormous warehouse filled from floor to ceiling, on three floors built into the space, with stuff. Most of it is old padding and piles of foam, stacks of chairs, bundles of springs and metal, and tons of wood.

But there is also an old flour mill and, along one wall, something that made me literally gasp. I mean, I was already impressed by a couple of galvanized tubs lying around, but then I saw them.

I’m sad the photo didn’t turn out very well, but this is a picture of a gigantic bookshelf filled with old quart and (I do believe) gallon Ball jars. Old, blue and green Ball jars. They’re worth a mint, and they’re worth it because they’re really beautiful and rare. This guy keeps everything. You never know when something will be useful.

The space was at one time a granite warehouse, with two giant cranes that moved slabs around the space. Then it was bought by Sealy, the mattress company, as some kind of investment growing soybeans (the property is 23 acres). Mr. Sis bought the place from Sealy after, he says, the three executives sent to run it had squandered away the money and not done anything. That was 1961.

In 1968, Robert was upset that the area Catholic schools had decided to start teaching sex education. He and his wife went to see the movies that would be shown to their children and they didn’t like what they saw. They appealed to the bishop but didn’t get anywhere. So, he decided to build his own school to educate his 11 children (Chris is the youngest) and the children of other like-minded folks. They began with an old country school they bought at auction for $900.

Eventually they built and moved into the school on the hill. There is a turret and two silos cut to look like castle towers. It’s still being operated as an alternative school for very conservative Catholics. Every hour on the hour, he said, a bird clock “chimes” with birdsong in every room. The children put down their pencils and say a prayer that Robert’s wife taught them. Then they pick up their pencils and continue their work. They begin every day with the rosary at 8 a.m.

Every Friday the children put on a play and he goes up and assesses it. He missed the play, which was on Thursday this week, but it was so good the children invited him up to see it this morning and performed it again.

His main goal these days is independence and self-sufficiency (perhaps that has always been his goal).

He would like to build a greenhouse for the school, because the kids need to learn how to grow their own food. We were talking about cold frames and he said he had some great crank windows for that, including an octoganal one. He had devised a set-up whereby an old woman could have the garden with the window attached to her home. She would just need to open the window and could plant and harvest without leaving her house. She could keep growing her own food right through the winter. “There are thousands of ways to stay alive,” he said.

He lives in a second floor room in this same building. It’s over the furnace but has no additional heat. He says it never gets below 50 degrees. He uses the bath and shower downstairs in the office and eats with his son’s family. It’s a spare room, unlike the warehouse. We said he lives like a monk and he agreed, then told us how he’d traveled in Europe after being in the army, back in the 1950s, and stayed primarily in monasteries.

He’s a lot like our neighbor Maurice Palmersheim, who works every day in his shop fixing old mowers and motors so they won’t go into the landfill. He spends his days still in making things, like Rita Palmersheim using pieces of scrap wood to make painted lawn art: St. Francis and birds and deer with grass in their mouths.

He has developed and run this separatist, conservative school, but he was critical of Catholics who form their own churches. He told us about a diocesan priest who broke away and formed his own church in nearby Rockville. Robert said, “When they changed from the Latin to English Mass, that was hard for my wife and I to accept. But we would never break away and form our own church. We built our own school, but not our own church.”

Robert and Chris appreciate what Steve is doing, and especially that Steve so appreciates what they have put together in their shop. Steve bought some fabric backing, and got some advice about reinforcing seats and pads. For me, as with the visit to the fishhouse, I feel privileged to be welcomed into people’s spaces and told their stories.

Life is full of extraordinary spaces and extraordinary lives. Sometimes they’re hidden in a back bay or behind a nondescript warehouse front. All you have to do is knock on the door.