Cold-Hearted Quakers: Toilet-Paper Capers...Nixon's Not One Of Us Anymore

A long ago in the latter part of the 20th century, when times were lean and small town life in Indiana rejected me like a bad liver transplant, I fled in terror or perhaps it was refuge to a seemingly bigger city closer to where I lived at the time which was Attica, to West Lafayette, home to Purdue University, where living was easier, even though the small mentality was everywhere I stepped within the community.

In March of 1994, I took on a new and yet one of the strangest jobs I ever held, that being a caretaker for a Quaker Meeting House. Overall, Quakers are known for their simplistic values and pacifisms approach are a nice bunch of folks all around, but the Quakers I were about to meet changed that entire image for me and carried it through until a few months ago.

It was back in February, 1994 when I first saw the posting in the local paper for a caretaker position at the Quaker Meeting House in West Lafayette on (Glenn) Robinson Trail, while still living in the apartment complex that was once a mansion in Attica, Indiana.

The advertisement mentioned the rent would be cheap, $175 to be exact, in exchange for light labor duties. At the time I had just become unemployed and was living on unemployment and I thought that WAS the ticket and jumped at the chance.

When I moved in, I began to get a little freelance writing work, but not enough to cover food, so I began visiting the back alleys of churches and waited in line for food like all the others who were poor or unemployed and hungry. It was a re-occurring event that I would visit at least two more times in my life.

I moved into the Meeting House at the end of late March and took up occupancy in a couple of rooms in the upper part of the house, one which included the attic. The Meeting House itself had a few quirks in it, but things seemed to be going okay, as the job duties were spelled out clearly.

Legend has it that the house itself was willed to the local area Quakers by a woman who was rescued from one of the Jewish concentration camps in Germany by an older brother and later married the man who discovered oxygen on the sun. The couple settled into the West Lafayette area in the 1940s.

It was then that I began noticing strange quirks within the Meeting House itself. Strange quirks that included the likes of moaning and creaking sounds in varying parts & times when there should have been no sounds.

Another major quirk I noticed was that several cartons of spoiled milk were left in the refrigerator well past the date of drinking and when I attempted to throw all of the cartons out, I was scolded by one of the two head Quaker women who claimed they needed them to stay there indefinitely. That milk smelled bad and eventually curdled to the point where the stench filled the entire refrigerator and kitchen for weeks after that.

Then one day, I received a visitor who I was told by one of the Quaker woman was the previous caretaker, who was allowed to stay in the Meeting House for up to three days. Those three days stretched out to six weeks! My complaints fell on deaf ears. According to the contract, which was nothing more than a verbal agreement made between myself and one of the Quaker women, my priorities were less important than their priorities and with that, I soon knew that things slowly began to change.

My duties were simple. All I had to do was to shop each week at the local Sam’s Club, buy bulk lemonade, cookies, coffee and sugar and set up the refreshments, paper plates, plastic silverware & napkins and leave the doors unlocked for the Meeting on Sundays and not make noise between the hours of 10am to 1pm. Simple-dimple-pimple. Or so I thought.

During the summer months of which I stayed for nearly all three, I had to mow the lawn, something I had never done before. I broke the lawn mower at least twice when I ran the blades over a hidden sewer pipe within the grass. Sure they were angry with me, but when I had explained previously that I had never cut a lawn, well again that went on deaf ears.

Even though I was shown how to the mow the lawn, my lawn-mowing experience was a lot like cutting my own hair, bad patches of grass in between everywhere. They were no longer amused.
Once I even forgot to lock the door, but it was no biggie for the person who arrived there early with her own key, a key she wasn’t supposed to have. It was from this particular progressive Quaker woman member that I spoke to one day, who filled me in on all the gory details regarding the folks who were running the Meeting House right into the ground and making decisions without having a consensus vote from other Meeting House members. That is why she had a key and that is also why she didn’t go there often.

When I asked about this particular Quaker member, both the women in charge scoffed and said that she was “damaged goods,” as well as queer and strange. It seemed to me at that particular moment that something was going on behind closed doors that they didn’t want me to know about.

It was when I accidentally forgot to refill the toilet paper roll in a Meeting House bathroom that I received by registered letter that my services were no longer required as caretaker and I was given a 30-day notice to vacate the premises.

I was viewed as a troublemaker and that didn’t sit well with either woman, for asking questions was wrong according to them, as opposed to taking orders and not questioning a thing.
I was still expected to pay rent and do chores around the home until the day of my demise, but that’s when I stood up to these crazy Quaker women and told them to shove it!

I never did pay the rent nor did I do the chores, as I had to pack up all of my belongings for the move-out. I ended up moving back home with my parents that late summer and took a job close to home in a bookstore.

To this day, being let go as a caretaker from that Meeting House due to not replacing a roll of toilet paper and receiving a registered letter in the mail still cracks me up. My days in Indiana were nearly over. I was exhausted, yet relieved.

Since that time, I’ve spoken about my experience there very little. In the late 1990s, I wrote a little song dedicated to my experience as a caretaker called “Cold-Hearted Quakers,” which I’d like to share the last lyric line with you dear readers, as I believe it sums up my brief but entire experience with these particular Quakers…

“Cold-hearted Quakers/Toilet-paper capers/ (Richard) Nixon’s not one of us anymore…”