I knew there was unrest in Turkey, but not to this extent

Link to Imgur where the story is told in pictures... very moving (to me at least). https://imgur.com/gallery/UeJKDe4

Eric, there was an article about this on the Fox News site yesterday. I'm glad this incident is getting exposure.

When we moved to Texas back in the late 90s, we bought a house that had belonged to a former Ambassador to Turkey. He was a career State Department official and he had also been an ambassador to other countries from the 1940s through the 1960s. He died in the early 90s and then a few years later, his wife died. They had no children and we bought the house from their estate. One of our neighbors there was an elderly lady who had been good friends with the ambassador and his wife. I spent some time visiting with her. She was a widow who lived by herself and she also had no children. She and her husband had run a cotton gin in Greenville, Texas back years ago when cotton was king in that area. Anyway, she told me stories that the ambassador had told her about his tours overseas, especially in Turkey. This would have been in the 50s when he was there, I think. 50s or early 60s. He found himself in a couple of dangerous situations where quick thinking on his part calmed everyone down and possibly saved some lives, according to what she told me. I guess that part of the world has always been at least somewhat unstable. Later on, I found interviews online that the ambassador had given after he retired. I read through some of them and some of the stuff he experienced, and his take on things during that period of time in US history, is really interesting.

Here is Ambassador Warren's obituary.

http://www.txssar.org/AFletcherWarren/afw-history.htm

We lived in a house in the Perdido Bay Country Club and a new house was built across the street from us. The homeowner was a guy named John Payne and he owned a business called "Jet Research" on Dog Track Road. He would buy surplus jet planes from the military, part them out and sell them to middle-eastern types.

This area of the Country Club had your average 1,800 sq. ft. homes and they weren't fancy... except for what we called Fort Payne. Payne's house was 2-story, probably 4-5,000 square feet with small parapets on perimeter walls, wrought iron and a spanish terracotta roof. Occasionally, we would see his limo pull up with fully-garbed middle eastern men inside and he would play the gracious host while his "customers" were in town. Payne obviously had money while the business thrived.

It gave us something to talk about.

Wow, I bet it did!
You think everything going on there was legal?

So, Neko. Did the house have any peculiarities?

I rented what was a 3-acre estate on 10th Avenue near Fairfield. In my bedroom closet, there was a ladder built into the wall and an excape hatch you could push up, that was inset into the floor of the large attic upstairs.

The place was built in the late 1940's and when I rented ($120/mo) it in the late 1970's it was in disrepair... a dump if you will. To get the light to come on in the kitchen, you had to hit the light switch on the wall... and turn a burner on the stove!

The owner was a bit of a packrat and I salvaged some PNJ newspapers from the 1940's and early 1950's that he had stashed in a shed. The place was overgrown but unique, cold-frames here and there, grape arbors with water spigots nearby, a working fountain, thirty-foot tall camellias everywhere. I was always bringing in cut flowers into the office...

Sadly, it has been bulldozed and is now an apartment complex.

nekochan wrote:

Wow, I bet it did!
You think everything going on there was legal?

Think of Bill Clinton... "define legal"



There was a domestic violence incident, a handgun fired, a divorce, and things fell apart for the family. I don't know what happened to the parents, but their children are still in the community... good kids... grownups now.

The house was peculiar but not because of secret hidey places (that we ever found anyway, lol.)

Part of the house was from a huge, old turn of the century house that was broken into 2 parts in the late 50s. Part of the old house was moved onto our lot in the late 50s. The builder then built around the old part of the house and put brick around the entire outside of the house to make it one, whole house. The front part of the house--the living room/dining room/master bedroom--were the old parts of the house. The rest of the house- the other bedrooms, kitchen, bath, and family room were the new parts of the house. But it was put together so that it flowed naturally from the old part to the new part. The living room (old part) had huge, thick, mahogany sliding doors. The floors in those rooms were beautiful old parquet wood from the early 1900s. Beautifully carved mahogany wood panels were also taken from the old house and incorporated into the entire new house--they were placed in the walls of all of the bedrooms and the family room that was built onto it when they built the "new" house in the 50s. Everything, except for the wooden sliding doors, had several coats of white paint on them. We hired a preacher who is also a carpenter (!) to take the panels all down and strip the paint off. It took months and a lot of money, but he finally got them done and placed back onto the walls. Of course, then we sold the house....and moved to Florida. I think there is a theme of some sort going here, lol.

Greenville is not a town that everyone was flocking to for real estate, so we bought the home for a really low price. It had sat empty for a year or so after Mrs. Warren passed away. It did need some updating. Nothing had been updated since it was built in 1959. So we did a little updating and we had the wood panels stripped and refinished and we were able to sale it and recover our costs. I hope the new owners didn't paint back over all of those panels.

Our neighbor told me that the retired ambassador sometimes held parties/political fundraisers in the home and that Reagan and Bush Sr. were among the guests.

I do think there was "something" about the house. I don't know if you'd call it haunted or not, I never actually saw anything. But it was just a feeling I sometimes got outside the master bedroom. Not a bad feeling. Just a feeling that someone was there. But not a threatening presence at all. There would be a feeling like I wasn't alone accompanied by a musty smell. And then it would be gone.