Frances Gabe, Creator of the Only Self-Cleaning Home, Dies at 101

[JSngry]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/18/us/frances-gabe-dead-inventor-of-self-cleaning-house.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fobituaries&action=click&contentCollection=obituaries&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=5&pgtype=sectionfront

 

“Locally, she was just the kind of unique person that you often see in these small towns,” Allyn Brown, Ms. Gabe’s former lawyer and a longtime friend, said in a telephone interview last week. “I don’t think anybody really knew her name.”

There was a time, however, when Ms. Gabe’s name was known round the world. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, her house was featured in newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, The Guardian and People; on Phil Donahue’s talk show; and in several books, among them Chuck Palahniuk’s “Fugitives & Refugees” (2003), about the curious characters around Portland, Ore.

“When I’d come out and see her,” Mr. Brown recalled, “I would be conflicted on whether she was delusional or whether she was so much smarter than I that I just didn’t have the ability to recognize her genius.”........

n a 1982 column about Ms. Gabe’s work, the humorist Erma Bombeck proposed her as “a new face for Mount Rushmore.”

Yet her remarkable abode — a singular amalgam of “Walden,” Rube Goldberg and “The Jetsons” — remained the only one of its kind ever built. The reasons, recent interviews with her associates suggest, include the difficulties of maintaining the patent, the compromises required of the homeowner and, just possibly, Ms. Gabe’s contrary, proudly iconoclastic temperament.

“She was very difficult to get along with,” Mr. Brown said, warmly. “She had an adversarial relationship with all her neighbors and she didn’t do anything to discourage it.”

Perhaps it was the cement mixer residing permanently in Ms. Gabe’s yard that inflamed the neighbors so. (It was essential to her house-building enterprise.) Perhaps it was the series of snarling Great Danes she kept. Perhaps it was her penchant, at least in her younger days, for doing her yard work in the nude.........

A cinder-block bungalow of about a thousand square feet, Ms. Gabe’s house was completed in the 1980s, at a cost of $15,000, after more than 10 years of work and decades of planning.

The result, the newspaper The Weekend Australian wrote in 2004, was “basically a gigantic dishwasher.”

In each room, Ms. Gabe, tucked safely under an umbrella, could press a button that activated a sprinkler in the ceiling. The first spray sent a mist of sudsy water over walls and floor. A second spray rinsed everything. Jets of warm air blew it all dry. The full cycle took less than an hour.

Runoff escaped through drains in Ms. Gabe’s almost imperceptibly sloping floors. It was channeled outside and straight through her doghouse, where the dog was washed in the bargain.........

Her efforts also received little support from her community.

“One time I had a group of furious housewives on my doorstep, telling me I was doing them out of a job and that if they didn’t have to clean their houses, their husbands wouldn’t need them anymore,” Ms. Gabe told The Guardian in 2006. “And I said, ‘Well, if you had more time to spend with your husbands, don’t you think they would like that better?’ ”.........

Ms. Gabe held fast to her house for as long as she could. About eight years ago, her family arranged for her to move — kicking and screaming, a grandson, Kevin Selander, said last week — to a nursing home.

Ms. Gabe’s children, Grant Bateson and Lourene Bateson Selander, died before her. Besides Mr. Selander, who confirmed her death, in a hospice in Newberg, her survivors include 10 other grandchildren and many great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren.

Her property was sold some years ago, though the house still stands. “There’s kind of a hippie guy living there and he likes the place,” Mr. Selander said.

He will be obliged, though, to clean it himself. Today, no suds descend, no cleansing showers come, no dog enjoys collateral washing.

Born of figs and fury, the self-cleaning house now exists in public memory only in dreams — much as it did for so long in Ms. Gabe’s mind: dewy with mist, quixotically clean.

 

[Rooster_Ties]

Again, come hell or high water Jim, you've gotta see the Obit documentary, on the NYT's obit department.

[JSngry]

I fully intend to. It's gotta come to Netflix, right?