Our content director Laura Johnston wrote a piece a week ago about the history of her house in Rocky River, and readers were so charmed that we’re thinking we need more content like this. Laura is having a substantial addition built and thought sharing some thoughts on the process might resonate with others undergoing or considering renovations. Her first piece was about the longtime previous owner, Dorothy Kaiser, whose family greenhouse business was well known to earlier Rocky River generations. Laura discussed how she and her husband found the house, why they fell in love with it and what they want to do to make it work. She also described how the house once was carpeted inexplicably in green. Readers immediately warmed to the story. We could see through our metrics how much time people spent with it, and their comments to Laura were filled with warmth and mirth. Readers have been telling us this year that they want to read more pieces that are diversions from all the bad news. Rest assured, we won’t stop reporting the ugly stuff. Readers regularly thank us for providing vigorous coverage of the gerrymandering battles in Columbus, the corruption scandal in the Statehouse and the weekly failures of the Cuyahoga County government. (Like siting a new jail on a toxic site or creating $66 million in slush funds for all the county council members.) Readers say they are glad an independent watchdog is paying attention. But they tell us they want the occasional break from the government misbehavior. That’s one reason we started a gardening column last month. Has Laura tapped into another good idea, looking at the history of our homes? Who isn’t curious about previous inhabitants. One of the first things I did when we bought our house in Cleveland Heights is check out the history. And it had some. The original owners bought it in 1925, a lawyer and his wife who raised three boys in it. When the lawyer died in the 1950s, his wife went back to school to master Spanish and opened a translation service in what is now our living room. (Sadly, she tore out built-in bookcases to make it an office.) Katherine L. Perris’ business grew quickly to include other translators, covering Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese German and more. The translation firm served Cleveland businesses that were going international, companies like General Electric, Eaton Corp., National City and Society Banks and others. As interesting to me was her son, Don Perris (pictured above), who became a well-known journalist before becoming president of Scripps Howard Broadcasting Co. He was a Cleveland Press reporter who joined Cleveland’s first television station when he returned home from World War II. He Became general manager of WEWS (Channel 5) in 1964 and president of Scripps in 1974. I tracked him down when we moved here and talked about the early years of our house. He died in 2006, but his brother visited our house a few times to walk through it and remember his younger days. A mason named Peter Rozewski bought the house 41 years after the Perris family did, and he’s the reason we have a garage that will be standing when every other building in the neighborhood falls. We learned of other interesting people who lived in our house as well. We were fascinated as we dug up each detail. The details were fascinating to us, but would they be interesting to anyone else? Readers clearly were tuned in to Laura’s tale, but was it because the greenhouse business was a touchstone for anyone who grew up in the vicinity? Or was it because they enjoy reading warm tales about interesting characters. If readers want more of this kind of thing, we’ll be happy to provide it. We could solicit readers to tell us write what they know of the former inhabitants of their homes, or we could ask for suggestions for stories our reporters would write. So I come to you. Let me know if you’d enjoy a regular diet of stories like Laura’s. And what kind of characters once lived in your house. Thanks for reading. | 