#ernie kovacs
wehadariverboatinourlivingroom:
Why is this Tumblr blog called We Had A Riverboat In Our Living Room?
Mother bought our house during the Second World War when Daddy was stationed on an island off the coast of New Guinea. It had been a rental unit for several years and so was in need of some tender loving care. Once Daddy returned home, they took on tasks a few at a time.
One of their first projects was the replacement of the very worn wall paper. They agreed on the paper for most of the rooms, but when it came to the living room, Daddy insisted that he wanted to have a wall paper mural. After looking through several books, he decided on this one.
Mother never really warmed up to the scene, but she reluctantly went along with his choice and so all the years of our childhood, this is the picture which covered the long wall of our front room.
Every few years Mother suggested that it was time for a change, but Daddy was not a man to change his mind.
Our parents shared this home and the mural the rest of their lives and the mural was still there when we sold the house 50 years after it was originally hung.
To order this mural, Mother went to the only store (so far as I knew) that had wallpaper books. Unfortunately I can’t recall the name of this store, or even if it was a home decor store or a hardware store. But as child I found these books fascinating! I could sit on the floor at Mother’s feet carefully paging through a book with large squares of wallpaper especially designed for children’s rooms. (I remember noticing that all the color choices seemed to be pastels for girls and bright primary colors for boys. Since my favorite color was red, I found this disappointing.)
At the same time, Mother was standing at a high table paging through books with wallpaper designed for adults. This took some time as there seemed to be dozens of books from various wallpaper companies. After she made her choices, she borrowed those huge heavy books and schlepped them home for overnight viewing. That way, she explained to us kids, she could look at the paper in the room it was intended for, under different lighting and of course, Daddy could weigh in with his opinion.
There were only a couple of books with murals and as you can imagine, no single square, no matter how large, contained the whole mural. So as I remember it, the book contained swatches of the wallpaper, so you could see the textures and colors accompanied by a photograph of a wall with each full mural installed.
Daddy selected the riverboat mural as his favorite. Mother may have thought that it was a temporary desire on his part to have a mural and that she would eventually be able to cover it with some other wallpaper. Obviously she had not counted on Daddy’s resistance to change.
Now to your question: I have no idea at all which company created the mural or whether or not it came from a painting. But I might have found a helpful clue. Years later I found a picture of the comedians Ernie Kovacs and Edie Adams in their dining room and on the wall beyond the table was the exact same wallpaper mural!
A further clue could be found in the name of the riverboat itself, as it is labeled “Robt. E Lee”, which was an actual steamboat which plied the Mississippi after the Civil War. Somehow it entered the mindset of the popular culture as a “showboat,” a sort of moving theater that sailed from town to town.
Our family was Yankee through and through and the mural was certainly not chosen by my father with any notion of glorifying the boat’s namesake.
Maybe somewhere out there is a Tumblr reader who knows how to research this stuff?
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