A Showcase House for a Worthy Cause

At midnight on New Year’s Eve between 1948 and ‘49, Carlynn Chaffee’s date brought her a cup of pink punch and Allan Stover put on a stack of records of Frank Sinatra, Jo Stafford and the Pied Pipers. Carlynn was just 14 and her parents hesitated about letting her go to a New Year’s Eve party with a wordly high school senior. But she reminded them that the party was at Allan Stover’s house and his parents, Rheba and Clarence, were well-known and respected members of the college town of Claremont and friends of her parents.

The party was as much fun and as grown-up as Carlynn hoped and she met a cute boy named Herb Christian, who turned up in the same study hall spring semester. After college, she married Herb and they have lived in the storybook college town of Claremont ever since.

What goes around comes around, and life is as curled around itself as a raspberry jellyroll. Carlynn Christian is now chairman of the Claremont Showcase House committee and the house is the Stovers’ former house, where Carlynn met Herb on New Year’s Eve.

Showcase houses are the greatest fund-raising dodge since Ragged Dick met the kindly but gruff philanthropist and gave up his shoeshine box in the pages of Horatio Alger.

Showcase houses are now presented all over California, notably Pasadena, Palos Verdes, Whittier and Claremont. This is the ninth year for the Claremont group, all members of the Children’s Home Society of California, and all money they bring in goes to help children.

The society has been working with the crushing problems of children since 1891. Adoption planning, teen-age counseling, foster homes, day care--whatever is needed by the smallest Californians who have been caught in the wrenching machinery of our social structure--is provided by trained and professional social workers.

The house, a gracious and roomy Williamsburg, will be open to the public through May 17, every day but Monday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and evenings until 9 on Wednesdays and Fridays.

The idea of showcase houses is to enlist decorators to bedeck the houses, each person taking a room or area. Gardens and outdoor fancifuls such as pergolas, arbors and summerhouses are often parts of the displays.

Of course, each designer trots out his or her most captivating work, with the result that I always want to go home and burn my house down. The idea is to look and observe and take home what marvelous ideas you can use in your cozy, little mortgage eater.

My house looked perfectly acceptable when I left for Claremont to see the design house the other day. Peaches and Mrs. Goldfarb were napping, Goldfarb in the copper kettle by the fireplace and Peaches on the chaise longue in the summer room.

The copper pans on the wall in the kitchen weren’t very tarnished, and a lot of the magazines were neatly stacked with only a few on the floor. But the Claremont house was a soothing environment of gentle spring colors--lavender, rose, lilac, pale pink, dark and light blues, a green like the underside of a new leaf, cool gray and warm beige.

The house is being done by four designers and the decorating and design and landscaping departments of three California schools, Mt. San Antonio, Chaffey and Cal Poly Pomona.

Breck Rollins is doing the living room, the guest bath and the entrance hall using natural fabrics, wools, linens and silks. Furniture is Chippendale and fresh with primula colors. The fun of the showcase house is seeing color blends you’ve never thought of and new uses for space. You have the lovely, naughty feeling of being a snoop and getting brownie points for it.

Children’s Home Society members have put together a cookbook which will be for sale during the showcase house endeavor. There will be lunches served by reservation, magicians and mimes will entertain and a couple of fashion shows will be offered.

The basement where Carlynn and Herb met is called the great room. It has a fireplace, a pool table, white upholstered walls, a painted wood ceiling and probably some lingering strains of Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller.

Co-chairmen Joanne Perry and Karen McCabe have full-time careers, as do most members of the Children’s Home Society who put together this project in scraps of stolen time.

And to prove once and for all that there are really only 1,300 people in the world and we just change places, as my father always said, I met Allen Stover in 1962, and his brother, Bill Stover, has been a dear and treasured friend for years. I saw him recently when former Sen. George Murphy was in town. Bill used to be the senator’s chief of staff.

When Carlynn said the showcase was originally the Stover house built in 1938, I asked if the boys’ names were Allan and Bill. She looked at me as if I had just fallen out of a Gypsy wagon. Uhh, I did. If you want to know where and all those things, call (714) 626-7455 or 624-0450.