When pondering what to focus on for a story to mark this 20th anniversary of the house’s $3.5 million restoration and opening, the woman who has become the face of the place chose the unassuming man who has helped her think through a thousand decisions since: Tom Fyffe.
Staying alive, staying alive
“While we had an appetite to have a bigger staff,” Wojcik said, the financial crisis of 2008 made very clear what the debt remaining from the house’s restoration suggested: “We need to be nimble, we need to survive.”
Survival itself was on Fyffe’s mind when he made the first major decision of his adult life. Raised in a working-class family on Springfield’s West Side, he’d worked his way into the dairy manager’s job at the neighborhood Big Bear grocery store while still a student at North High School.
After graduation in 1967, he began driving a panel truck for Ohio Bell, and while making his night-time deliveries, he had time to think about something then foremost in many young men’s lives.
With the Vietnam War burning white hot, “The Marines were drafting people,” Fyffe said, (and) “I didn’t want to get drafted, especially into the Marines. So, I joined the Air Force” – and in a way that taught him a lesson about the importance of the timeliness of decisions.
“That afternoon, the Marine recruiter called me up and said they were going to recruit me.”
A Wright turn
While his decision did lead to a bullet hole in a hubcap of his car in East St. Louis, Illinois, during some tense racial times, after four years in the service “drinking beer and working on air conditioners,” as he puts it, Fyffe returned to the job he’d soon tire of.
“I saw an ad in the newspaper” for an air conditioning maintenance job at fledgling Wright State University, went to the interview, he said, and “was hired on the spot for $3.57 an hour.”
Over the next 28 years, the university mushroomed from four buildings to 28, all of which he knew the moving parts of in his capacity as the assistant director for plant management.
An economic downturn and a buyout he couldn’t refuse led to two years’ work at the Kuss Auditorium and a few more at Springfield’s IOOF (Independent Order of Odd Fellows) nursing home.
While he was taken on at the latter because he had a boiler operator’s license, his ability to solve problems with the time clock, address safety issues and handle the payroll made him assistant to the administrator, where he also began to dabble in finances.
“It was interesting,” Fyffe said. “It changed all the time, there was always some kind of an issue where something didn’t work, and it was fun to figure out.”
Rinse and repeat
As the renovations at the Westcott House were winding up in 2005, Fyffe was ready for another rinse and repeat.
“I saw this ad in the paper,” he said again. “They wanted somebody with air conditioning experience, because they were putting in geothermal.”
And once again, at interview’s end, then executive director Rob Kearns said, “That’s great, when can you start?”
So, beginning July 5, 2005, he “just kind of did some stuff part time, some maintenance things.”
When Kearns left, Fyffe filled in temporarily, then was happy to pass on the job to Wojcik, who he said “could have done it in the first place.”
“You just can’t say enough about her. Smart. She knows where to get the answers, and if she doesn’t have them, she’s knows where to find them. There’s nobody better to work for,” he said.
As at the IOOF home, “I liked all the different mechanical systems. And trying to preserve an old house with hardly enough money to do it with” was a challenge he had faced before.
He credits people at Haucke Brothers and Durable Slate for always answering the phone when he called them and Wojcik both for being “good at fund-raising and grants” needed to make ends meet.
He expanded into the financial responsibilities with the help of then Turner Foundation employee Karen Wooten, who “helped me the most to get things started and taught me how things should be kept” in the digitally based systems that had come along.
He also took and continues to take great pleasure in driving and minor maintenance on the museum’s Springfield-made Westcott car designed and built by the house’s owner.
(When the house is rented out for parties, Fyffe is called on to chauffeuring passengers whose blood alcohol levels occasionally exceed the level permitted by the Ohio Revised Code.)
A problem in common
As Wojcik has grown into her job and then leadership roles in the community, “I’m like running around, and half of the time he doesn’t know where I am,” she said. “And he trusts me … Or maybe he doesn’t, and he just doesn’t tell me.”
Meanwhile, she trusts that he has the pulse of the place.
“I’m at Westcott seven days a week,” Fyffe says before adding, “I might skip a Saturday or Sunday, but not often.”
Wojcik is sure whatever time he misses is made up when something goes haywire.
“We sometimes have these issues like the alarm in the middle of the night,” she said. “Some people won’t deal with that kind of nonsense. (But) in a small operation like this, that’s how we make it.”
Both say the dedication each has shown to the house and one another is matched by the dedication of Westcott House volunteers.
“Most of them jump in and help,” Fyffe said. “Some of them want specific schedules to give tours. Then there’s another group that volunteers to take care of the gardens, flowers and things.”
Wojcik adds that it has been that way since the beginning.
“I was told when we first started that I may have a hard time to get people to go through the process of guiding tours,” she said.
That concern went away when “we had, like, 65 people at the first training.” It showed that people were hungry for an opportunity to be involved and have remained so.
“If we have 15 people from all over the state coming for a tour, the volunteer better show up,” Wojcik said, “or the whole enterprise collapses.”
Unhappy birthday
Still, those who think all this would make Frank Lloyd Wright’s June 8 birthday a day that Wojcik and Fyffe look forward to are dreadfully mistaken. After 20 years of hosting the annual event, Wojcik and Fyffe have been tempted to change the name from a party to a shower because it always seems to rain.
“This past one was the worst,” Wojcik said.
“We had an offer from (Clark State College President) Jo Blondin to move it” indoors to Hollenbeck-Bayley Creative Arts and Conference Center, Wojcik, said.
“We were just going back and forth, and we finally decided (the forecast) looked good” — so good that the evening of June 7, Wojcik and Fyffe were in the amongst the flowers, linens and decorative lights in the house’s backyard enjoying a drink and agreeing “This is spectacular, this is worth it,” she said.
The next day “Everyone came to the party, and the sun was shining,” she said. “But in an hour in, it pours down, and there’s no stopping it.”
And there appears to be no magical solution.
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