Art: Lumberman at Home

Every well-informed citizen of Kansas City knows how the late Robert Alexander Long went into the lumber business, boosted Long-Bell to be the largest lumber company in the world operating under one ownership, built the company city of Longview, Wash., and paid himself, as founder-chairman, a $60,000 salary during good years. The first years of his married life Lumberman Long passed in a $700 cottage in a corner of a lumber yard. But before he died last March, aged 83, he had erected for himself a huge 70-room porticoed limestone and marble Renaissance house—fine even in a finer place than Kansas City. The house alone cost $575,226.07. Inside was placed a profusion of Austrian hand-tufted carpets, tapestries, urns, silverware, china, pictures, bric-a-brac, chandeliers, for which Mr. Long paid $207,763.57. There were Oriental rugs in every bathroom. House and contents were listed on his personal ledger as an $11 asset. Last week more than 1,000 Kansas Citizens gratified a long-cherished ambition to see the inside of the Long house. Up for auction was everything Lumberman Long possessed except the sets of Dickens, Eliot and Bulwer-Lytton which lined the walls of the little oak room where he read the Bible every morning and to which was brought his 10 o’clock glass of milk. While Auctioneer William Henry Jones grew hoarse trying to get better prices and Housekeeper Catherine Viles wept salty tears of sadness, bidders and gapers were able to glean from the house’s elaborate furnishings how pious Lumberman Long liked to spend his days. At the foot of a marble and bronze stairway was a red plush and Gobelin tapestry sofa (sold to Harry Jacobs for $410) on which Mr. Long and the late Ella Wilson Long used to sit only at Christmas when they gave presents to the servants. In the French salon beneath an enormous pear-shaped crystal chandelier (sold to Dr. Abraham Sophian for $470), was a walnut and gold-leaf player piano (to Mrs. John K. Jasper; $1,325), a matching walnut cabinet for music rolls (to Mrs. Victor Schutte; $87.50). A rose and ivory French hand-piled rug was appraised at $8,000, sold for $500. Vases and urns, including a huge Austrian-ware receptacle decorated with a lavender, red and green battle scene ($250), stood in every room. Lumberman Long had few pictures, none by famed artists, but liked bibelots like his small ivory goose ($2.25). Gongs announced dinner even when Mr. Long was alone and his valet played the organ while he sat on Aubusson-tapestried chairs, ate from English china, drank from hand-cut crystal goblets (sold for $280). At large dinners, a silver tankard more than two feet high ($135) decorated the table. A sufferer from asthma, Mr. Long had a mahogany stand on which he kept his atomizer. In the basement he had his own two-chair barber shop. Last thing to be auctioned will be Mr. Long’s 70-room house, for which a Catholic boys’ school was expected to bid.