I grew up in Tipp City, Ohio, and passed this house hundreds of times. It sits directly across from the city park, and I always knew there was something a little odd about it. That’s probably why it stuck in my mind. I’m simply drawn to this sort of thing.
Then one day my buddy McKay Featherstone started talking about Lustron houses.
You have to understand the relationship I have with McKay. One reason we’re friends because we both love nerdy stuff, and McKay is basically a database for this sort of thing. But in this case, he had more than an academic interest. McKay actually grew up in a Lustron home. (Yeah, how cool is that?) So when he started telling me about Lustron homes, something immediately struck a chord.
Then he told me there was one right here in Tipp City.
Suddenly, it all felt familiar. I seemed to remember my grandfather telling me about these houses a long time ago. Before long, McKay and I decided to take a walk through town and have a closer look at the one I’d passed hundreds of times without really knowing what I was looking at.
And that little walk eventually put a Lustron house into The First Flight.
So, What Exactly Is a Lustron House?
If you’ve never heard of a Lustron house, you’re not alone. Until McKay started talking about them, I didn’t really know what I had been looking at all those years either.
The Lustron was an answer to a very specific American problem. When World War II ended, millions of servicemen came home, families were growing, and the United States faced a serious housing shortage. American factories had just demonstrated that they could turn out airplanes, tanks, trucks, and ships in staggering numbers. So why not houses?
That was the idea behind Lustron.
The Lustron Corporation, headed by industrialist Carl Strandlund, proposed building houses much the same way automobiles were built: in a factory, from standardized parts, and then shipping those parts to the building site for assembly.
But these weren’t ordinary prefabricated houses.
Lustrons were made largely of steel. Their exterior walls were covered in square porcelain-enameled steel panels, the same basic idea as the durable enamel finish found on appliances of the period. Inside, steel panels were used again for walls and ceilings. Even much of the framing was steel.
The result was a house that looked unlike almost anything else in the neighborhood.
And that was exactly what I had noticed as a kid.
Those rows of perfectly uniform panels gave the house across from the park in Tipp City a look I couldn’t quite identify. It wasn’t futuristic, exactly, but it didn’t look like the older wood, brick, and stone houses around it either. There was something almost manufactured about it.
Because it was.
Lustron’s factory in Columbus, Ohio, began producing the homes in the late 1940s. The pieces were loaded onto specially designed trucks, delivered to building sites around the country, and assembled into finished homes. Buyers could choose among several models and colors, and the company promoted them as modern, efficient, low-maintenance homes for America’s postwar families.
It was an extraordinarily ambitious idea.
It also didn’t last.
Despite enormous government backing and a massive manufacturing operation, Lustron struggled with production costs, distribution, construction delays, and finances. The company went bankrupt in 1950, after producing only a few thousand homes.
That failure is part of what makes the surviving houses so fascinating today.
For a brief moment after World War II, someone seriously tried to build the American house of the future out of porcelain-coated steel, and one of those houses ended up directly across from the park in the little Ohio town where I grew up.
My father, a lifelong Tipp City resident, tells me he remembers there being three Lustron houses in town at one time. Today, the one across from the city park is the only one I know of, the same strange little house I passed hundreds of times growing up.
So What Does This Have to Do With My Book, The First Flight?
Well, I had a problem to solve.
I was looking for a way for one of my characters to receive messages through his dreams. I wanted the idea to have just enough connection to the physical world that it didn’t feel entirely like magic.
And then I thought about the Lustron house.
A house constructed from a steel frame and covered, inside and out, with porcelain-enameled steel panels suddenly seemed like a wonderfully strange place for this to happen. In my imagination, sleeping inside a Lustron was almost like surrounding yourself with one enormous antenna.
That idea stuck.
So a house I had walked past hundreds of times as a kid, one I never really understood until my friend McKay suggested we take a closer look at it, found its way into The First Flight.
That’s one of the things I love most about writing. You never really know where an idea is going to come from. Sometimes it comes from months of research.
And sometimes it’s been sitting across from the park your entire life, just waiting for you to notice it.
If this sounds like your kind of story, check out The First Flight: And Other Declassified Tales. And if you like Lustron and homes of the future, McKay and I have devoted an entire episode of Dreams of Future Past to them. Go check it out!
Leave a Reply