Bookmarked: Future emerging for Updike house

The Shillington, Pa. house at 117 Philadelphia Avenue, just south of Reading, where John Updike confronted as a child the "terrible pressure of American disappointment" is being renovated by the John Updike Society in conjunction with Habitat for Humanity of Berks County. Updike lived in the house until the age of 13 when his parents moved to a farm in Plowville.

The 250 member Updike Society envisions the house becoming a place of pilgrimage for fans of the author, school teachers, and scholars, and the site of events and lectures related to his work. Scheduled to be completed for the Society's third annual meeting in October 2014, it will depict the house as it was from 1932-1945, and contain some of the Updike family's collection and possibly items from the Alvernia University's Updike archive, first editions of his works, and potentially video and other materials exploring his connection to Pennsylvania.

"Walking through the house, readers will remember Updike talking about his room being behind his parents' bedroom, or sleeping on the upstairs porch with his mother. And there's just something special about being in the same space and picturing young Updike absorbing everything like a sponge," says the Society's president Jim Plath, a professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University.

The Society will make use of an annex added to the house by the subsequent owner, Dr. Hunter. That space will be used for writers' retreats and events that celebrate the life and work of Updike, says Maria Mogford, an instructor of English and Education at Albright College, who will serve as the curator of the Updike Childhood Home.

Both Plath and Mogford expect the 80 year old dogwood tree planted in honor of Updike's first birthday to have a strong emotional draw on visitors, as it did for the author himself. In "The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood," Updike wrote, "in a sense, that tree was me."

House museums of this kind are notably difficult to conceive, fund, and sustain, in part because like this one, they're often in residential neighborhoods separate from a city's commercial core. Organizers believe that Updike's substantial following and the attention he paid in his writing and throughout his literary life to his upbringing and particular his mother, who desired herself to become an author, will make this a place of lasting importance.

The $350,000 renovation is being underwritten in part by grants from the Robert and Adele Schiff Family Foundation and the PECO Foundation, with more still needed. The project has gotten a substantial boost from the involvement of Habitat of Humanity's Berks County chapter, whose volunteer workers have shaved tens of thousands of dollars of the cost of renovation. This marks the first time a Habitat chapter has committed resources to a broader community project beyond affordable housing for needy families.

"The idea of using resources to assist in a project like this is very non-traditional," says Habitat's Berks County director Tim Daley. "Habitat for Humanity of Berks County is all about recognizing that decent affordable housing should be a staple for families wanting to secure roots into a community and we work very hard to increase homeownership experiences for moderate income families.  That being said, we also recognize that we must feel obligated to be a true community partner. If we want our families to understand community responsibility then doing work that benefits the community at large should be part of our mission."

Indeed, organizers of the house museum seem particularly aware of the Updike Childhood Home's role in figuring a future for the deeply impoverished Reading, where the author set the Rabbit books, The Centaur, and the Olinger stories. "He'd be sad about the continued decline, because for his entire life he felt a connection to Shillington, to Reading, to Pennsylvania," says Plath. "We can't do anything about the area, but we can certainly do what we can to stop the deterioration of The John Updike Childhood Home and begin to restore it so that, decades from now, it will be as accessible to literary tourists and hopefully as popular as Mark Twain's Hannibal, Mo. house, Ernest Hemingway's Oak Park, Ill. birthplace, and William Faulkner's Rowan Oak. As one of the great American authors of the twentieth century, Updike is certainly deserving of our efforts."