“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Within a few weeks Ed Robbins’ and my labors on the Mike Hammer detective strip came to an end due to policy differences with the syndicate distributing the feature. Both of us ended up out of work. I never did get to settle down in my own place in Schuylerville! A “coincidence,” of course, that my work for Ed ended at the same time Jane told him that she and Walt had amicably agreed to part. Ed talked about moving with his family to New Paltz, a small community about 110 miles south, near the Hudson River; he might find commercial work there with a friend. I thought of returning to my parents’ home in Sayre, and then going on to New York City as I’d originally planned to do before receiving that life-changing call from Ed.

“Rob, do you think the community—Elmira—has any idea of the historical significance of this house, as far as Jane’s work goes?”

We had always been very comfortable in the community, and grateful indeed that we had the privilege of living there on our own terms, even though in those early years we usually took in so little money that we lived pretty much from week to week, with no security. Before we moved out of 458, though, Jane’s books began to appear in local and chain bookstores, and the very interesting mail from readers kept increasing, to our great pleasure.

The Butts family does have a bit of history in Elmira, though. Here are a few clues for anyone even remotely interested. In the last two decades of the 1800s my grandfather Otis and his wife raised four children on their farm in Wellsboro, PA, a farming community some 50 miles from Elmira, New York. At the age of 15 my father, Robert Sr., followed his three older siblings, Jay and Ernest and Ella, in leaving the farm. All did well, each in his and her way. Ernest left the northeast and never married. After Jay and Ella had each married they settled in Elmira. Jay and his wife had children. My father married Estelle (Stell) in Newark, NJ in 1917, and I was born two years later in Mansfield, a small community near Wellsboro.