“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.

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.

Often I think of the routines Jane and I settled into upon moving into 1730 in 1975. She was 46; I was 56. Now it seems that all of those years to follow passed in a flash. Routines, yes, but also ever-changing ones that still revolved around the simple elements of the work we loved and carried out amid the unexpected freedoms of living so much closer to the environment we had always taken for granted: the writing and painting, the sessions and mail, the publishing of books, the visits of friends and fans, some even from Europe. The hill house was the first property either one of us had ever owned, yet even within that loving context Jane gradually had more and more trouble walking even while the Seth material continued to grow in reach and flexibility, to attract a wider and wider audience. We saw deer in the back yard and put feed out for them and the birds. (The deer went into hiding during the hunting seasons.)

John “settled down” eventually; he lives with his wife and children in Seattle, Washington. I saw him once several years later when he visited his mother. He was immensely proud to show me his very young first son. His mother Margaret retired to Florida after the death of her husband Joe. We still keep in touch. I’ll always treasure her exceptional kindnesses to me during Jane’s long and final hospital stay.