John Hiatt had no inkling the buyers of remodeled house would become famous writers.
If John Hiatt had known he was dealing with two future American literary lions, maybe he would have paid more attention.
He remembers, nevetherless, right much about a 1946 encounter with young, then-unknown writers Peter Taylor and Randall Jarrell.
Taylor won the Pulitzer Prize for his book "A Summons to Memphis," and Jarrell, the National Book Award for a book of poetry. He also occupied the position now known as National Poet Laureate.
Hiatt, 85, is a selt-taught, self-educated construction man. In 1946, at his second job in a construction business he had started, he bought a rundown house at the corner of Spring Garden Street and Holliday Drive.
He remodeled the house into a duplex, which he put up for sale. He lived in one unit while he built a house for himself on Springwood Drive in nearby Lindley Park.
Jarrell and his first wife, Machie, and Taylor and his wife, Eleanor Ross Taylor, bought the duplex. Both men pooled their G.I. Bill loans.
Hiatt doesn't remember if he knew they were writers. He saw them as two ex-GIs getting on with their lives after the war. He may have known they had teaching positions at the Woman's College, now UNCG, just down Spring Garden, but he's not sure.
Under the terms of the sale, Hiatt and his wife got to stay in one unit until their house was completed.
They meant the Jarrells and Taylors had to bunch up and live together in the other two-bedroom unit. Hiatt says these tight living arrangements continued for about six to eight weeks. After that the Taylors and Jarrells each had their own units.
"During that time we all became friends," Hiatt says in a letter to the News & Record, prompted by a story that the state will erect a highway historical marker to honor Jarrell.
"Randall and wife...had a Siamese cat. They would sit in the side yard on a stump parts of everyday with the cat. Randaell and wife were very friendly. I'd sit with them on lots of occasions.
"Peter and his wife was not as friendly. They stayed to themslves most of the time."
He can't remember what he and the Jarrells talked on that stump. But he's certain it wasn't about poetry and prose.
Hiatt says he had never heard of Robert Lowell, Allen Tate, Robert Frost, Robert Penn Warren and other contemporary writers that the Jarrells and Taylors knew and who Jarrell often reviewed.
The relationship between Taylor and Jarrell may have been testy. Taylor may have admired writers that Jarrell dispised.
Regarding Taylor, "his first sojourn here," writes the late Randolph Bulgin, who taught English at UNCG, "was marred by the acerbity and condescension of Jarrell's too frequent criticism - he said it was like living in the YMCA with Saint Ignatius..." Ignatius was considered a contentious saint.
Told that Jarrell loved fancy cars, Hiatt says he doesn't recall discussing autos with him. But come to think of it, he said, Jarrell had a weird looking car parked behind the duplux.
It may have been an MG, which Jarrell drove before buying a gold-colored XKE.
Jarrell and Mackie Jarrell would eventually divorce, and he remarried. His widow, Mary Jarrell, 91, still lives in Greensboro. They settled in a house off New Garden Road near Guilford College.
Except for sabbaticals and time off to serve as poet laureate, Jarrell stayed at UNCG. He was killed when struck by a car in Chapel Hill in 1965.
Taylor left Greensboro for other teaching jobs, returning in the 1960s, before leaving again. He died in 1994 in Charlottesville, Va., where he had taught at the University of Virginia and lived in the house that William Faulkner had occupied when he taught at Virginia.
Hiatt says he thinks of Jarrell and Taylor and their wives when he passes the house at Spring Garden and Holliday, where up Holliday Street another celebrity of sorts grew up, Mayor Keith Holliday. The street is named for his father, a merchant and World War II survivor of D-Day.
Hiatt says he never read anything either writer wrote. He prides himself on just being a simple construction man, still working five days a week running a one-horse company in which he says "I'm the horse."
He specializes in remolding, and the older the house the better. He says the house at Spring Garden and Holliday was a dump until he fixed it up.
Not much has changed about his routine since then. He's now performing renovation magic on a run-down two-story house on Phillips Avenue.
