Howard A. Metzger (1921-2005)
Frederic C. Palmer (1901-1971)
How an Ohio Boy Found Love, and a Life, in East Haddam
A Nephew Remembers Uncle Howard's Life with Frederic Palmer
At the top of the stairs in the Palmer-Warner House was a workroom with a big drafting table. When Frederic Palmer died in 1971, a set of plans lay open on it, turned to the last page he and Howard Metzger had worked on together.
Howard left it there for the rest of his life.
"There's not a paper or a pen out of place," says Scott Metzger, Howard's nephew. Once, on a visit, Scott turned a page to look at the next drawing. "When we left the room, he turned it back to the page where it was when we started."
Frederic's bedroom stayed the same too, with the same wallpaper, the same lamps and his clothes still in the closet. "It was always kind of like a shrine," Scott says.
"He was a special person in my life," says Scott Metzger, who spoke with EastHaddamStories by video from Wisconsin. He agreed to share his uncle's story as Connecticut Landmarks prepared to tell of Howard Metzger and Frederic Palmer's life together at the Palmer-Warner House.
Scott is 72 now and lives in Wisconsin. He sat down to talk about the uncle he loved and the relationship his family knew about for decades and never discussed.
"It was something that was never talked about in our family openly," he says. "There were whispers."
Howard was born in 1921 in Greentown, Ohio, between Akron and Canton, the son of a Hoover vacuum company worker. He grew up in the Depression, a slight, artistic boy who read, drew and painted and had no interest in sports or dating. "Being the person he was, being gay, he really didn't fit into this little blue-collar, small-town atmosphere," Scott says.
He left on the water, first on Great Lakes ore ships and then in the Merchant Marine, serving on seven or eight ships during World War II. On shore leave in New York, he stayed with a friend in an apartment owned by Frederick Palmer. By Scott's account, that's how the two met. Before long they were in East Haddam.
Frederic was a restoration architect. Howard had no formal training. He never went to college and made sure nobody found out. But he had an eye for "the lines of something," Scott says. "The lines of a car, the lines of a bedspread, the lines on a wallpaper." While Frederic restored old buildings, including the Goodspeed Opera House, Howard made sure the interiors were right. At home they made the house and grounds their shared project. "This house, this property, was like their child," Scott says.
Scott knew Frederic mostly as a voice on the phone. Every Christmas, Howard drove home to Ohio alone. The family passed the phone around on its four-foot cord to wish Frederic a merry Christmas, and Howard's mother talked with him for ten minutes or more. Christmas cards came signed by both men. Everyone understood what that meant, and no one said it out loud. Scott's father, Howard's younger brother Jack, had once tried to fix Howard up with dates and couldn't understand why he refused. Scott believes his father didn't truly acknowledge that Howard was gay until after Howard died.
In East Haddam, it was different. "They never were really out as a gay couple," Scott says, "but they loved to have people come to the house and entertain. And everybody in the community knew that they were a gay couple."
Their life together had real style. The two men dressed for dinner in white dinner jackets, even at home. Dinner came in courses, with cocktails and long cigarette holders. They owned MGs, fast Buicks and Cadillacs, and each had a Rolls-Royce. They bought a 1964 Riviera partly because they loved how its fender tips lit up with the parking lights on. Their friends ranged from wealthy estate owners to Howard's friend Neil Blaskie, a mechanic at a local car dealership, whom Howard phoned every day.
Frederic seemed delighted by Howard. "He would say, 'Oh, Howard trimmed this tree today into a corkscrew,'" Scott remembers. "You could tell by the tone in his voice that he was pleased." The tree, a pine about 40 feet tall, was Howard's self-taught topiary, next to a pair of bushes clipped into rabbits.
After Frederic died, Howard held onto the life they had built. He painted the house himself into his 70s, and Scott saw him trotting across the yard in his 80s. He kept collecting: hundreds of clocks, set to chime a minute apart beginning at noon so he could hear each one, a hundred frogs arranged behind the kitchen, and a thousand VHS tapes recorded three movies to a cassette. For guests he set a formal table and served vichyssoise, which turned out to be Campbell's potato soup. "It was all in the presentation," Scott says, laughing.
He was also a little mischievous. He came home from South America with a shrunken head hidden under his officer's cap. Years later, the family sold it for $10,000, and it ended up with two gay turtle farmers in Florida. When his mother died, Howard flew to Ohio for the funeral and flew back the same day because he didn't want to leave the house alone overnight.
He died at 84, after a crash in his Volkswagen Karmann Ghia. He asked for no funeral and no obituary.
Looking back, Scott wishes he had asked more. "I was uneducated about this stuff and didn't know that it would be okay to have a discussion with him, so that he would feel comfortable talking to me," he says. "I regret that to this day."
That regret is part of why he's talking now, as Connecticut Landmarks prepares to include Howard and Frederic's story at the house. Scott thinks his private uncle would have needed some persuading, and that he would have agreed as long as it was done properly.
"I don't think it's something that should be hid away in a closet," Scott says. "It's great that they found each other, and were compatible in work and in life together."
