Bill Hooper--Requiescat in Pace.

We note the recent passing of Bill Hooper.  We were the grateful recipients of construction advice from both Bill and his Partner in Building, Bob Porter.

Bill was a font of both arcane and practical knowledge as well as Yellow Springs community history.

We were owners of a home on Kurt Street that Bill and Bob had built in the early 1950’s for an Antioch professor of mathematics.

One day Bill ruefully informed me that our house was the only structure that he and Bob and ever lost money on in the history of their enterprise.  Bill was so enamored of the pictures and plans that he seriously underbid the project for the “opportunity” to be associated with it.

The house was the design of a Cincinnati architect and featured an unusual “V” trough in the roof line that invariably created an ice dam each winter when snow and ice slid down the slopes of the inside inclines of the “V” and would alternately freeze and thaw until the seams of the roof were breached and the snow/ice melt started to flood the kitchen and living room.

Bill, and everyone else, was struck by a roof line that no one had ever seen before.

And of course the reason so few “Butterfly Roofs” had ever been seen was because architects who wanted to retain their reputations  designed only one such roof in their career-- and then spent the remainder of their professional lives dis-associating themselves from the leaky disaster.

It was yet another instance of Bill Hooper’s signature self-effacing wit that he told the story on himself.

Requiescat in Pace.