What is it with this community? Within a couple of days after publication about the Air Mail house in North Hills, we heard from the owner of the other Air Mail house – the one that had apparently inspired it. As you may recall from that previous post, the Coates family didn’t remember the exact location or know whose home it was that sparked their decision to hang their own flying mailbox landmark some 17 years ago. But now we know.
The home from which the Coates family borrowed the idea is on New Second Street in Elkins Park. Stephanie Phillips explains that about 20 years ago, “We were driving down a peninsula in Down East Maine, admiring the purple lupines.” She says when she saw a mailbox dangling from a high tree marked “Air Mail,” she giggled. “I thought, ‘What a nice thing to have.’ There are so many things not to smile about – here’s a happy thing.”
Phillips and her husband, tree surgeon Lewis Ruberg of Lewis Tree Care, are on their second airborne mailbox already. “It’s a recognition thing,” she says. Like Coates, they appreciate its value as a landmark on a busy street and enjoy the instant identification it provides to strangers and visitors.
And like the Coates family, they’ve been asked if their letter carrier really puts mail in it.
Those aren’t the only coincidences shared by the owners of these matching aerial adornments.
Like Drew Coates, Phillips is a professional. With her background in art history, Phillips has long consulted to a number of the area’s prominent nonprofits. Specializing in cultural travel and customized trip design, Phillips owns Globe Travel, which she says is the oldest travel agency in the Philadelphia area. “Actually, it owns me,” she quips. She marvels at the pleasant irony that in 1961, the agency that booked the trip Phillips took to Europe with her grandparents had been this very one.
Also like Coates, Phillips is drawn inexplicably to the unusual. A compulsive multi-tasker, Phillips’ favorite freelance job was the restoration and decorative repainting she gave Isabella, a lifesize cow that had been auctioned as a fundraiser for the Waco (Texas) Art Museum some years ago. Apparently Isabella had faded in the sun and salt air of Florida, where her owner had moved her. Phillips came to the rescue.
She says the scariest job she ever performed was a treatment she conducted on a fine English sofa that its owner had upholstered – unhappily, it turned out - in expensive, bright yellow silk damask. The owner was in her 80s, and, recalling a procedure once executed by her mother, recruited Phillips to apply this strategy to tone down the glaring color. So, at the owner’s insistence, Phillips reluctantly sprayed the sofa with iced tea. It worked.
Phillips is a serious cat lady. She’s the originator, some thirty years ago, and owner of Plants for Cats (sold locally at places like Primex and the Philadelphia Flower Show), the little packages of seeds you can plant to detour your felines away from other houseplants. Her household is ruled by a rescued mother-daughter cat team, and Phillips also collects all sorts of antique cat treasures.
Gardening is another of Phillips’ obsessions. She adores what she calls the “hodgepodge” of English gardens, and cultivates “the world’s most expensive salad bar” for the unintended benefit of the neighborhood wildlife. In order to counter her involuntary generosity, Phillips is desperately devising strategies – from Irish Spring soap mobiles to fences made from sparkly tinsel sticks scavenged from her son’s Bar Mitzvah centerpieces. Her latest effort, derived from the concept of a scarecrow, is a “scare deer.”
Guess it’s open season for talented homeowners who take pride in distinction and creativity. Anybody else?
