Word: homers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Homer Collyer and his brother Langley grew up just before the gas chandelier, the camisole and the Prince Albert coat vanished from the American scene. Their father was a well-known and wealthy Manhattan gynecologist, their mother an educated woman who read the classics aloud to them in Greek. They were fondly reared; they were trained to be gentlemen & scholars. Homer became an admiralty lawyer. Langley went in for engineering and developed a talent for the piano...
...they were shy young men and showed little inclination to brave the noisy world. In 1909, when Homer was 27 and Langley 23, they were still living with their parents in a handsome, three-story brownstone on upper Fifth Avenue. Then their father & mother separated. The brothers began shutting themselves off from life...
...Visions. When Homer went blind in 1933, they did not call a doctor. Speaking in cultured accents, Langley explained that there was no need-Homer was eating a hundred oranges a week and resting his eyes by keeping them closed. But Homer did not get better. He became paralyzed in 1940 and never left the house again...
Langley, a long-haired and shabby figure in a greasy cap and a flapping coat, grew more secretive, more intent on being "let alone." Although he was seldom seen, he led a life of incredible activity. He read aloud to Homer, sometimes sketched buildings "all in red" which Homer had seen in visions, saved tons & tons of newspapers for Homer to read when he regained his sight. After midnight, Langley roamed the city, pulling a cardboard box on the end of a long rope. He inspected garbage cans for food, begged meat scraps from a kindly butcher, sometimes walked...
...took a long time to investigate the call. The police chopped away the Collyers' bolted front door, and were confronted by a solid mass of newspapers, cartons, old iron, broken furniture. Finally a patrolman went up a ladder, opened a shutter, swept his flashlight into a cavelike burrow. Homer was sitting on the floor. He was naked except for a thin and tattered bathrobe, his long white hair hung down to his shoulders, and his hand rested near a shriveled apple. He had been dead for some hours...