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The rough-hewn cypress house that Jane Wood Reno built by hand has withstood hurricanes and weathered campaigns. Now it is one of the foundations of daughter Janet's career.
By WES ALLISON, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published July 21, 2002
MIAMI -- The gravel road cuts through saw palmetto and avocados to an earlier time, when this concrete corner of Miami-Dade County was sand and scrub, too remote to make a phone call. At the cypress house where the gravel stops, the tropical canopy shuts out the strip mall across the street, hides the funeral home next door, drowns out the noise of traffic on the busy four-lane nearby.
The only concession to the suburban sea that now slaps at its edges is the whine of a lawnmower from a brush-cloaked subdivision, where neighbors once complained about the peacocks that have roamed the grounds for 30 years.
The house, low slung and weathered, its window screens scored by time, isn't much to look at if you prefer the sterile sameness of the patio homes next door. But it is quaint in the way a lake cottage is quaint, as welcoming as an idle summer day, rough-hewn and stout with cypress beams and posts.
The most striking feature, like its occupant's height, is the oversized screened porch that also serves as the living room, with its long wooden table that has survived five decades of spilled drinks and cigarette ash and the boisterous, hope-fueled strategy sessions that make every political campaign as wild as this place itself. Pulled up against it is a black leather chair stamped with the gold seal of the attorney general of the United States.
In the parlance of Janet Reno, this is the House My Mother Built. She has lived here, more or less, since she was 13 years old.
For a figure who literally can stop traffic just by standing on a street corner, it is her last private place, and she guards it jealously. The Renos used to throw parties there, colorful, unruly gatherings of reporters and politicos and cops that her folks knew from their newspaper jobs. Now the mailbox bears no name. A chain blocks the gravel drive.
But the house also serves as a very public, and effective, political tool. Reno used it first to disarm the U.S. Senate, spinning a warm tale about family and hard work that melted away her conservative critics. Now, in her uphill run for governor of Florida, she again is counting on her mother's old house to make foes rethink their enmity, and to win new friends.
Reno never gives a speech without it. Anyone who has heard her lately -- school children, retirees, Democratic groups, talk show host Jay Leno -- knows the story: Her mother, Jane Wood Reno, built the house with her own hands to make room for her growing family, learning construction as she went and counting on her husband, Henry, to "help her with the heavy stuff when he got home from work."
On the campaign trail, the House serves as a metaphor for Reno's Old Florida roots, and as a way to soften the angles of the tall, taciturn law-woman with the stern demeanor. During a talk this spring to students at a Highland County elementary school, her mother's feat offered proof that hard work can overcome any obstacle.
To potential supporters at a recent community meeting in Land O'Lakes, to a gathering of Democratic faithful in Pinellas Park, to gay rights activists in Fort Lauderdale and to dozens of groups between, the House provides parable: In August 1992, as Hurricane Andrew raged around them, her mother -- "old and frail and dying" -- sat "totally unafraid, for she knew how she had built that house. She hadn't cut corners. She hadn't compromised her standards. She had built it the right way."
That Jane Reno built the House, timber by timber, seems a bit far-fetched. It's a big house, with a steep, pitched roof and heavy redwood rafters tied together with thick cypress beams. Some walls are cypress batten, others are a whitish slump brick made from local soil. The cool floor of the 50- by 14-foot porch is brick, too. It accounts for nearly half the total square footage of the house.
Detractors contend Reno has nurtured a myth. But Reno and her siblings swear their mother built it, with a little help from family and friends.
"She came to know the good suppliers, the good plumbers and electricians, and she said 'I'll buy my material from you if you answer my questions,"' Reno, settled into a wicker chair on that porch, explained on a recent Sunday afternoon. Her mom did all the carpentry, she said. "My father would help her with the heavy work, getting the beams up and so forth."
Jane Reno, a journalist, was something of a hurricane in own right. In her youth, friends and newspaper accounts described her as fiercely independent, a splendid writer who forsook the trappings of social propriety to follow her muse. For one story, she took six days to walk 100 miles down the beach with just a handful of supplies and a pack of cigarettes. She discarded her bathing suit early in the journey because she preferred to swim nude and the beach was mostly deserted. She slept in the sand.
Howard Kleinberg, a friend and colleague at the Miami News in the 1950s, recalled how she wrote for the opinion page under pseudonyms to make extra money. In the sports department, someone named Dick Reynolds always received a free set of tickets from a local race track. "We could never tell who the hell was Dick Reynolds," Kleinberg said.
He was Jane Reno.
She got only saltier as she aged. Miami Herald accounts from the 1970s described her drinking Busch beer before lunch and smoking like a chimney. She wielded a chain saw, with aplomb, well into her 60s. Her primary uniform seems to have been an old housecoat and sneakers, or no shoes at all. She fed her peacocks and damned the neighbors who complained about the poop.
There are no building permits for the House on file with Miami-Dade County, and Reno says she has no idea whether the permits for framing, electric and plumbing were lost over the years, or whether her mother simply never bothered to pull any.
Back in 1979, soon after Janet Reno was appointed state attorney, the Herald asked Jane about the House, where mother and daughter still lived together. "I found this," she said about building it: "You can learn to do anything you want, if you aren't hurried."
The House began with 21 acres of scrub, pine and pasture that Henry Reno, a police reporter for the Herald, purchased in 1947 for $11,500. At the time, Kendall was mostly farmland abutting the Everglades, so remote that his editors had to cajole Southern Bell to run out a phone line.
He and Jane and their children -- Janet, Bobby, Mark and Maggy, four children born in as many years -- moved into a cramped yellow bungalow on the property. They had no neighbors, save for a hermit who lived a mile or so away. Seminole Indians frequently passed through. "You saw nature as it functioned without human limitation," Reno said.
Almost immediately, Jane began planning for the House. She designed it to draw air, the way houses in her native Georgia did, with an open floor plan and no interior doors. It would have no air conditioning and no heat.
Janet Reno says her mother was a woman of singular determination, driven and hard-driving. She broke ground in 1949.
"One afternoon, Mother picked us up at school, and she said, 'I'm going to build a house,"' Reno tells her audiences. "We said, 'What do you know about building a house?' And she said, 'I'm going to learn.'
"And she went and talked to the brick mason and the electrician and the plumber, and she learned how to build a house. She dug the foundation with her own hands with a pick and shovel, she laid the blocks, she put in the wiring, she put in the plumbing, and Daddy would help her at night."
It took her almost three years. In fact, she never really finished; she just quit working on it. The family moved in in 1952, but some paneling has yet to be installed, and the kitchen sink was never quite right, Reno said. "She said, 'You finish a home, you die.' "
Nearly four of the original 21 acres remain; the rest has been surrendered to development. The family sold 10 to finance the house, then five more to send the children to college. A couple more acres were sold to cover Jane Reno's last trips abroad and her retirement. She died of lung cancer in 1992, at age 79. Janet inherited the house.
Reno likes to talk about the House, and on a recent afternoon she did for an hour. Yes, she acknowledged, her mom did have some help. A. Travers Ewell, an old family friend, poured the slab and made the brick she used for the walls. He seemed to serve as a consultant as well, often advising Jane Reno on what to do or how to do it.
An old photo shows him and Reno wrangling with plumbing, a skill she never quite mastered.
At the time, Jane Reno was freelancing for a news publication called Florida Living. Her other daughter, Maggy Reno Hurchalla, said that got her acquainted with plenty of craftsmen.
"Do-it-yourself was a brand-new, post-war rage," Hurchalla said. "She would interview an electrician on how to do it, and then sell the story for $25 to buy materials."
Jim Adamson, a Miami builder and architect, toured Reno's home in early 1993 for a Herald story about the House, which Reno had made famous in her pitch to the Senate Judiciary Committee during her confirmation hearing. (For this story, Reno allowed a reporter to see only the porch, the kitchen and the grounds.)
Adamson says he has no trouble believing Jane Reno built it. The hardest part would have been pouring a level slab to start from, and Ewell did that for her.
"With a lot of diligence you can figure out how to do it. It's a very basic thing," Adamson said. "The thing that people don't realize is that up until 100 years ago, people built their own homes. Now it seems so specialized, but it really is just common sense."
It's well-built, too, with notched posts and beams that provide enormous strength, he said. It makes the most of the prevailing breezes. Benches, shelves and cabinets were built in thoughtfully. It definitely struck him as home-built, and it's not perfect. The only way into the kitchen, for instance, is through the front porch.
"It has that hand-crafted aspect to it," Adamson said. "I think you get that from people who have a vested interest in what they're building."
She got the chimney from an abandoned home nearby and crafted the mantle from a piece of mahogany driftwood. Reno says she sanded it dozens of times, then coated and recoated it with linseed oil to give it a smooth sheen.
In the family photo album, a series of black-and-white snapshots provide a step-by-step tour, from the first hopeful hacks in the sand to the framing to the shingling of the roof. Most feature Jane, wiry and fit-looking, shorter than Janet at 5 feet 9. Her dark hair reaches almost to her shoulders, and her loose pants reach mid calf. Often she is barefoot.
Jane, next to a surveyor's level, masonry trowel in hand.
Janet, age 11 and already 5 feet 11, holding the surveyor's pole for her mother.
Jane with a pick-ax.
Jane checking the level of the foundation.
A. Travers Ewell and two workmen pouring the concrete slab.
Henry Reno paying Ewell's wife for the brick.
Henry, with help from a set of pulleys, hoisting a ceiling beam to the top of cypress posts.
Mark, who became a carpenter, helping mom with the rafters.
Jane hammering home the cedar-shake shingles.
"I watched her build it, I have wonderful memories of growing up here, and living here most of my life," Reno said. "I put in some of that paneling, I laid some of that brick. And as I say in my comments, she put so much thought into it."
It's a good tool, the house. Crowds like the story, and it burnishes Reno's image as a nature lover and natural Cracker with Florida roots as deep as a well.
Reno offers herself as a natural contrast to Republican Gov. Jeb Bush, a Miami developer who moved to Florida 20 years ago. Her chief Democratic opponent, Tampa lawyer Bill McBride, also casts himself as a son of the state, reared in a plain, three-bedroom block home in the Central Florida town of Leesburg.
But Reno has raised crafting a down-home image to an art -- the plain skirts, the scant makeup, the little red pickup, the stories of exploring the entire Florida coast in a small motor boat with her mother. Floridians addicted to air conditioning marvel when she tells them the house still has only a single window unit, installed in a bedroom 10 years ago to protect her computer from the humidity.
"I like that I can sit here late at night and lean my head back and look up at that paneling," Reno said as evening descended on her porch. "The richness of that paneling is so beautiful. And you can sit on this porch and look out at the driving rain. What you see is what you get."
Built: 1949-52.
Bedrooms: four
Baths: two
Materials: cypress beams and paneling, adobe slump brick walls, redwood rafters, cedar shake roof
Total square footage: 1,707
Square footage of the porch: 700
Purchase price of the 21 acres of land, 1947: $11,500
Assessed value of remaining four acres: $479,700