In my grandparents’ house on Green Hill Lane, there was a vast attic at the top of a rickety flight of wooden stairs. When we visited we were not supposed to go up there, and so of course we would, whenever our grandmother wasn’t nearby. When she discovered us (as she would) she was invariably cross, although if there was anything compromising or untoward up there, it eluded me entirely.

Mainly it was old boxes, old furniture, some splendid Philadelphia Inquirers from 1957 with Sunday Rotocomics of Dick Tracy, Little Iodine, etc.; and an adult-size promotional figure of Reddy Kilowatt (“Your Electric Servant”) from the Philadelphia Electric Company. I have no idea what it was doing there. It’s the sort of thing one might find in an antiques shop today, but it certainly wasn’t brought in by my grandparents as a valuable curio in the 1940s or 50s. A gag gift, maybe? Maybe, not likely.

I did think, when I was 5, 6, 7, that Reddy Kilowatt was a bit frightening to look at. Maybe my grandmother thought it was scary, monstrous. Or apt to tip over and kill a small child. In the end I formed the vague idea that I wasn’t to go up into the attic because of Reddy Kilowatt.

Of course it could just be she thought the slippery, narrow attic stairway was treacherous. I don’t think either grandparent visited the attic very often. Although the house had only been built in the 1930s, it was quirky, designed by my grandfather after some old English country houses he had studied. He was a mechanical engineer rather than an architect, and his emphasis was on antiquarian cleverness rather than utility and safety. The house had things like a witch’s-hat turret with no functional purpose, and ground-floor stairway-ceiling so low that anyone over six feet would need to duck.

Outside, a weird, curving stone staircase wound up from the driveway to the front door. This was never used, as it was unusable; the flagstones were crooked and the steps were tiny. I gather this was meant to look like the detail of a 300-year-old habitation, preserved solely for antiquarian purposes. Anyway the front door of the house was the only entrance (of four) that was almost never used. There was a “sanitation” receptacle sunk into an outside walkway near the kitchen, and I was long grown before I realized this was another useless holdover installed just for period authenticity. A hundred years before this was the thing where people would dump the contents of chamberpots, and other unmentionables, to be collected each day by the nightsoil man.

My grandmother finally sold the house in the 1970s and moved back to her homeland of western Ohio, having first deposited with my parents anything that might possibly have some meaning of value— photo albums, furniture oddments, and boxes of 19th century memorabilia. What became of Reddy Kilowatt I never found out.