Review by Ed Quillen
Rural Lore – December 1997 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Two-Story Outhouse
by Norm Weis
Published in 1988 by the Caxton Printers
ISBN 0870043269
IS THE TWO-STORY PRIVY merely a legend, like Bigfoot or the jackalope? Or have such facilities been constructed and put in use somewhere in the West?
Norm Weis, a physics teacher at Casper College in Wyoming, decided to find out for himself. Across several summers, he drove thousands of backroad miles, then compiled this entertaining book.
Why build a two-story privy? Well, in mountain habitations that get a few feet of snow during their nine months of winter, maintaining a path to the privy could get worse than tedious. Build a tall outhouse for winter use, and reach it via a door on the second story, and you’ve reduced the need for routine shoveling.
Another possibility, not limited to the snow belt: Take a commercial building with a dancehall on the second floor, and consider the convenience of a catwalk to a two-story privy. The top bench, of course, would be offset from the lower one.
Weis had heard these possible reasons, and he’d even heard there was a tall privy in Dillon, Wyoming, a ghost town near Encampment: “A local sheepherder calls the last three-mile stretch the `alternate route,’ and explains, `it alternates between mud a foot deep and boulders a foot high.'”
Thus began his search. He drove around, making inquiries in a dozen states and several Canadian provinces, then pursued the leads. Only about one inquiry in ten produced an offbeat privy, and generally those were rotting ruins in an old mining camp.
He did strike gold near Central Colorado. In Crested Butte, he found two-story privies, maintained and then in use, at the town hall and the Masonic Hall. “It is a place of contrasts…. Lear jets wheel overhead, while old-timers tread the boardwalks. Tired skiers loll in hot tubs at the resort, but in town most homes lack sewer systems.”
Remember, Weis published this a decade ago, and some things have changed. But in his search, he collected scores of old-timer anecdotes and survived numerous adventures with bad roads and suspicious property owners.
The author’s accounts are always light, he takes tall tales with the requisite grains of salt, his pictures please the eye while illustrating his text, and the result is a delightful book, a snapshot of the West’s backcountry ten or twenty years ago.
The real story isn’t the discovery of a few unusual privies, but the entertaining search for them.
“Pat Day used to be a good and trusted friend, right up until he gave me the champion of all bum steers… [He frequently] drove past a strange old building that he felt certain was a genuine two-story outhouse…. we weakened, and set out by car for the vast wasteland called Texas. It took two days and eight hundred miles of driving to reach Dalhart, Texas, near the site of the oft-mentioned two-story outhouse.
“It stood on the west side of the road, leaning slightly to the right amid a solid blanket of foot-deep snow…. My hopes evaporated as I stooped to enter. The place was bare except for a shoulder-high rectangular opening and a sheet of 1/8-inch-thick steel against one wall. Pat Day’s two-story outhouse was an old deserted skeet house….”
Although this book first appeared almost a decade ago, it remains in print, and for good reason. Its discoveries may be dated, but it’s good reading — a pleasant evening present for yourself or a fine gift for someone you know who enjoys venturing off the paved path and cherishes those once-beaten paths. I thank Jim Ludwig for turning me on to it, and Caxton Printers for keeping it in print.
–Ed Quillen
