Click here for past issues of the Globe Magazine, dating back to June 22, 1997

Letters to the Magazine editor:
Mail can be sent to Letters to the Editor, The Boston Globe, P.O. Box 2378, Boston, MA 02107-2378. The email address is [email protected] or use our form.

A house divided

For an earlier generation of property inheritors, the summer house became sacred space, shared with the departed. Nobody talked of selling it.

It is the mid-1920s, and Ike Norton is sitting on a nifty piece of Martha's Vineyard property. Less than a half-acre, 91 North Water Street is a prime waterfront lot on the harbor, with a three-story brick-and-clapboard house, two boathouses, and a pier, all just a few minutes' walk from the center of Edgartown.

Ike calls it the Homestead. His grandfather William Norton bought the property back in 1866 for just $1,500. The value is probably 10 times that now, his friends tell him, what with the 50,000 summer folk coming to the island as the '20s roar on.

But Ike sniffs at the temptation to profit from his land.

"Place isn't worth a dime and never will be," he likes to say. "That's because it'll never be for sale."

Ike Norton, who became a local fishing legend and died in 1971 at the age of 69, was an entrepreneur blessed with many skills. Clairvoyance was not one. The Homestead destined to remain "forever" in the family was sold for $1.75 million two years ago, and the smoke is still clearing from a legal battle among his three grandsons. They shared the inheritance of the Homestead but could not find a way to share Ike's dream.

Harrison Flynn of Boston and Paul and Norton Flynn of California were fifth-generation owners who had spent part of their childhoods in the Homestead. Their mother, Ursula Norton Flynn, was Ike Norton's only child and heir; she died in 1992, leaving her sons the property and all the challenges of comanaging a valuable piece of land on a tony island. They did not prove equal to the challenge.

Court documents indicate that the first shot whistled over Norton Flynn's bow via a letter from Harrison dated March 3, 1993, one year after their mother's death:

"[I] would be willing (and would prefer) to sacrifice monetary gain to keep the house as our grandfather wished, but I won't tolerate the behavior exhibited over the past month," he wrote, not elaborating on what that behavior had been. "And if you can't act like an adult, then we'll just unload the house and go our separate ways. ... You owe me an apology for the nonsense you said to me on the phone, and you can be sure that I won't be putting you up in Boston again until it's forthcoming."

The records also give Norton's version of events a month later, when he had traveled from California to Edgartown. He was expecting to permanently move his young family into 91 North Water Street, a 150-year-old house with six bedrooms, three bathrooms, and wraparound porches well suited to the pursuit of leisure. But the house was already full, it seemed: "Each time I called the Homestead, there would be lots of people sounding like they were having a party. They claimed to be friends of Harrison. It hurt me that Harrison had turned the Homestead into a party house. ... When I arrived at the house, Harrison physically attacked me, and I filed for a restraining order, and criminal charges of assault and battery were filed against Harrison."

And that was just the beginning.

Flynn v. Flynn is a painful family tale reduced to a 2-inch-thick legal docket in Dukes County Probate Court. It speaks to every benefactor's nightmare, that a legacy intended to foster family unity becomes the bomb that blows the family asunder.

"People just don't understand how the dynamics of inheritance have changed," says Steven Small, a Boston estate attorney and author of Preserving Family Lands. Every day from now until early in the next millennium, some 9,000 Americans riding a demographic curve will be turning 50. No, they are not all on the verge of inheriting multimillion-dollar gems on Edgartown Harbor - or, for that matter, the 450-acre, 43-room Hudson River estate called Rockeby, or the 1,400-acre Shelburne Farms on Lake Champlain built by the late Lila Vanderbilt Webb's family. But more than a few 50-something midlifers expect to inherit grandpa's modest hunting camp in Rangeley, Maine, or the cabin on Lake Willoughby in Vermont.

And if they have not already done so, yesterday's children, poised to make the big inheritance catch, are about to learn the hard realities of generational arithmetic.

Say your hypothetical New England ancestor was cruising the rustic Maine coastline in 1890 for a summer home site, and found the perfect island retreat. He purchased, built, married and multiplied, having three children who each had three children, and so on. Even assuming that the nine grandchildren have worked out their personal and financial relationships to the house, there are 81 cousins in the fourth generation, deep into midlife and preparing to inherit.

In real life, the scenario is not usually so dire. But it doesn't take 81 cousins to start a fight. If the house is grand and the property prime, it may be worth millions: Do the heirs keep it or cash in? If the property is a maintenance nightmare, and the heirs are not rich, and estate taxes are due, family harmony will surely be tested. Even if money is not an issue, even if the heirs love one another and their house, they may disagree over improvements, whose family gets first pick of vacation time, or that thorny issue of upgrading the decor of ghosts - to replace, or not to replace, the old porch cushions now packed hard as cork.

Thousands of New Englanders of greater and lesser means face such situations today, estate planners and historians point out - often because of decisions made a century or more ago when land and labor were cheap and the American population was one-fourth the 270 million it is today.

"Amazingly, you must look all the way back to the post-Civil War era to understand the convergence of developments that put these houses on the map," says William Fowler, director of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

One of those developments was the 19th-century back-to-nature movement championed by landscape painters such as Fitz Hugh Lane of Gloucester. Another was urbanization: Along with the industrial growth of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia came a phenomenon the farmer had never known, the summer vacation. And there was new wealth, some of it from the relatively recent practice of corporate merging. Along with the upward mobility there was new literal mobility as well: Steamship lines were opening at an unprecedented rate - 12 new passenger lines in 1890 alone along the Northeast coast, according to Commerce Department statistics. In 1902, 6,026 miles of railroad track were laid nationwide, an annual record that stands today.

With more time and more money came yachting, and men on sailboats found retreats on islands where they could mimic, with less money and far more modesty, the thriving grand summer lifestyles of the Pulitzers and Vanderbilts, to name two. Boston real estate broker James Murray Howe was sailing when he stumbled across Islesboro Maine, in Penobscot Bay, as was Dr. William F. Weld of Brookline (a distant relative of the former Massachusetts governor) when he was smitten by North Haven, Maine.

They were the "new" old money made from investments, shipping, and mergers. Proud to call themselves "rusticators," they built shingle-style houses designed to weather with the land, not crown it like the mansions of Newport and Bar Harbor.

As subsequent generations added bodies to the family, issues of time sharing surfaced. Half the family might come in July, the other half in August. The house became sacred space, shared with the departed. Nobody talked of selling it.

For the current generation of inheritors, all that has changed.

Money is a large factor in the equation, says author and attorney Small - and it's not just a question of sentiment versus greed. "At the top of the list" of problems for heirs, says Small, "are the estate consequences of a real estate market that has shot through the roof."

In the past three years, realtors say, the median price of a single-family residential home on Martha's Vineyard has increased 28 percent. Since 1996, more than 105 homes on the Vineyard have sold for amounts in excess of $1 million. A home on North Bay Road in Osterville that cost $1 million in 1994 costs $4 million now - if you can find one for sale. And the owner who bequeaths such a home without the benefit of estate planning is typically leaving the heirs a tax bill for as much as 55 percent of the property's value. It is not unusual for children to have to sell the house just to pay the tax. If they can leap the estate-tax hurdle, they have to pony up for maintenance, which can reach $50,000 or more annually on large older homes.

In some families, though, money is the least of the issues.

"Families can speak passionately about their inherited land," says Jerry Bley, owner of Creative Conservation, a land-use consulting firm in Readfield, Maine. When that passion puts them at odds with one another, he adds, "it is very painful to watch."

George Carey of Tenants Harbor, Maine, a member of an extended family that owns several islands and more than a mile of waterfront at the entrance to Penobscot Bay, can testify to the bitterness of a family feud. "I've got cousins who still don't talk to each other," he says.

Carey's maternal grandfather, Philip Lees Smith of New York City, made a fortune in investments earlier this century, allowing him to vastly expand a modest summer foothold on Hart Neck, a large peninsula on the south side of Tenants Harbor.

Subsequent generations subdivided the property, and to defray costs, some of those subdivision owners sold a portion of their land to friends outside the family. And there began the rub. Did those owners not related to Philip Smith have rights to communal facilities such as the dock and the tennis court? Complicating the matter, some of the people who had sold to outsiders sided with them, not kin. According to Carey, the blister ruptured in a court battle a half-dozen years ago, the upshot of which was this: Only the descendants of Philip Smith could use dock and court. It all makes Carey wonder if there are not more important issues confronting mankind.

"This is a family that had been given so much in the first place," says Carey, a retired college professor. "Yet it was never enough. It never is. Someone always seems to be afraid someone else is getting the better deal."

Such was the case with a large property on a New England island not long ago. The two owners, who requested anonymity, solved their sibling dispute with cash, thus keeping their laundry out of court and the public record.

When the last of their parents died three years ago, the two children inherited not only the handsome million-dollar-plus summer home but several hundred thousand dollars' worth of securities apiece Problem was, before the next summer season arrived, the net worth of one child's securities had multiplied, while the other's had foundered (relatively speaking). This was construed as unfair.

The "shortchanged" heir insisted not only on the pick of weeks for summer occupancy but also on the pick of bedrooms. Otherwise, she threatened to force a sale of the house - something her father, assuming the children shared his passion for the property, had not foreseen. The matter was resolved with a cash payment in six figures to the "disadvantaged" heir, reestablishing for the moment financial parity. The status of affection between the siblings remains less resolved.

How many inherited-property family disputes in New England actually end up in court? "Probably no more than a handful a year that I personally hear about," says David Rosen, a staff consultant on property preservation issues at LandVest, a high-end real estate firm in Boston.

Brita Holmquist hails from one of the many families that saved a home without litigation: Her tools were compromise and a chain saw. Longledge was a rambling clapboard home located on Gilkeys Harbor in Islesboro, Maine. When who got stuck in what wing became an issue a few years back, the family sawed the house down the middle with a 3-horsepower Dahl, moving half of Longledge a few hundred feet away to a perch that is now called Upper Shortledge.

"The reward is the utter predictability and safety that come with owning an island home that has been preserved," says Holmquist, a 49-year-old artist. "I smell the fireplaces that I smelled at age 2" - which, she notes, is not all that difficult, since they never drew properly. "Almost all my art comes from there."

Shelburne Farms in Shelburne, Vermont, is an another unorthodox success story. The 3,800-acre gentleman's farm, with a mansion and barns considered to be some of the grandest and most fanciful in the country, was built with the $10 million inheritance William Henry Vanderbilt left to his daughter, Lila, in 1885. Seward Webb, Lila's husband, put the $10 million - slightly more than the budget of New York State that year - into building the farm.

Marshall and Alec Webb remember the day in 1970 when it almost slipped away. Their father, Derick, Lila and Seward's grandson, called the children to his side and said he was deeply in debt. He would be selling off large tracts of the farm.

"And he had decided to let the buildings fall down," recalls Alec, 47. So the six kids cut a deal with Dad. If he could hold out for just a few years, i.e., attend to the barns, they would all return to the homestead and work the farm.

Alec and Marshall Webb, both then in their 20s, moved to the Vermont farm with their wives.

Before Derick's death in 1984, they sold some land to raise working capital that eventually allowed them to open an inn at the old mansion and start a nonprofit environmental education center. Today the farm operates with 38 full-time staff members and a $3.5-million annual budget. Some 120,000 students and visitors come to the farm each year, to hear the Mozart concerts at the inn or stay in rooms that cost as much as $260 nightly. The buildings not yet refurbished with a recent $17 million capital campaign are slated for repairs after the next fund-raising campaign.

"The farm is not in the family," says Alec. "The family is in the farm."

Still, with the transfer of property taking place at an unprecedented rate - baby boomers are inheriting $8 trillion in real estate and other assets from their parents, according to federal estimates - disagreements are sure to multiply.

Rosen echoes the sentiments of Bley on the subject of preparing for inherited land. "The biggest pitfall," he says, "is to do nothing at all."

The house at 1 North Water Street, Edgartown, Massachusetts, shows just how bad "nothing at all" can get.

Ike Norton's 1971 obituary notes that "many of [Edgartown's] memories are of him in relation to the family home, boathouse, and wharf on North Water Street. Here Captain Ike lived in the character of the old Vineyard breed." He took pride in being able to trace his ancestors back to one of the first 10 families to settle Edgartown in 1641.

In 1955, Ike Norton's daughter, Ursula, married Navy Lieutenant Harry Flynn, an island-born theater aficionado who had been educated at Andover and Harvard. The Navy took them to Newport, Rhode Island. But Harry Flynn's interest in Hollywood eventually led the couple to California, where Harry worked for a film promotion company and Ursula gave birth to three sons. When the couple divorced in the early '70s, Ursula moved back to the Homestead with the boys, who grew up in the house and later summered there.

Harrison Flynn, 41, lives in the South End. Norton Flynn, 40, lives on Cape Cod and is between jobs. Paul Flynn, 38, lives in Los Osos, California, where he gets up at 2:30 a.m. on weekdays to drive a bread truck.

"It has been a Shakespearean tragedy, filled with a lot of pain," says Paul, the only Flynn brother who agreed to be interviewed, albeit briefly, about the sale of the house. He has legally sided with Harrison.

Ursula Flynn died on June 5, 1992, without a will, so 91 North Water Street was passed in equal shares to her three sons. For Norton, who was living in California with his wife, Nancy, that wasn't good enough; he believed the house should be his because, according to one court document he filed, his mother loved him best. Within a year, he would challenge the property disposition.

"Many times during Ursula's life, she specified that she did not want Harrison to have an interest in the Homestead and that she had contact with the attorney and trustee of her trust to draft a will to designate Norton as the sole heir of the Homestead," Norton said in an affidavit. But she never put it in writing, according to the attorney and trustee.

Within a month of Ursula's death, the brothers agreed to rent the Homestead for that summer. Just the rental of boat slips on the pier could bring in $10,000 a summer. The monthly rental of the house was expected to fetch $15,000, maybe more. There was much maintenance to attend to. Harrison would manage the house account and split any profits after expenses. But there was not enough time to rent for the summer of '92, and by the following winter, it was apparent that Harrison and Norton's relationship was beginning to unravel.

Norton announced that he was moving with his family back to Edgartown and into the Homestead.

"You would have been welcome to live at North Water St. with your family [during the off season] ... but we all agreed that it had to be rented for the summer of '93, and that time has arrived," Harrison wrote Norton in early March.

Not dissuaded, Norton showed up on the Homestead doorstep a month later. Harrison, apparently living both in Boston and Edgartown, met him at the threshold, and the brothers ended up in a fistfight. The police were called and restraining orders were filed. Eventually, the brothers reached a compromise. Norton and family would move into a nearby cottage that had also been owned by Ike; Harrison would rent the Homestead to others for the summer of 1993.

When fall arrived, and the Homestead was no longer rented out, Norton wanted to move himself, his two children, and his pregnant wife to the larger house. But Harrison and his friends were apparently enjoying the place themselves on weekends. So it was not until more than a year later, on a quiet winter's day in January 1995, that the Norton Flynns moved into the Homestead. Harrison countered long distance from Boston by canceling the Homestead's telephone service.

Now, events really started to get nasty. In May, Harrison and the third brother, Paul, who had been monitoring the battle from the other coast, petitioned the court to cleave their shares of the property from the whole - a formality, because local zoning regulations prohibit such reconfiguration of a relatively small lot. What they were really doing was forcing a sale of the property. Norton could not afford to buy them out.

That summer, Harrison had also rented the Homestead for August to a wedding party from Texas. Norton, hunkered down on the third floor with his family, had missed the deadline for clearing out of the house. This did not please the bride-to-be when she arrived. The police were summoned.

Norton's wife, Nancy, would later report: "The officer told us that the [bride] had told him I had threatened to ruin her wedding. One of the women [in the wedding party] called me a `psycho' several times. ..." The Norton Flynns eventually left, the wedding took place, the Texans flew home, and Norton slipped his family back in.

The following summer, June 1996, the three brothers agreed to list the property with several brokers and accept the first bid over $1.5 million. Norton was supposed to make plans to leave the Homestead, but he didn't budge. Nobody met their price on the house until April 1997, when Harold Garvey, a real estate broker on the island, offered $1.65 million for the property. Norton would not sign the purchase and sale agreement, though, forcing his brothers to file a legal petition to have their agreement enforced. Then Norton attempted an end run, conveying his one-third ownership to his wife in hopes of foiling the sale.

It was at about this point that Judge John P. Cronin of Dukes County probate court, who had seen more than enough of the Norton brothers, began showing his weariness. "After reviewing the evidence presented by [Norton] at approximately five court Hearings over the course of two years, I ... believe his motivation is to cause delay and interfere with any sale, lease, or other action which would interfere with his continuing to live rent free at this unique waterfront property on Edgartown harbor," Cronin wrote in a decision that denied Norton's petition to void the sale.

Less than one month later, at 31 minutes past 3 p.m. on July 25, 1997, the Dukes County registrar of deeds recorded the transfer of ownership of 91 North Water Street from the Flynn brothers to the North Water Street Realty Trust, Harold Garvey, trustee. The end, it seemed, of a painful saga.

Not quite.

Unbeknownst to Norton Flynn, and probably his brothers, on the very same day the deed was logged at the registry, Garvey accepted $1.75 million - $100,000 more than he had paid the Nortons - from a Lincoln couple who became sole beneficiaries of the trust, and thus owners of the house. Norton cried foul, accusing Garvey of misrepresentation and petitioning the court to rescind the sale. Earlier this year, the petition was denied. The end, again - if no further petition is filed.

Bailey Norton, Ike's nephew, lives across the street from the Homestead. On a second-floor wall in Bailey's home hangs a small watercolor painted in 1925, its mood calm, warm, and lazy. The picture speaks in soft tones of a hot summer day on Edgartown harbor when there were no houses across the way and the wooden boats were rigged for work, not play.

The painting's perspective extends out Ike Norton's pier, past two young boys lazing in the sun's heat. Captain Ike's sloop Catherine is docked at the end of the pier. A harpooner's platform has been temporarily rigged on the bow; that means the swordfish must have been in, so it must have been August. Is that Ike on board, one of three figures in the cockpit? The brush strokes are too broad to show the round gold-rimmed glasses that would have been the giveaway.

On a day this summer as sultry as the one depicted in the watercolor, Bailey Norton decides to stroll down the short path to the wharf where he docks his powerboat. Lean and tanned, he wears khaki pants and an Edgartown Yacht Club polo shirt; his attire, like the furnishings in his house and boat, is in perfect order. The leap he will shortly make from pier to boat suggests that for his 79 years, he is also in perfect shape.

As Bailey crosses the yard, the soles of his canvas sneakers crunch on the broken white shells marking the path.

"This is where Ike used to put the shells after he shucked the oysters he had caught," Bailey explains. His gaze lifts to the end of the dock where Ike moored a succession of boats - Catherine, Malvina B., Ursula, Flamingo, Edgartown, Ike & Jens, Joan and Ursula, Hunter, to name a few - each vessel larger than the last.

Of the recent unpleasantness involving his second cousins, Bailey has little to say. Silences speak to the discomfort of a sad matter - a family matter.

"At my age and experience, I have come to realize that things are not going to be as they used to," Bailey says. "I had hopes, but times change, one has to be practical."

And then he starts talking about fishing.