That pink color Mike Smith and his wife, Jane, are applying to their home at the corner of Columbus and North DePeyster streets in Kent is not really pink.
It's actually "Briar Rose" and it's the authentic color for a "Painted Lady," a name given to a type of home built in the late Victorian era.
The Smith home, of late Victorian vintage, was once the home of N.J.A. Minnich, the mayor from 1908 to 1912 of what was then the village of Kent. He also was editor and publisher of the Kent Bulletin.
"They often sat on their porch and would greet me in the nicest manner," the amazing Mildred Bumphrey recalled last week. She was a youngster when Mr. Minnich was mayor and can remember walking by the Minnich home as a young girl.
The daughter of Frank and May Foote Elgin, she lived with her family in the stately home that still stands at the top of Columbus Street hill, the one with the commanding view of Kent and beyond.
Mike Smith, whose insurance and real estate office is on West Main Street in Ravenna, and his wife, Jane, bought the Minnich home eight years ago. Its former owner had removed all of the paint by sandblasting, repainting the house a color Mike calls "Army green."
The Smiths did some restoration, but lived in the house that way for several years.
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When they finally decided to paint it, they consulted Sue Nelson, the decorator, who as a Hiram College student had majored in art.
At Hiram, Mrs. Nelson had studied colors with the late Paul Rochford, who had been a student of Joseph Albers, and with George Schroeder, who has just opened an art exhibit at the Kent State Gallery on North Water Street.
The Victorians, Mrs. Nelson said, liked lots of decorative detail in their buildings. As that era progressed, she said, bright cheerful colors came into vogue and it was not uncommon to see reds, blues, greens and yellows in the paints applied to houses.
Victorian era homes using such colors can still be found in historic coastal areas in the United States, she said, "in the San Francisco area and to a limited extent on the Monterey Peninsula, and, closer by, on Cape May on the southern coast of New Jersey."
Functionalism, a severe form of design that became popular after World War I, probably as a reaction to the excesses of Victorian design and coloration, rendered the "Painted Ladies" passé. With Functionalism's arrival, many owners of Victorian homes simply painted them over, using bland whites, grays, and browns, Mrs. Nelson said.
Functionalism, she said, was succeeded after World War II by the California ranch style, whose horizontal lines and simplicity pointed to the future.
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In recent years, she said, people have grown more curious about their past and with that has come an appreciation for authenticity in decorating homes.
"You can see this already in Ravenna," Mrs. Nelson said. "That's because so many beautiful houses were constructed in Ravenna during the Victorian era and some of their current owners, respecting the period in which their homes were built, have reverted to the colors of that era."
In the case of the Smith home, Mike and Jane selected a color called Briar Rose for their field color. Ms. Nelson said the colors for the trim include Heart's Content, Trooper, Noblesse and Lipstick.
"I know it looks a little wild at first," Mike said, "but wait 'til it's all done before you judge it."
Mike said he has confidence in his painter, Sam Ludwig, who he has employed for his rental units.
"It's going to look great when it's done," he said.
The paint job has already picked up one fan.
Attorney Bailey Clegg, whose Columbus Street office is next door in an attractive Victorian home once owned by Mrs. Bumphrey and her husband, Cecil, admires the Smith home and is consulting with Mrs. Nelson and Sam Ludwig.
"Bailey's house is an even more elaborate Victorian home," Mike said. "If he goes through with it and turns it into a 'Painted Lady,' it is going to be spectacular."
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On a different topic, when the news staff under Editor Roger Di Paolo undertook the Kent Bicentennial section for September, they knew they couldn't include every story.
One story we inadvertently overlooked concerned the Davey Compressor Co., an outgrowth of the inventive genius of Paul Davey Sr., who was the brother of Martin L. Davey, Ohio's governor and the president of The Davey Tree Expert Co., which their father, John Davey, founded.
A trained botanist, the multi-talented Paul Davey Sr. invented an air-cooled compressor, well suited for drilling in mining applications. The company was so successful that at one time, under the leadership of Mr. Davey and his son, Paul Davey Jr., it employed more than 500 people in Kent.
In the early 1970s, the company was sold to a conglomerate. The compressor part was moved to Cincinnati and the drill line went to Chicago, where it eventually went out of business.
Tom Myers, the grandson of Paul Davey Sr., and his father, the late Joseph Myers, the industrialist, in the 1980s bought up the remnants of what remained in Chicago and repatriated them back to Kent.
The heritage of the company survives in Kent under Tom's leadership as "Davey Kent, Inc.," aka "Davey Drill" and occupies quarters in the Nypano building south of the Post Office. There, heavy drilling equipment is manufactured, the company employing about 26 people.
Tom said the drilling equipment ranges in price from $150,000 to $750,000.
Manufacturing faces severe competition globally, but Tom and his son, John, who has joined him, have somehow turned Davey Drill into a flourishing enterprise.