The Shy Men

Homer Collyer and his brother Langley grew up just before the gas chandelier, the camisole and the Prince Albert coat vanished from the American scene. Their father was a well-known and wealthy Manhattan gynecologist, their mother an educated woman who read the classics aloud to them in Greek. They were fondly reared; they were trained to be gentlemen & scholars. Homer became an admiralty lawyer. Langley went in for engineering and developed a talent for the piano.

But they were shy young men and showed little inclination to brave the noisy world. In 1909, when Homer was 27 and Langley 23, they were still living with their parents in a handsome, three-story brownstone on upper Fifth Avenue. Then their father & mother separated. The brothers began shutting themselves off from life.

For 38 years, as the great city boiled and throbbed around them, as their house became part of Harlem and Negroes seeped into their neighborhood, they lived in greater & greater seclusion. They boarded up the windows of their old brownstone. Despite their wealth--estimated at more than $100,000--they stopped paying their bills. Their water, electricity and gas were shut off. For a while Langley tried to "make my own electricity" with an automobile generator. Then they were content to cook and heat their big house with a small kerosene stove, and fetch demijohns of water four blocks from Mount Morris Park.

Red Visions. When Homer went blind in 1933, they did not call a doctor. Speaking in cultured accents, Langley explained that there was no need--Homer was eating a hundred oranges a week and resting his eyes by keeping them closed. But Homer did not get better. He became paralyzed in 1940 and never left the house again.

Langley, a long-haired and shabby figure in a greasy cap and a flapping coat, grew more secretive, more intent on being "let alone." Although he was seldom seen, he led a life of incredible activity. He read aloud to Homer, sometimes sketched buildings "all in red" which Homer had seen in visions, saved tons & tons of newspapers for Homer to read when he regained his sight. After midnight, Langley roamed the city, pulling a cardboard box on the end of a long rope. He inspected garbage cans for food, begged meat scraps from a kindly butcher, sometimes walked all the way to Brooklyn to get a loaf of stale bread. On rare occasions he darted into a liquor store, after first peering carefully through the door, and bought a pint of whiskey--"for medicinal purposes."

As the years passed, legends sprang up about the spectral old house. The most persistent: it hid a fortune. But nobody but a policeman and crew from the gas company had ever got inside, and they had seen little. Burglars, who had tried, had backed out after setting off booby traps which deluged them with garbage.

Bowl of Milk. A fortnight ago, Manhattan police got a strange telephone call. A man's voice said: "This is Charles Smith. There is a dead man at 2078 Fifth Avenue."

It took a long time to investigate the call. The police chopped away the Collyers' bolted front door, and were confronted by a solid mass of newspapers, cartons, old iron, broken furniture. Finally a patrolman went up a ladder, opened a shutter, swept his flashlight into a cavelike burrow. Homer was sitting on the floor. He was naked except for a thin and tattered bathrobe, his long white hair hung down to his shoulders, and his hand rested near a shriveled apple. He had been dead for some hours.

After that, the police tried to find Langley. At first they thought he was probably hiding in the house. The building was packed almost solid from top to bottom with incredible masses of junk, pierced by winding tunnels. As they cleared passageways the police found five pianos, a library containing thousands of books on law and engineering, ancient toys, old bicycles with rotting tires, obscene photographs, dressmaker's dummies, heaps of coal, and ton after ton of newspapers--the fruit of three decades of hoarding.

But nobody found Langley. Excited people thought they saw him, all over the city. But all the reports were wrong. The police speculated on another theory--that Langley had disappeared before the mysterious telephone call, that Homer had simply died of neglect. But where had he gone? Was Langley dead too?

At week's end, police thought they might never know. After a week of headlines, Manhattan's newspapers fell all over each other belaboring the police for intrusion on the lives of two kindly, harmless people. Said the Daily News: "We find ourselves wishing the New York policemen would just sweep Langley's place up a little more, and then quietly steal away, maybe leaving a little bowl of milk for him, on his doorstep."

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