Two Treehouses, April 1966

There's just something about having a house up in a tree! It's not for everyone of course. Swiss families like them, I'm told. As do adventurous boys. But I'm sure that many of you are neither boys nor Swiss, and you'd still like to have one.

Chip is just starting his way up the stairs to the first level of rooms on the Swiss Family Treehouse. I can hear that Swisskapolka now! That giant fig tree's air roots provide some handy additional support for staircases and a Rube Goldberg plumbing system that is a kinetic work of art (did Rolly Crump have anything to do with its design I wonder?). I used to love to try to identify the pieces of the wrecked ship that had been salvaged and incorporated into the arboreal abode.


Here's the perfect treehouse for boy adventurers like Chip or Tom Sawyer. Tom Sawyer did not do things in a small way, so he built an actual staircase rather than nailing pieces of lath or bits of boards into the trunk for a makeshift ladder. The house itself is made entirely of scrounged crates that were plentiful near the steamboat docks.