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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The bathroom turned out to be a fascinating and wide-ranging topic, and I have enjoyed my time pondering the smallest room in the house, despite all the teasing from friends. My first thanks goes to James Ciment, who approached me about writing this book. I am also grateful to fellow schol- ars, friends, and family who helped along the way: Chris Bell, Alison Bradford, Larry and Pat Burdick, Betsy Cromley and Curt Lamb, Jamie Jacobs, Carol MacLennan, and Mark Schara, with special thanks to my perceptive readers and critics, Catherine Bishir and Al Chambers. For help with research, my thanks go to the staffs of the Library of Congress, the J. Robert Van Pelt and John and Ruanne Opie Library at Michigan Tech- nological University, and the Hagley Museum and Library. I also appreci- ate the opportunity to view historic bathroom fixtures at the Plumbing Museum in Watertown, Massachusetts, and the Kohler Design Center in Kohler, Wisconsin at the latter facility, my thanks to Angela Miller, archi- vist, for producing critical documents. In 1934 my grandparents, Philip J. and Esther Ward Kimball, renovated an early 19th-century stone farmhouse in Centerville, Delaware, installing modern bathrooms. I remembered those bathrooms from occasional stays at their house when I was a child, and I was pleased to return to that house during the research for this book, more than forty years after my grandpar- ents had died. The bathroom fixtures were still there: baby-blue ones in the guest bathroom and, in the master bathroom, the height of modernity and fashion: black fixtures. It was not until I researched this book that I under- stood the significance of those colors, but I had long remembered them.