Landing in Zion Mick’s commentary from the Summer 2008 vol. 5 Catalog Shadows come early to the canyon floor in Zion. The red Navajo Sandstone cliffs rise up 3,000 feet. At the northern end of the park, the canyon is only about 20 feet wide and the cliffs are vertical. Your neck hurts from trying to get a view of the ribbon of blue sky above. As the canyon heads south, it widens and the cliffs become more softly tapered. Ages ago, this area was windswept sand dunes of unimaginable size. Water seeping through the sand dissolved minerals which then acted as a bonding agent under pressure from the sand above to form sandstone. The distinctive red color comes from rusting traces of iron in the sand. I came here as a child. For unspoken and unrealized reasons I had resisted returning. I had an instinctual fear of this place similar to the genetic built-in fear of snakes. I just never wanted to return. I didn’t question why. My father, bless his heart, bravely agreed to rent a camper trailer and take two of my brothers, myself and my cousin on an adventure through the American west. He had the thankless job of looking after 4 rambunctious boys all by himself. I don’t remember much of the trip. I remember throwing up in a small plane flying through the Grand Canyon. My other memory is running out of gas after visiting Zion National Park. As luck would have it, we ran out going up a mountain. Fortunately, we were close to the top. My smarter older brother and my cousin pushed from the back of the camper trailer. My brother Dave and I pushed from back of the car with the trailer behind us. It is hard pushing a car up a mountain. After the crest of the mountain, the car sped up, faster and faster—faster than we could run. Brother Dave claims he jumped to push me out of the way. He landed on his face and knocked out his front tooth and bloodied his face. I was run over by the trailer. Fortunately, there was a town at the base of the mountain. My dad loaded us into the back seat. We were a bloody mess. We coasted to town and found a doctor. I still have scars on my legs from the trailer’s wheels. I didn’t like Zion. It hurt. It is funny how your fears from childhood can control the balance of your adult life. Decades later I kick myself for avoiding Zion National Park. It is now one of my favorite places. There is something about our being out in nature, in our national parks in particular, that restores your sanity. Your worries seem to disappear as you become dissolved and absorbed into the environment of nature at its grandest. The duty of the Park Service is not only to be host to all the taxpayers who want to visit, it is their mission to protect and preserve our parks. In Zion they have put the brakes on automobile traffic in the park. You now need to park near the park entrance, walk to the visitor center and then board various low polluting, quiet shuttle buses. They run every few minutes and can take you anywhere you would like to go in the park. I love John Steinbeck novels. A favorite character is Lenny from Of Mice and Men. He is big and strong, but not too bright. He is good natured but doesn’t understand the violence of his actions even when he is expressing affection. Even though attendance is down in our parks, we are loving our parks to death. I didn’t want to give up my car. Like most any other American, I wanted to be able to drive right to the sight I wanted to see. It seems as a culture we are like the Lenny character. We need to understand how much damage we actually do and then respond accordingly. Within minutes of being denied use of my car, I started to appreciate the concept of the shuttle. Not only was it quiet and convenient, it put me together with people from all over the world. It was fun hearing different languages and sharing other people’s experience of the park. The shuttle actually created a sense of community amongst park goers. So instead of being stressed out in a traffic jam in the park and being angry at the jerk driving too slowly ahead of me, I was actually enjoying talking with that same person on the shuttle. We all dislike losing some of our “freedoms” but I wound up not missing my car at all. In fact, I would love it if most towns in the U.S. had similar systems as that of Zion. So if high gas prices and global warming lead to more mass transit and if the result is anything like what I found in Zion, then fear of the unknown might well be misplaced. We shouldn’t let our conditioning from childhood make us inflexible to change. The Columbian Theatre Mick's commentary from the Spring 2008 vol. 2 Catalog I have had a love for old theatres as long as I can remember. My grandfather and great-grandfather were both big fish in the small pond of Arkansas City, Kansas, on the border with Oklahoma around the time of the Oklahoma Land Rush. One of the many businesses they had was an opera house. In high school I had ushered at an old movie palace right before the wrecking ball tore it down. I had always wanted to be in show business, but somehow I wound up in shoe business. As we walk around with white cords coming out of our ears, absorbed into our self-arranged personal soundtrack or huddled in front of a 53-inch plasma screen in the isolation of our home or apartment, surfing 200 channels, we imagine Americans really must have had it rough a century ago. They must have really been entertainment-challenged, bored silly. Not so. In many ways we are worse off despite technological improvements. If you read the novels of Willa Cather, Langston Hughes and other regional writers who came of age a century ago, their stories describe a rich choice of entertainment options. The options were less passive, non-corporate and more democratic. At the turn of the previous century, even tiny towns had glorious opera houses. Traveling lecturers, actors, musicians and vaudevillian troupes performed. Locally produced plays and dances took place all the time at these venues. These theatres were fully scheduled and folks from all walks of life attended. The theatre was very important. Life was different a century ago. People spent an amazing amount of time and energy calling on neighbors and friends to engage in full-blown discussions of politics, religion and the purpose of life. People made their own music. The pathetic little one-room schoolhouses with the privy out back produced people who read more and had at their command thousands more words than the average American now has. Literature has been replaced with television and movies. In one hundred years we have allowed ourselves to drift from being citizens to being mass-consumers. Instead of being tethered to our neighbors for support and entertainment, we are now wired to distant corporations. Community withers with the change. One of the most endangered historic building types in America is the old opera house or single screen movie theatre building. These wonderful buildings are collapsing from neglect at an alarming rate. These once-grand places were the secular gathering places where community took place and was nurtured. Their demise hurts our democracy. To me, saving them should become a priority for any community that still has one that can be saved. It is difficult and very expensive, but the value to the community outweighs the cost. In many ways, the health of a small community can be measured by whether or not effort was made to save their theatre. It is like the proverbial canary in the coal mine. About eight years ago I purchased a Mission style opera house, which was remodeled right after WWII to an Art Deco style. The theatre was 90 miles from my home, in the town of Council Grove, Kansas. The roof was leaking and suffered from neglect. Despite sound advice against the idea, I couldn’t resist the price of $20,000. I couldn’t imagine the cost of such a project and was discouraged from proceeding once I received the various restoration cost estimates. To cut my losses, I sold it to someone as well-intentioned, enthusiastic and dreamy as I was, but for $12,000. We featured a story about this in a Footprints catalog years ago and I am frequently asked what happened to the theatre. Sadly, the subsequent owner let the much-deteriorated building go for unpaid taxes at a sheriff’s auction recently. It will probably never be used again as a theatre and may collapse soon. I did however salvage all the interior art deco fixtures in case I don’t heed my mother’s comment, “Didn’t you learn your lesson the last time?” and decide to restore or build another theatre. Theatre in Council Grove Saving an old theatre is a daunting task. These declining white elephants are frequently a liability for the owner, but truly an asset-in-the-rough for the community. It takes a special town. It takes a special group of people to bring them back to life. I thought it would be fun to use this catalog to shine a spotlight on a town that has succeeded in a big way in saving its opera house. The town is Wamego, Kansas, population just over 4,000. It is located between the state capital of Topeka and the university town of Manhattan on Highway 24. I had read a brochure about the Columbian Theatre in Wamego, but had never been inside until I was biking across Kansas last summer. I had lunch across from the theatre and saw through the window a giant banner advertising the upcoming performance of Oklahoma. I’ve got to tell you, Oklahoma is one of my favorite musicals. I have seen it at least five times in five different theatres, from big city professional productions to talented amateurs in a small town park with real horses and cowboys. I had to come back to see how Wamego would stack up. I sat two rows back in the center. It was certainly one of the best versions I had seen. The quality of the theatre really added to the enjoyment of the production. The evening started with dinner on the first floor of the theatre. After dessert, you would ascend the grand staircase to the theatre on the second floor. Like many turn-of-the-century opera houses, the theatre was upstairs and a store of some sort would occupy the ground floor. At intermission the crowd mingled in the second floor lobby or went out on the large balcony facing the street. Down below, the street was alive with a motorcycle rally going on. A band was playing down the street and some shops and restaurants were still open late. This small town has vitality not present in many. The problem with small towns in Kansas is economic. Most counties in Kansas, and the rest of the Great Plains for that matter, are losing population. Towns were formed for reasons that no longer apply. Generally speaking, farms were within three miles of a school so children could walk to school. Towns were generally within a day’s horse-drawn wagon trip of a farm to bring goods to market. If a town was to succeed, it needed access to a rail line to take those farm goods to a larger market. Agriculture was labor intensive so towns served a more regional market with a larger population of farmers and farmhands. Conditions are completely different now. In 1863, the Kansas Pacific Railroad Company began to build a mainline passenger and freight line west across Kansas. The Wamego Town Company was formed to lay out a town site. They offered money and promises to the railroad company to entice them to locate their division headquarters at the proposed town. The deal was struck and the town was incorporated in 1868. In 1870, a bridge crossing the Kansas River replaced the ferry, allowing access to the rich farmland to the south of town. Wamego grew fast and prospered. J.C. Rogers family Toward the turn of the century two titans of local Wamego industry and banking were J. C. Rogers and Louis B. Leach. Each was involved in a long list of business ventures. They competed against each other tooth and nail as arch rivals. Leach owned a local newspaper and refused to ever mention his rival in print, even though Rogers was a major player in town. Leach also refused to accept advertising from any of Rogers’ many businesses. When Rogers died, Leach’s editor wrote a nice obituary about Rogers. Leach reprimanded his editor and docked him a week’s pay for violating the owner’s rule. Both rivals owned competing opera houses in this same small town. The Leach Opera House was connected by underground tunnels to his nearby mansion. Supposedly, traveling actors would stay with Leach in his hillside mansion and access the opera house through the tunnels. The three-story mansion was built to the plan of an Italian villa Leach had visited in Messina, Italy. The mansion is now a local historic site open for tours. But it is the Rogers Music Hall that is the subject of this story. The lives of these early entrepreneurs on the frontier prairie sound larger than life. Rogers moved to Wamego in 1875, just as the town was beginning to boom. He and his brother started a bank, a lumber yard, a flour mill and numerous other businesses. He owned much of downtown. He also had various businesses in Kansas City, including a warehouse and a high-end gentlemen’s gambling club. He somehow also found time to be on the board of Commerce Bank in KC. Rogers commuted by rail to Kansas City two or three times per week. He was reported to be a quiet and frugal man, but one you should not cross. Once he felt overcharged by the Union Pacific rail line by $14. He was so annoyed he started his own freight line so he would not have to give the UP any business. He operated it for a profit for three years until the Union Pacific rail line returned the $14 overcharge. Rogers then closed down his freight line. Seeing a need for an opera house or maybe just to butt heads against his rival (Leach was building an opera house), Rogers began to dig the foundation and basement for a theatre in 1892. The following year, while still working on his theatre, Rogers attended the Columbian Exhibition and World’s Fair in Chicago. Something like 27 million people attended the fair. Granted, many attendees may have gone multiple times, but consider that the population for the entire country was around 67 million people at that time. That means the equivalent to 40% of the population of the entire country went to this event. Rogers didn’t go by himself; 1,500 people from the Wamego area accompanied him to Chicago by train. The Columbian Exhibition was the defining event of the Gilded Age. Chicago’s honor was at stake. The country was coming into its own. The frontier was closed. America was becoming a world power. This was a chance for America to strut her stuff. Chicago carried the expectations of the entire country on its broad shoulders. Architectural luminaries Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmsted worked to design a complex of exhibition halls, promenades and parks over 633 acres. The fair was a celebration of technology, specifically electricity, and commerce. The fair had its own electrical plant. All sorts of new gadgets and machines powered by electricity were on display. The fair was the perfect spot to expose the entire nation to new consumer goods like hamburgers, carbonated soda, Cracker Jack, Shredded Wheat and Juicy Fruit gum, which all became American staples after the fair. Though the fair’s effects were long lasting, the fair buildings were mostly temporary, to be torn down right after the fair. Like most fairgoers, J.C. Rogers was quite impressed with the exhibition. When he heard most of the buildings and much of the artwork were going to be destroyed, he went back to Chicago to arrange the purchase of architectural salvage and specific murals from the U.S. Treasury exhibition. The paintings and entire buildings were dismantled and shipped to Rogers’ warehouse in Kansas City. Rogers found use for some of the salvage in the construction of his theatre and other construction projects in Wamego and Kansas City. Being an entrepreneur, he also was able to sell off the salvage he was unable to use personally. The Treasury paintings were allegorical in nature, painted in a European neo-classical tradition. They found their new and permanent home along the walls of the Rogers Music Hall. Their meaning might be a bit obtuse to the modern audience, but to the attendees of the Opera House in 1893, the paintings’ message was clear. Like the Columbian Exhibition itself, the paintings expressed an appreciation for all that America had become and was a celebration of liberty, justice, industry and commerce. The murals defined the style and feel of this Opera House. The Rogers Music Hall name was changed to The Columbian in 1898, presumably due to its connection with the Columbian Exhibition. Parts used in the theatre from the exhibition include five stone columns from the façade of the Victoria building. The seven cast-iron columns in the theatre’s art gallery are from the Indiana building. The stained glass window on the first landing of the grand stairway came from the Brazilian Pavilion. A young Frank Lloyd Wright was on the design team for the Brazilian Pavilion. The first floor of the theatre building was originally separate retail space. Interestingly, the floor on that retail space was a recycled floor from a Wamego roller rink from the 1880’s. The bulk of the building is made from Kansas limestone from a quarry just south of town. Mr. Rogers really knew how to get the most for his money. The first event to take place in the opera house was a Grand Ball held on New Year’s Eve, 1895. Musical entertainment was provided by a band called Woodard-Keele Colored Combination. For decades the theatre was the cultural center for the area. Parties, meetings, basketball games, lectures, traveling plays, minstrels and vaudeville took place at the theatre. Then came silent movies, which in turn transitioned to talkies. As technology improved, electric lights replaced gas lights, wood burning stoves were replaced with modern steam heat. During the silent film era, patrons were entertained with an elaborate one-man-band player piano device with sounds from various instruments, including drums, violins, trumpets and many others. A fireproof projection booth was installed due to the danger of flammable nitrate film. A primitive water-cooled air conditioning system was installed. Like any profitable business, Rogers poured profits back into the building to keep up with the ever-changing consumer demands. However, business founders don’t live forever. Times change. A business that doesn’t adapt dies. After WWII, the world was a dramatically different place. Everything changed. People quit coming to the theatre. In all the years of operation, the theatre never had bathrooms, hard to imagine with our 44 ounce sodas that we slurp in theatres now. People in Wamego were suddenly more mobile and could go to Topeka or Manhattan for theatres with improved seating, quality concessions, real air conditioning, improved projection equipment and yes, even bathrooms. People quit coming to the theatre. It closed its doors, seemingly forever, on February 9, 1950. Various businesses operated out of the first floor of the theatre building. Tenants included a general mercantile store, Rogers’ own hardware store, later the Rogers’ Buick car dealership, and undertakers with caskets and a horse-drawn hearse stored in the basement. Finally, and for 72 years, the Stewart’s Furniture store occupied the space. Having that first floor tenant is probably what saved the theatre from destruction. A leaking roof is what destroys most old theatres and having someone on the first floor kept the roof in good shape. For 43 years the theatre sat dark and empty. Every now and then people would talk about what should be done with the old theatre, but nothing ever came of it. When a “for sale” sign went up on the building, a group of thirteen citizens banded together to form a non-profit corporation to assess the potential of the theatre, the expense of restoring the theatre and the process of raising the money. There are numerous non-profits out there attempting similar tasks. For too many, it is an exercise in hand-wringing and expressions of helplessness. It doesn’t just happen. It takes the right circumstances, the right timing, an awful lot of work from talented people to make the project a success and lots of money. For The Columbian, it was $2.5 million. Wamego succeeded for a variety of reasons: its close proximity to other towns, participation of a small group of successful business people who were willing to contribute thousands of dollars because they saw the value the theatre would provide to their hometown, contributions from hundreds of concerned citizens and the quality of the original theatre, which led to the ability to get grants. The paintings were unique, something other theatres looking to be restored don’t have. At first, one “art expert” said the paintings weren’t of any value, but he would be willing to haul them away if they would pay him $50 for his trouble. That turns out to not be quite true….though damaged from being folded and tacked to the wall, holes cut in them for stove pipes and soot from the burning coal and wood and the accumulated grime from a century of exposure to crowds and lack of temperature and humidity control, the paintings did have value. They just needed restoration. There were six large paintings that people knew about in the theatre. The six were part of an original set of eight paintings. Two of the eight paintings are presumed to have found their way into some of J.C. Rogers’ businesses in Kansas City and are presumed lost. The restoration cost for the six was $165,000. It was deemed a good investment once it was known that their true value was around $800,000. This is for both their artistic and historical value. The paintings were probably produced by a team of painters, but the primary artist in charge is believed to be a Theodore Bare. A contemporary Chicago newspaper article shows in a sketch Bare working on one of the eight paintings. Upon restoration of the paintings, his initials of ETB were found. It is also believed that of all the decorative art from the Columbian Exhibition, these are the only surviving works of art. Now restored, they sparkle. Before restoration work began, the Columbian Theatre Foundation held a “historic dig.” Items found included: the original gas lighting system, gas footlights, 70mm glass advertising slides, magazines and documents related to the running of the theatre. They found the original silent movie screen backstage. The screen was another painting from the Columbian Exhibition, which had been painted a reflective silver color. It was deemed not restorable. In a crate underneath the stage, fourteen additional paintings from the Columbian Exhibition were found. They were not part of the eight from the U.S. Treasury set. It was quite a treasure trove. In contemplating restoring an old theatre, the common response is “Why bother if it can’t pay for itself?” Good question. The reason is that it adds to the value of life of a community, spurs other development, and generates significantly more retail business for the community than just ticket sales. Because of the presence of the Columbian theatre and the programming they offer, the Wamego community sells more gasoline, restaurant meals, hotel and bed and breakfast rooms, antiques and whatever else one might sell in Wamego to out-of-towners. There is also the money that stays in Wamego that locals spend when they don’t have to leave town to be entertained. An argument can be made that the town of Wamego is as vibrant as it is because of the restoration of the theatre. The thirteen original board members who saw this project through to conclusion can be very proud of their accomplishments. And yes, in a very real way, the theatre does pay for itself to the community. Footprints is proud to sponsor the upcoming performance of South Pacific. This Pulitzer Prize winning musical is considered to be one of the best musicals ever produced. Broadway giants, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, wrote the music and lyrics. Joshua Logan helped produce and direct the play. When South Pacific premiered on Broadway at the Majestic on April 7, 1949, its theme of racial tolerance was considered quite radical. After a five-year run on Broadway, it was the fifth longest running show in Broadway history. Even if you haven’t been to the play, its songs like “Some Enchanted Evening” and “I’m Gonna Wash that Man Right Outta My Hair” are familiar and truly wonderful. Come and see The Columbian shine for yourself. Make plans to see South Pacific or any of the other shows this season. See the magic that happens when community is strengthened and history comes alive. If we can’t see you at opening night, please visit The Columbian Theatre through their website. More information is available there about the history of the building, the paintings and the town. Details about upcoming performances and ticket availability are available. Tours are available. Buffet & Performance Times Sunday Buffet – 12:30PM Performance – 2:00PM South Pacific March 14-16, 27-30, April 3-6 Greater Tuna May 9-11, 16-18, 23-25 Seven Brides for Seven Brothers July 11-13, 17-20, 24-27 Hoo Haw IV August 15-17, 22-24 Wizard of Oz September 26-28, October 2-5, 9-12 The Columbian Theatre 800 899 1893 www.columbiantheatre.com Aaron Douglas Mick's commentary from the Fall/Winter 2007/2008 vol. 6 Catalog

Introduction

We are proud to partner with the Spencer Museum of Art on the campus of the University of Kansas in presenting an exhibition on the life, art and times of African American and fellow Kansan, Aaron Douglas. To help promote this event we have given the Spencer space in our catalog to tell the story of Douglas’ life. This exhibition is going on at the museum through December 2nd and then travels to Nashville, Washington D.C. and New York City. We hope you find his story interesting and get the chance to visit the exhibition at one of those locations. Details of venues follow the story.

We were particularly drawn to this exhibition because we are in the process of doing a series of catalogs which feature the life, art and times of fellow Kansan Aaron Pyle, who was roughly a contemporary of Douglas. Pyle, who was white, was born in Towanda, KS. As a child he moved to the then frontier of western Nebraska. His experience shaped his art work. Douglas was African American and left Kansas as a young man to go to Harlem in 1925. Douglas’ very different life experience shaped his art. The contrast between the two is quite interesting to me. It just shows how diverse our country truly is. Douglas’ approach references slavery, struggle and racism and mixes it with rhythms of jazz and the then current style of Art Modern or more commonly known now as Art Deco. Even his signature on his paintings has the stylized look of Art Deco. This exhibit is our opportunity to gaze back into a unique moment in our history and culture and get a sense of the richness of our past. We hope you enjoy our catalog.

Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist

Aaron Douglas 1899-1979

Born to laborer parents in Topeka, Kansas, Aaron Douglas (1899-1979) overcame many obstacles to pursue his passion for art and ideas. He was one of the first African American artists to portray racial themes within the context of modern art, and his ambitious pursuit of justice through his paintbrush continues to influence artists today. After earning a BFA degree in 1922 from the University of Nebraska and teaching at Lincoln High School in Kansas City, he migrated to New York in 1925 to join in the cultural flourishing that has variously been called the New Negro Movement or the Harlem Renaissance. He later earned a master’s degree at Columbia University and taught art at historically black Fisk University in Nashville. Philosopher and writer Alain Locke, a Harvard-educated contemporary of Douglas’, dubbed Douglas “the father of Black American art.”

New York was where this son of Kansas made his name. Throughout the 1920s, visual artists such as Douglas—as well as authors, playwrights, philosophers, and musicians— flocked to a roughly two-square mile section of upper Manhattan known as Harlem. Stretching from 114th Street north to 156th Street, this previously little known part of New York flourished as the capital of the African American social and cultural scene. As the poet and author Langston Hughes wrote, “Harlem was in vogue.”

The creative crowd that Douglas met in Harlem believed that art and creative expression could help bridge the chasm between the African American and white worlds. These pioneers helped make real the notion of a self-determined “New Negro” who possessed an appreciation for African heritage, a strong sense of race consciousness, and a deeply felt racial pride.

In a 1971 interview at Fisk University for the school’s oral history project, Douglas recalled his initial impressions of Harlem. “There are so many things that I had seen for the first time, so many impressions I was getting,” Douglas said. “One was that of seeing a big city that was entirely black, from beginning to end you were impressed by the fact that black people were in charge of things and here was a black city and here was a situation that was eventually to be the center for the great in American Culture.”

Douglas was inspired by philosophical thinking and political ideals that were part of this efflorescence, including the “back-to-Africa” argument of Marcus Garvey, which suggested to Douglas that he mine African art for potent images and forms. Douglas was determined to avoid stereotypical images, and equally intent on presenting in his art images of both the joys and the sorrows of African American life and history. In her essay for the exhibition catalogue co-published by the Spencer and Yale University Press, Spencer Curator of European and American Art Susan Earle writes that Douglas’ focus on social and historical issues resulted in revolutionary work that was “closely tied to the spirit and poetry of its time, with echoes of past and present architecture, Negro spirituals, contemporary jazz, lively dance halls, racial uplift, and the gritty realities of history.” This fiery young artist from Kansas soon became what artist and scholar David C. Driskell has called the “tastemaker” of the Harlem Renaissance.

In many ways, Harlem and modernism were synonymous, and no one else captured this powerful pairing, emblematic of the Jazz Age, with the rigor and strength that Aaron Douglas did. At a time when racism still ruled the day in America, Douglas provided a dignified voice of opposition, insight, and aspiration through his powerful and distinctive imagery. He illustrated articles on topics including segregation, lynching, and human rights for Crisis and Opportunity, magazines founded by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League, respectively. His bold new vision spread further when he collaborated with writers to illustrate their novels and poems. Deeply influenced by Negro spirituals and what he called their “starkness,” this ground-breaking artist combined modernist forms and African motifs to portray the life, labor, and history of African Americans, evoking both harsh realities and hopes for a better future.

Earle, who organized the exhibition and edited the accompanying book, also notes that Douglas’ Midwestern roots profoundly influenced his path. “An African American from Kansas, he was not a Regionalist, but he forged a unique modernist vision that is hard to categorize,” Earle writes. Earle explores how Douglas’ Kansas roots affected his achievements later in life, and also how those roots related to modernism and the Harlem Renaissance.

In the early 20th century, she notes, Douglas’ hometown of Topeka was home to a thriving African American community, with working class, middle class and elite social groups. Also, because Kansas had entered the Union in 1861 as a free state under the Kansas-Nebraska act, the state was largely free of the institutionalized racism so prevalent in the former Confederacy. While agrarian like the South, Kansas counted among its founders New England abolitionists, and freed black slaves settled planned communities such as Nicodemus in 1877 in the northwest part of the state, created expressly as safe havens for ex-slaves migrating from the South. Also, both Kansas and Nebraska provided higher education to African Americans and whites. African American Midwesterners thus could enjoy many of the same educational opportunities as whites from their states.

Earle writes, “Douglas and other artists and writers who migrated from the Midwest to New York did not carry the heavy burden of the South directly; thus, they may have been freer to explore and innovate. This structure, of innovation coming from outside the center or big cities, has occurred in other creative contexts. The Midwest had less history, as pioneers had settled on the plains a few decades earlier, displacing the native Indians. While certainly not free of racism, the region represented a new beginning, rather than the failures of reconstruction that plagued the South. Even the open spaces may have seemed to Douglas modern and pregnant with possibilities, like the sea, or like a prairie waiting for seeds.”

While still a high school senior in Topeka in 1917, Douglas exhibited this sort of confidence and aspiration in his design for the cover of the school yearbook, in which a stylized sunflower, the state flower of Kansas, is surrounded by text. “Douglas had progressed all the way through high school in the Topeka school system, which was no small feat considering that the school, though integrated, was largely white, and that relatively few citizens in the United States made it through high school prior to World War II,” Earle writes. “That he undertook designing the yearbook cover (along with drawings for the school newspaper) in a school with few black students shows him already as a teenager navigating with assurance in a white-dominated society, and suggests that his artistic skills were already so significant as to defy whatever racial barriers might have existed at the school. Although a youthful effort, the cover announces elements that would later be amplified in Douglas’ visual output: book-jacket design, a sophisticated combination of image and text, and an embrace of modernism. Through his own industrious research, Douglas must have found models of modern graphic design to emulate, creating a cover in tune with a modern aesthetic that would soon be linked to Jazz Modern or Moderne (later called Art Deco).”

Earle suggests that the relative racial tolerance of the Midwest likely helped to give Douglas the experience and security to steer a successful course as a black artist within a white culture.

“With Langston Hughes, who as a boy lived in Lawrence, Douglas shared both Kansas roots and later success in Harlem,” Earle writes. “Hughes had grown up with his grandmother in Kansas, and attended Columbia University in New York before he completed his degree at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania; he traveled to Africa and Europe in 1923, before Douglas moved to New York. Hughes’ first novel, Not Without Laughter, published in 1930, recounts what life was like for an African American boy who grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, in the early twentieth century—and Douglas created the dust jacket for this tale. Another writer with whom Douglas would collaborate, Claude McKay, had come from his native Jamaica to the Sunflower State to study agronomy at Kansas State University in 1913-1914, where he began an interest in politics that would eventually lead him to Russia and to embrace socialism. Visual artist Hale Woodruff, born in Illinois, studied at the Herron Art School in Indianapolis and eventually spent four years in Paris. The combination of McKay’s trail, Hughes’s Kansas upbringing, Woodruff’s Midwestern roots, and Douglas’ self-confidence and university education in art created a stream of influences flowing from the heart of the U. S. into Harlem, bringing political and artistic ideas that would become an important part of the Negro Renaissance.”

Exhibition Details

The Spencer Museum of Art exhibition, which will be on view in Lawrence from September 8 through December 2, 2007, represents an important moment for American art, as it is the first nationally touring retrospective to celebrate the art and legacy of Douglas, now considered the foremost visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance. With nearly 100 works of art by Douglas plus several by his contemporaries and students, the exhibition focuses on the artist’s career from the 1920s through the 1940s and is organized both chronologically and by project.

A wide array of programs for the exhibition includes a national conference in late September, an October concert by the Fisk University Jubilee Singers, a book and film series, children’s classes, gallery talks and tours, and an oral history project. Another unique endeavor is a community mural project, led by nationally-known artist Dave Loewenstein, to create a mural in the style of Douglas in downtown Lawrence. The mural, which will be unveiled in late September, honors Douglas and other famous African American artists with Kansas roots, including poet Gwendolyn Brooks, jazz legend Coleman Hawkins, poet and author Langston Hughes, actress Hattie McDaniel, photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks, and filmmaker Oscar Micheaux.

To offer the public easy access to all aspects of the Douglas exhibition, the Spencer has created a special website, www.aarondouglas.ku.edu.

The exhibition, which will travel from Lawrence to venues in Nashville (Frist Center for Visual Arts), Washington, D.C. (Smithsonian American Art Museum), and New York (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture), argues that Douglas’ bold work opened doors for many and created a dialogue with American and international modernism that put at its center African American life, labor, and freedom, along with African traditions.

Douglas’ most important works are large-scale murals that portray subjects from African American history and contemporary life in epic allegories. In the late 1920s Douglas created murals in Harlem for private residences and Club Ebony, a vibrant new nightclub. In 1930 he painted murals for Fisk University that narrated a history of African American life and for the Sherman Hotel in Chicago that portrayed the ‘Birth O’ the Blues.’ His best-known portable murals are Harriet Tubman at Bennett College for Women and the four magisterial Aspects of Negro Life panels created in 1934 for the Countee Cullen Branch of the New York Public Library, now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Portraying subjects such as slavery, emancipation, modernity and skyscrapers, and the contributions of African Americans to the broader United States economy and culture, Douglas utilized his knowledge of Egyptian wall painting and Ivory Coast sculpture to devise graphically incisive motifs. All of his major mural projects are represented in this exhibition. Included are actual mural-like paintings, studies for various mural projects, and an artist-made video by Madison Davis Lacy commissioned for this exhibition that represents the Fisk and Harlem YMCA murals.

Douglas also collaborated with many important Harlem Renaissance writers, including Langston Hughes and Claude McKay. His dust jackets for books vividly captured the spirit of the time and disseminated his signature style of flat, silhouetted figures combined with fractured space and a monochrome palette. Very rare today, these dust jackets are brought together for the first time in the Spencer exhibition. His best-known collaboration was his seven paintings for James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927), a poetic interpretation of popular folk sermons. His cover for the historic and inflammatory FIRE!! and his complex illustrations for Paul Morand’s Black Magic (1928), including Charleston, are central to his work.

Douglas’ first major mural commission came in 1930 for the new Cravath Library at Fisk University. Several years later Douglas founded the art department at Fisk and became an assistant professor there, inspiring many Fisk students not only through his teaching but also through the example of his murals and his belief in black pride and leadership. His style continued to develop and he painted works such as Building More Stately Mansions (1944). He traveled throughout the South and also abroad, journeying to Paris in 1931 and later to Haiti, Europe, and Africa. He painted watercolors on these trips, as well as during his stays in Nashville and New York. His portraits of peers and various luminaries convey the power of his vision in a realistic mode, different from the flat and abstracted approach that he used for his illustrations and murals.

Both in his day and afterward, Douglas had an important impact on many artists. Among these are well-known figures such as Romare Bearden, Hale Woodruff, Jeff Donaldson and other AfriCOBRA artists, Kara Walker, and Terry Adkins. He also inspired many artists who knew him in New York or at Fisk, including Richard Bruce Nugent, Viola Burley Leak, Gregory Ridley, and John Simmons, as well as contemporary community muralists such as David Loewenstein. His message of freedom and of the importance of African American history, labor, music, and education remains relevant today and reverberates strongly. As Fisk president Walter J. Leonard stated at his memorial service in 1979, “Aaron Douglas was one of the most accomplished of the interpreters of our institutions and cultural values. He captured the strength and quickness of the young; he translated the memories of the old; and he projected the determination of the inspired and courageous.”

*This article comprises excerpts from the official exhibition brochure and Dr. Susan Earle’s essay on Douglas in the exhibition catalogue, co-published by the Spencer Museum of Art and Yale University Press.

Timeline

1899 Douglas born in Topeka, Kansas

1909 National Association for the Advancement for Colored People founded

1919 Race riots erupt in more than twenty cities

1920 Editor of The Crisis W. E. B. Du Bois writes of a pending “renaissance of American Negro literature”

1921 Shuffle Along, the first musical review written and performed by African Americans, opens in New York

1922 Douglas earns B.F.A. at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln

The Senate defeats anti-lynching legislation

1923–1925 Douglas teaches art at Lincoln High School in Kansas City, Missouri

1925 Survey Graphic publishes a special issue dedicated to “Harlem: The Mecca of the New Negro”

Douglas moves to Harlem and studies with German modernist artist Winold Reiss; contributes illustrations to progressive black journals The Crisis and Opportunity, and to Alain Locke’s The New Negro

1926 Douglas co-founds the short-lived journal Fire!!

“Father of the Blues” W. C. Handy publishes Blues: An Anthology

1927 Douglas illustrates James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse and paints a mural for Club Ebony in Harlem

1928 Douglas receives a Barnes Foundation fellowship to study African art and modern European art

1929 The stock market crashes

1933 Douglas’ first solo exhibition, at Caz Delbo Gallery in New York

1935 Douglas becomes first president of the Harlem Artists Guild

1936 Douglas paints murals for the Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas and participates in an artists’ congress against fascism

1937 Douglas receives Julius Rosenwald Foundation fellowship for travel to Haiti to paint

1938 Douglas accepts a teaching position at Fisk

1944 Douglas earns M.A. at Columbia University in New York

1950 Gwendolyn Brooks from Topeka, Kansas, receives Pulitzer Prize, the first African American to receive this honor

1952 Ralph Ellison publishes Invisible Man

1954 In Brown vs. the Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court rules segregation in schools to be unconstitutional

1966 Douglas retires from Fisk University

1973 Douglas receives honorary doctorate from Fisk

1979 Douglas dies in Nashville

Publications & Venues

This exhibition’s accompanying book, Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist, contains essays by Renée Ater, Kinshasha Holman Conwill, David C. Driskell, Susan Earle, Amy Helene Kirschke, Richard J. Powell, and Cheryl R. Ragar, plus a foreword by Robert Hemenway and a chronology by Stephanie Fox Knappe (272 pages, 189 illus., co-published with Yale University Press, 2007).

Exhibition organized by Susan Earle, Ph.D., and coordinated by Stephanie Fox Knappe at the Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas September 8—December 2, 2007

Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville January 19–April 13, 2008

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., May 9–August 3, 2008

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, August 30–November 30, 2008

Major funding for the exhibition Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist and the accompanying book has been generously provided by The Henry Luce Foundation, Inc. Additional funding for the touring exhibition has been provided by Capitol Federal Foundation; the Office of the Chancellor of the University of Kansas; and the Judith Rothschild Foundation.

For more information, visit www.aarondouglas.ku.edu and www.spencerart.ku.edu

Aaron Douglas Image Credits—United States (1899-1979)

Charleston, circa 1928 gouache and pencil on paperboard, 14 11/16 x 9 13/16 in. (37.3 24.9 cm) North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. Purchased with funds from the North Carolina Art Society (Robert F. Phifer Bequest) and the State of North Carolina, by exchange

The Black Tsar, circa1928 gouache and pencil on paper board, 14 1/4 x 9 1/2 in. (36.2 24.1 cm) North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, Gift of Susie R. Powell and Franklin R. Anderson

Study for Aspects of Negro Life: An Idyll of the Deep South, 1934 tempera on paper, 11 x 26 in. (27.9 66 cm) Collection of David C. and Thelma Driskell

Cover for Arthur Huff Fauset, For Freedom: A Biographical Story of the American Negro, 1927 Collection of Thomas H. Wirth

Cover for FIRE!! A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists, November 1926 Collection of Thomas H. Wirth

The Founding of Chicago, circa 1933 gouache on paperboard, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in. (37.5 31.4 cm) Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas Museum purchase: R. Charles and Mary Margaret Clevenger Fund, 2006.0027

Self-portrait, 1954 charcoal and conté drawing on paper, 24 15/16 x 18 7/8 in. (63.4 48 cm) Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas Museum purchase: Peter T. Bohan Art Acquisition Fund, 1995.0042

Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery Through Reconstruction, 1934 oil on canvas, 57 3/4 x 138 1/4 in. (146.7 x 351.2 cm) Art & Artifacts Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Rise, Shine for Thy Light Has Come, circa 1927 opaque watercolor and black ink on paper board, 11 3/4 x 8 1/4 in. (29.8 21 cm) Howard University Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Drama, 1930 Cravath Hall, Fisk University, Nashville

Building More Stately Mansions, 1944 oil on canvas, 54 x 42 in. (137.2 106.7 cm) Fisk University Galleries, Nashville

Noah’s Ark , 1935 oil on Masonite, 48 x 36 in. (121.9 91.4 cm) Fisk University Galleries, Nashville

Aaron Gunn Pyle

Introduction

I have been writing little stories or essays for this catalog since 1993. I have never pursued any subject beyond about five typed pages. Maybe that was because of my short attention span, lack of confidence, or fear I would lose the interest of however many readers I may have. I never really wanted to write. It is hard work. It does not come easily. However, I love to do research and travel.

As a freshman in college, an English teacher gave me an “A” on a paper, but then said “This grade is for content, not style. With writing style like yours, you won’t amount to anything more than a janitor.” Not that there is anything wrong with being a janitor. In fact, I was a night janitor for four years in high school. His condescension still rings in my head.

I have come across a subject that fascinates me. With your patience, I would like to pursue a subject for more than a few pages, more than one catalog. For the last two years, I have been toying with the idea of writing a book on the life of the painter Aaron Gunn Pyle. No such book exists. The working title is Aaron Gunn Pyle and the End of Regionalism. (This once popular style of Regionalist painting fell out of favor following World War II.)

The death of Regionalism wasn’t merely the end of an art form, but signaled the end of regionalism in America. I have overblown aspirations of viewing social, political, economic and artistic changes from the Great Depression through the 1970’s from the perspective of this artist who farmed outside the small town of Chappell, Nebraska. This goal was jumpstarted by a recent trip.

A few weeks ago when two back-to-back blizzards shut down the Denver airport and stranded thousands of Christmas travelers nationwide, I was visiting my future in-laws at their ranch/farm in far northwest Kansas. What was supposed to be a brief Christmas visit, became extended when the second blizzard dumped the largest snowfall the area had seen in twenty years. A little shy of two feet of snow drifted to over eight feet in places. We weren’t going anywhere.

Farther east, power lines were coated with four or five inches of ice. The increased weight on the lines caused over 6,000 power poles to snap like toothpicks. Lights out! The furnace needed power, as did the water pump, which filled the water tank, which supplied the house. As night fell, we entertained ourselves listening to a Kansas basketball game on a hand-cranked radio under thick layers of blankets.

There was no need to for concern. Out there you are genetically predisposed toward independence and self-reliance. A forty-year old generator, not used in twenty, was somewhere out in the shed. In the morning, we would hook the generator to the 1962 tractor, connect the power cord to the main feed and we would be back in business. This place did not get electricity until 1948 when the New Deal program, Rural Electric Administration (REA) powered the farm. Meanwhile, we remained covered by our blankets.

Albert, my future father in-law, was born on this farm/ranch. It was the original homestead of Albert’s ancestors, English immigrants. After the game, in front of the fireplace by flickering lamplight, I asked Albert to describe what life was like in the Great Depression out on the High Plains without electricity. His language is peppered with colorful phrasing common to these parts before the country became more homogenized by mass communications and comfortable travel on interstates and airplanes.

The life Albert described was much like the life captured in Aaron Pyle’s paintings. The three most famous Regionalist painters were John Steuart Curry, Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton. Of the three, only Curry was born on a farm. They painted rural life, but led urban lives. They described the human condition for their home region from their personal bias. Benton was the most vocal of the three in promoting Regionalism. He once said: “If, as they say, I am the painter of Missouri, and Grant Wood is of Iowa, and John Steuart Curry is of Kansas, then as things now stand, Aaron Pyle is definitely the painter of Nebraska.”

On a previous trip and Pyle quest, I enlisted Albert and family to visit the Oregon Trail historical site Ash Hollow, in the Nebraska panhandle. It is near Pyle’s hometown of Chappell. Pioneers in covered wagons had to make the most treacherous descent of their overland journey, down Windlass Hill. At the bottom of the hill was a welcome spring, Ash Hollow. On display, inside the current Ash Hollow Visitor Center, was a wonderful painting by Aaron Gunn Pyle depicting Conestoga wagons making their way down Windlass Hill. Our next stop on our Nebraska tour was the town of Chappell.

Chappell began as a siding for the Union Pacific Railroad. Charles Henry Chappell spent 43 years working for the railroad. He is credited with adapting the telegraph to operate trains, thus improving safety and efficiency. He was superintendent of the second division of the Union Pacific Railroad, during its construction. The town of Chappell is named for him.

Mr. Chappell moved back to Chicago in 1872 to do railroad work there. He died in 1904. His wife Orianna Ward Chappell lived for three more decades, being active with the Chicago Art Institute and collecting art. To honor her late husband, she donated her art collection and $15,000 to construct a library/art gallery for the town that bore his name in 1935.

Nina Gunn Pyle, Aaron Gunn Pyle’s mother, was on the board of trustees of the library. She would have been involved with the building of the library and installation of the artwork. Presumably young Pyle was influenced by his exposure to the extensive art collection on display in the new library. When Aaron died, he left his farm and the balance of his artwork to the city of Chappell. Pyle’s estate paintings joined Mrs. Chappell’s art collection on display at the Chappell Memorial Library and Art Gallery.

Chappell Memorial Library and Art Gallery

Any study of this artist should begin in Chappell library. His numerous paintings are arranged at the west end of the gallery. You can follow the progress of his life’s work. His sketchbook is there. Black and white preliminary studies are displayed as well as larger finished paintings—decades of an artist’s depiction of life in rural Nebraska. His self-portrait and his painting of his wife anchor the south and north ends of the wall. A folder of articles about Pyle’s life is available to read, as well.

My research of Pyle began at the Chappell Library, but my enthusiasm for the story was amplified at Albert’s farm. Being stranded by the snow, walking the stubble fields from last year’s harvest, I was affected by the region. The environment is so bare and seems to go on forever. It has a quiet beauty. It changed me. It was time to start my book. My starting point would be the region in general, then more specifically focusing on one Pyle painting. By the same flickering lamplight, Albert described his life’s experiences and the life depicted in the painting on the front cover of this catalog. Albert has intimate understanding of everything shown in the painting. It is a visualization of his childhood.

I hope you find Pyle’s life interesting. His biography follows.

When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers therefore are the founders of human civilization. Daniel Webster

Though trained as an artist at the Cornish Art School in Seattle for two years and at the Kansas City Art Institute under mentor Thomas Hart Benton, Aaron Gunn Pyle was first and foremost a farmer. He raised corn, alfalfa and hogs. He only painted when his chores were done, usually in winter after harvest, but before spring planting. He painted his life and his surroundings. Pyle painted in a style alternately known as American Scene painting or Regionalism. This style was in vogue when he began his artistic training, but out of fashion during most of his painting career. He was one of the last practicing Regionalists.

Pyle’s life, experience, and region are truly a different world from what most of have known. Pyle was one of six children. His parents William and Nina Gunn Pyle moved to Chappell, Nebraska from Towanda, Kansas when Aaron was five in 1914. They homesteaded a place just west of town, along Lodgepole Creek. Supposedly the trees along this creek were of a type suitable for Native Americans to use for constructing tepees. At that time, huge herds of buffalo and Indian wars were not that distant of a memory. Pyle’s first home outside Chappell was a sod house.

Nebraska has a humid eastern half and a dry western half, roughly divided by the 100th meridian. The panhandle of Nebraska is a sparsely populated land of weather extremes. There are few trees and little rainfall. Farming is more precarious here. A change in annual rainfall of an inch or two is sometimes enough to make the difference between success and failure.

As travelers approached Chappell along the Oregon Trail in the mid-19th Century, they noticed after the crossing the 100th meridian, their nostrils would dry out, lips would crack, and wagon wheels would shrink from the dryness. The landscape changed from a lush green to brown. Unobstructed by trees, the horizon seems endless. It becomes difficult to gauge distances. Everything is so big, you begin to feel small. You develop a different perspective on the world.

The first non-native people to settle in Chappell were associated with the railroad when it passed through in 1867. A few early settlers chose plots along rivers or creeks as higher ground was too dry. In 1910, there were 200 people in Chappell. With a few years of plentiful rainfall and good grain prices associated with the buildup to World War I, the town swelled to 1,200 by 1915. Pyle’s family was part of a migration into this area, which included other Americans, but also thousands of immigrants arriving directly from Europe.

Whole families and extended families would leave the intimacies and ravages of Europe for the extreme isolation of western Nebraska. The attraction was free or cheap land. Hope sprung eternal that this would be their land of Eden. When young Aaron Pyle would venture into town, some residents might be speaking English, but it was just as likely they would be speaking French, Swedish, Norwegian, Czech and numerous other languages. Chappell, barely organized, was a center of tumultuous, profound and irreversible change.

Industrialization was also changing the landscape in the Nebraska panhandle at this time. Around 1900, one-third of all agricultural land was used to raise feed for horses. It was horsepower which drove agriculture and transportation. Because of military demand during WWI, the price of horses skyrocketed. It suddenly became far cheaper to use new fangled tractors instead. High grain prices and increased productivity from mechanization increased production. The one-third of the land formerly used to feed horses could now be converted to other crops. This dramatic rise in productivity coupled with the additional acreage converted to crops increased supply in a declining market. This led to the farm crisis, which preceded the Great Depression.

When Daniel Webster stated that agriculture was the basis of our civilization in the quote which opened this biography, he was referring to the occupation of the majority of Americans. Most Americans now have never even visited a farm, let alone understand what it is like to be an independent and self-reliant farmer. Webster’s thoughts were and consistent with those of Thomas Jefferson.

When Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, it was his contention that a viable democracy depended on a population of what he referred to as yeoman farmers. Jefferson saw evil in how urban life changed human nature. He feared mobs of people, not rooted to a certain place. The best results in a democracy would come from people who were deeply rooted to the ground, those who owned their land and were responsible for it. The uncomplicated, but arduous task of planting seeds, nurturing a crop through harvest and raising livestock instilled virtue in people. Since farming often involves helping neighbors at harvest time, farming also fosters stronger local communities with interdependent citizens. These yeoman farmers were naturally better at building community and local government.

The painting on the cover is called Rudel Homestead, Fleming, Colorado, 1959 (21½ x 42 inches). It is interesting to note that on the signed and painted title, the word “Homestead” is misspelled. Chappell, NE is just north of the Colorado state line. The town of Fleming, CO is less than an hour drive from Pyle’s farm. This painting was part of a two-painting commission, which showed two different homesteads. One homestead was old-fashioned, relying on horse and muscle power. The other had adapted to modern machinery. Even though the year was 1959, the painting gracing our cover was the modern homestead. Given the expense of farm equipment, if your machinery still works well, why buy a new tractor? I don’t know if this painting was a nostalgic view or a view still available in 1959.

A quick word on technique….most of Pyle’s early paintings were painted using an egg tempera technique. This centuries-old technique was a dominant method during the Renaissance. Most painters in the 20th Century were more likely to use oil paints. Egg tempera was Thomas Hart Benton’s favored technique and was how Pyle was taught. It is usually painted on board. A smooth ivory-white coating of gesso is applied to the board. In the case of the cover’s thrashing painting, it is on canvas that is stretched over plywood. Dry pigment and water is mixed into a paste. That paste can then be mixed with an egg-yolk, the fresher the better. Conveniently, Pyle raised chickens. This is not thick paint to be applied with expressive impasto brush strokes. Thin layers of translucent coatings of paint are applied. You would frequently dip your brush in water as you applied the thin coats of paint to build color. It is a beautiful, delicate technique. The surface is smooth and luminous.

The event depicted on the cover painting is the thrashing of the wheat after harvest. Wheat harvest would occur in July in this part of the country. The machine (not shown), which cut the wheat, was a reaper/binder. It had rotating blades, that would cut a seven-foot wide swath through the wheat. As the reaper cut the stalks of wheat, the stalks would fall onto a seven-foot wide moving canvas sheet with slats of wood attached for grip. The stalks would then be bound with twine by the machine in bundles about a foot in diameter and dropped off the end of the machine. A “shocker” would walk behind the reaper/binder to assemble bundles into shocks on the ground. (It just so happens that the mascot of Wichita State University is a Wheat Shocker.)

Thrashing would not necessarily follow immediately after harvest. Sometimes the shocks might stay on the ground until fall. Thrashing equipment was very expensive and the process labor intensive. In Albert’s county, there were probably just three or four thrashing machines for the whole county. Thrashing was a community event in which one farmer would help his neighbor thrash and his neighbors would help him thrash. The various people in the painting are probably not from the same farm.

When thrashing finally began, a wagon drawn by either mules or horses would roam the fields and pick up the wheat shocks with a three-tine pitchfork. These wagons would pull up adjacent to the thrasher machine. A man with another pitchfork would feed wheat bundles, still bound with twine, onto a conveyer belt. The conveyer would draw the wheat into the thrasher.

The thrasher itself doesn’t have any power. In the painting, the power for the thrasher comes from the blue tractor with the leather drive-belt, which transfers the power to the drive-belts on the thrasher. At first glance the blue tractor looks like an older steam engine with all the bellowing smoke out of the stack. However, this is a Mogul brand, kerosene-powered tractor. The barrel in the foreground of the large rear wheel of the tractor is a 55-gallon barrel of kerosene. Kerosene doesn’t burn clean, hence all the smoke out of the smokestack. The smaller can near the back leg of the blue-shirted farmer with straw hat is fuel can to transfer fuel from the 55-gallon barrel to the tractor. This tractor was water-cooled with a non-circulating, non-pressurized radiator. It used a lot of water. The open-topped barrel that the blue-shirted farmer is dipping a smaller can into is filled with water to repeatedly fill the radiator of the blue tractor. Gas stations back then were called filling stations since with nearly every visit you would fill up with gas, water and oil. The crumpled ladder-like object by the water barrel is a broken conveyer belt from the thrashing machine.

Thrashing was hard, dangerous work. There were plenty of farmers missing fingers or worse from their occupation. Medical attention was far away and rather crude. A couple of farm/home remedies from that time period are of interest. If you stepped on a rusty nail, you would scoop “clean” hot cow manure into a gunny sack. You would then insert your foot into the steaming excrement and tie the gunny sack to your foot. After an hour, you would pull out your pale, shriveled prune-like foot. You would then wash your foot and be cured. Likewise, rattlesnakes call this area home. When a rattler bites, you quickly grab a chicken and wring its neck. You then take a knife and cut the chicken’s chest open and wrap the carcass around the wound. Supposedly the still hot body of the chicken would pull out the poison.

As the wheat bundles are drawn into the threshing machine, they were met at the top of the conveyer belt by a spike-toothed cylinder which was mated against an adjustable set of spiked bars, which were arranged in a concave arrangement around the spike-tooth cylinder. As the wheat bundles passed through, the straw would be chopped up and the grain heads shattered. The material would continue into a chamber that had a broad metal sheet with raised perforations much like the largest opening of a cheese grater at the bottom of the chamber. This metal sheet would rock back and forth to “thrash” the wheat. The heavier grain would drop into a chamber below and air from a paddle-driven fan would blow the lighter straw up and out of the chamber through the wide diameter long pipe to deposit the straw in large piles. The straw would later be used for cattle feed, bedding for horses and insulation for ice.

Before refrigeration reached the farm, ice was be cut from frozen ponds and put into covered pits dug into the ground. The ice would lie in a bed of straw, blanketed with thick layers of straw for insulation. The ice was a welcome relief in the heat of summer to cool drinks and to make ice cream. Unfortunately, the ice was usually all melted by the time thrashing came along.

After the grain fell through the sieve/cheese grater-like metal sheet inside the thrasher and the blowers blew away the chaff, grain would flow into the base of the thrasher machine. It was transferred to the thrasher’s elevator by an auger. The elevator was a tall vertical box with a single chain, which would re-circulate from top to bottom. Little buckets, called paddles attached to the chain, would scoop up some grain, take it to the top of the elevator and dump it down a chute to be dropped in the back of a waiting truck. It is interesting to note that the pipe that the grain is flowing from has an upward slant from the elevator. Since inside this pipe the grain is flowing by force of gravity, the pipe is probably slanted due to “artistic license,” since the pipe would show up better with the tan straw pile as a background. After the truck was full, the grain would be hauled to market or storage.

The next truck waiting is on a hill and pointed away from the thrashing machine. Many of these old vehicles, like Model T’s had gas tanks with a gravity-fed fuel line to the carburetor. Since the gas tank was higher than the carburetor, it worked fine on level and downhill surfaces, but would stall going up long hills. It is quite likely that this truck needed to back up the hill to the thrasher.

The farmstead down below looks like it has the house on the left, an outhouse, and then a windmill with a water tower behind it. The various outbuildings include barns, a hen house and a shed. The trees are probably an orchard. You can see telephone poles leading up to the house, so this farmstead would have shared a party line phone with about four to eight other farms.

Phones hung on the wall in a wooden box. The receiver hung on a bracket on the left side, the crank was on the right and you spoke in to a speaker in the center of the box. When the phone rang, you would know if it was a call for you by the type of ring. Each account had its own ring like two long and one short. Everyone on a party-line could lift up their receivers and listen to your calls, if they wanted.

Finally, on the right hand portion of the painting is an International Harvester tractor pulling a drill. The drill is a machine with discs that cut open the soil. A measured amount of seed is dropped into the furrow and a wheel follows to compress the dirt. This was a two-person job. One would drive the tractor and the other would ride on the drill to make sure everything worked as intended. Drilling or planting of the wheat sometimes might take place in August in really dry places like eastern Colorado, but would usually take place later. It is called winter wheat since it is planted in the fall and gets established during the winter with moisture available during winter.

Although being snowbound this winter was a bit inconvenient, it portends to a very good wheat crop for next July. Moisture is everything in this part the country.

Conclusion and Next Step

History is a lumpy mosaic of millions of personal biographies, big and small. It is not a smooth, non-contradicting collection of biographies about a handful of great men. Although Aaron Gunn Pyle was a second tier-artist who wasn’t known beyond a small circle of people, his biography will offer yet another perspective.

One would look at the map and think that he spent most of his life in the middle of nowhere. Yet from another perspective, he lived a short distance from the Oregon Trail. The first transcontinental railroad line ran alongside his farm. The first transcontinental highway, the Lincoln Highway, could be seen from his studio, and Interstate 80 was built just a little south of his farm. These were all major transforming events in American history and Pyle had a ringside seat. His view from Chappell was as valid as someone from New York.

Eventually, I would like to assemble an accessible image library of as many of Pyle’s work as I can. If you have a Pyle painting, lithograph or drawing and would want to have your image included in this biography, I would be most appreciative if you would contact me.

Views of Mount Rushmore

With the unblinking gaze of four presidents over my shoulder, I sat on the wall of the plaza below Mount Rushmore. It was a warm summer day. I watched peoples’ feet. Thousands walked in and out all day long. Most shoes I saw were made in China. I only counted three pair of Birkenstocks or Danskos over the course of a few hours. There were very few shoes, typically considered “liberal shoes,” present. While walking around, tourists can vote for their choice of the most important presidents. Their choices in order are Washington, Lincoln and Reagan. Except for the Japanese tourists, most tourists were white—very few Hispanic, Asian, African-Americans or Native Americans. This monument means different things to different people. The following paragraphs will look at the many views of Mount Rushmore.

My first view of the mountain was as a child from the second visitor’s center. There have been three different visitor’s centers. The first was the sculptor’s original studio. The second center was the one in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. It is where Eva Marie Saint shot Cary Grant. The architecture had a wonderful 1950’s rustic look, which was not only a cool style, but had a human scale in keeping with the sculpture. Granted, it was probably inadequate for the increasing volume of tourists, but it worked with the site and evoked the era when the monument was created. My childhood history books held a simpler view about America’s basic goodness. We had saved the world from fascism. We were the shining light of Democracy. Americans had a tendency for hero worship of our political leaders. Our history held lots of unquestioned myths of American exceptionalism. I was blissfully ignorant of any reason to question my position in being part of the dominant culture. It made me proud to be an American. The mountain made perfect sense to me then.

The view is marred from the third and current visitor’s center. This center, combined with the parking complex, is colossal. It competes with and overwhelms the carvings above. It is much like driving up to a giant themed shopping mall. The size of the gift shop and food service continues that sense of corporate culture. It is not of a human scale. It is cold. It makes you feel small, separate from the environment. The presidents seem less important. One of the conditions placed on the monument in the 1930’s, when the federal government provided funding for the monument, was that no admission could ever be charged. Presently, the private corporation that handles the parking concession charges a whopping $8 per car. If 25,000 tourists visit per day during a busy summer, it adds up to millions of dollars in parking fees. Once inside, you are now able to get closer to the talus field by hiking the corporately sponsored Johnston and Murphy Presidential Trail. Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor, would have been outraged to see the money changers on the sacred ground of his memorial.

Native Americans had the first human view of this mountain. The Sioux name for mountain was the Six Grandfathers. This referred to the four quarters (four sets of four) which were the four seasons, the four winds, the four directions and the four races. The two halves were the sky and the earth. The four quarters combined with the two halves made up the Six Grandfathers. In typical aboriginal fashion, it was naturalistic and circular in view. This whole area was sacred, but this mountain especially so. As you can imagine it must be rather insulting for Native Americans to see their sacred mountain desecrated with the images of leaders of the white culture who were instrumental in nearly exterminating their culture. The treaty of 1868 preserved this area for the Sioux forever. Forever didn’t last very long. The Sioux sued the federal government to reclaim their land and the court’s finding was that yes, the United States was wrong in how it dealt with the contractual obligations of that treaty and the Sioux deserved compensation. Considering the value of the land involved, the compensation offered was woefully inadequate. The Sioux refused to accept the compensation which would have, in effect, acknowledged that they would no longer have any claim on the land. In essence, the Mountain resides on occupied Indian land. After the Indians were pushed out, mining companies began drilling. Legend has it, a New York mining lawyer named Charles Rushmore was passing by the Six Grandfathers in 1885. He asked his guide the name of that mountain. The response was “We will name it Mount Rushmore.” So it goes. In old age, the successful Charles Rushmore donated $5,000 for the carving of his namesake.

Probably the most exciting view of the sculpture was from the first visitor’s center—Borglum’s studio. From the start of the seventeen year project in 1924, tourists found a way to get to the mountain. In the beginning it took a lot of effort. The interstate highway system didn’t exist. Maps were suspect. Roads were mostly dirt or gravel. Tire technology was not good and flats were many. A road to the mountain did not exist when the project began. When Calvin Coolidge, wearing cowboy boots, a conservative business suit and a giant Stetson hat, attended the opening dedication, instead of firing a twenty-one gun salute, they fired off a twenty-one tree stump salute. Road crews blew up twenty-one tree stumps with dynamite to honor the president. It must have been grand to watch Borglum and the miners go up in the tram car to the faces and blast off rock. Explosions would go off just before lunch and at the end of the day like clockwork. It must have been a spectacular site. It would have been spellbinding to hear Borglum speak in grand terms of his ever-expanding vision of the monument. I am sure the difficulty in getting to the monument added to the appreciation of the experience.

The miners, turned mountain carvers, were a rugged lot. For most, it began as just a job. As the project proceeded, they became fully invested in the project. Many of the workers view Rushmore as the most important thing that they did with their lives. They worked hard in difficult circumstances for between 50 cents to $1.50 per hour. They also played hard. During prohibition the bootleg cost for a pint of liquor was two dollars. When tourists started showing up at the job site, the workers would bring down from the mountain honeycombed rocks chipped off the face of the mountain. The going price was two dollars, just enough to cover a bottle of moonshine. Bootleggers were kept busy. Those honeycombed rocks were the first souvenirs. The mountain was the show…not the gift shop. Borglum was determined not to allow his monument to be overly commercialized.

The most beautiful approach to Rushmore is via Iron Mountain road. It is a narrow, slow-to-drive road. It was designed to provide the greatest experience of the environment and to build to a crescendo as you approached the sculpture. Speed is not the point. The road includes curly-cue bridges that spiral up in elevation to avoid scarring the approaching mountains. There are three tunnels that have views of the presidents’ heads perfectly centered to build anticipation. There is not much traffic. Most tourists take Highway 16 which is a marvel of highway engineering. You can go fast. You don’t have to experience the mountains much. Valleys are filled in and rises were blown away. You are able to leave the interstate, head to Mount Rushmore and be back on the Interstate lickety-split. Zoom, Zoom… like eating a fine meal in two minutes.

Borglum’s view of the mountain was colossal. The monument needed to be as big as America’s virtues, understandable for generations 100,000 years from now. The granite wears away at a rate of about 1/8th of an inch per century. He had a charismatic personality. A genius, no doubt…. he was arrogant, opinionated, talented, generous, egocentric, and paranoid. A tough boss, he was very protective of his workers and concerned for their safety. Impossible to manage, he was the monument’s biggest asset and one of its biggest liabilities…a prima donna. Active in politics, he was friend of Teddy Roosevelt and big Bull Moose supporter. He made lots of money, but always spent more than he made. When the project ran out of funds, he frequently put up his own money.

A populist, his parents were Danish immigrants who had settled in Utah and later moved to Nebraska. He was a product of the late 19th Century frontier. The notion of Manifest Destiny was the context in which he was formed. There was a spiritual component to “how the west was won.” The white northern European settlers who conquered this empty virgin territory were God’s chosen people. The fact that people were already living in the “empty” land, mattered not. His dabbling in populist politics got him involved with the KKK which led to getting the commission to carve the Confederate monument at Stone Mountain in Georgia. After a power struggle within the Klan, Borglum sided with the wrong Klan faction. Borglum quit/got fired from the project, making him available to consider the Rushmore project.

Borglum chose the four presidents for their role in creating an American Empire which would stretch from sea to shining sea. In addition to the faces, he wanted an entablature carved into the mountain to the right of Lincoln. It would explain America’s greatness in words. For posterity’s sake, it is probably good that funding was not available and the meaning of the mountain can remain ambiguous and up to the viewer to interpret. Due to the political realities of the time and the background of the sculptor, the monument was sort of an evangelical expression of the superiority of white culture as opposed to celebrating Democracy. To have a balanced view, one should be aware that this great symbol of America is more than a little tinged with racism. Everyone will have their own reaction to that.

Rangers now give their point of view of the monument in mini-lectures. Talks usually focus on the process of the carving, not image or meaning. It is a wonderful story of persistence, talent and adversity. The project started in the Roaring Twenties when anything was thought possible, largely carved during the Great Depression when everything seemed to be coming apart and halted with the bombing of Pearl Harbor and Borglum’s death.

The idea was the brainchild of Doane Robinson, South Dakota state historian. He wanted to have western figures carved into the granite spires called the Needles—a roadside attraction. Environmentalist of the day were horrified, but boosters were supportive. When the Stone Mountain project fell apart up and Robinson contacted Borglum, the scope of the project expanded rapidly. It was hard to contain Borglum’s enthusiasm and scope of thinking. Peter Norbeck, South Dakota Senator, spearheaded the acquisition of federal funding. Farm implement dealer and businessman, John Boland, was in charge of keeping Borglum on task and within budget.

It was a constant battle for money and of wills. It frequently looked as if the project would fail. But through this group effort, the project had amazing results. If you can overlook the dark side of the project, the audacity of the project is inspiring. One man with a vision, a steadfast group of supporters promoting his ideas, and a small group of miners with jack hammers and dynamite rendered a rugged mountain into sensitively realized busts of four great men with humanity and emotion. The stone is not dead. It is alive. Personality comes through. Eyes sparkle with the optical trick of four foot long granite rectangles projecting in the middle of the pupil cavity. It makes you think that anything is possible.

Eight-hundred-million pounds of rock was blown off the mountain. Jefferson was first carved on Washington’s right, but when bad rock was discovered, Jefferson’s head had to be dynamited away and repositioned to Washington’s left. As Jefferson’s second head was being carved, dangerous cracks were discovered where Tom’s nostrils would be. To make the carving stable, his head was tilted up and shifted to the side. The upwards tilt gives our third president a more lofty detached intellectual look—though early tourists confused him for Martha Washington. The rock veins going down his cheek, that now miss his nostrils, give the appearance of tears. Roosevelt had so much bad rock in his spot that he was pushed way back in the mountain almost to the canyon behind. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, there is definitely not enough rock left to add Reagan’s head.

There was no manual on how to carve a mountain. The project was started with very little real experience. The process was invented as they went. The memorial is not just an enlargement of scale model. The model was only a starting point. Everything had to be adjusted to the quality of the existing rock and shifted around to take advantage of existing light and to enhance each figure’s relationship to another. It is hard to imagine a government funded project being done now with so little oversight, without consultants, engineers and an army of bureaucrats. The project was completed for just shy of one million dollars with no deaths occurring. Unfortunately, a few later deaths can be attributed to silicosis, a mining disease caused by breathing too much granite dust. Borglum’s son, Lincoln, who was instrumental to the project, was scarred by that same disease.

The commercialized view of Rushmore’s original boosters and current promoters is that this mountain was/is a gold mine. In 1930, as many as 300 hundred tourists per day were visiting the site. In 1931, 26,449 tourists registered at the visitor’s center. Since most probably wouldn’t bother registering, it is estimated that there were around 100,000 visitors that year. By 1937, the main road to the mountain was paved and visitation rose to 265,000 people. Well over two-million people now visit per year, pumping billions into the South Dakota economy. Not bad for a one-million dollar investment.

You can’t get to the mountain without running through a gauntlet of tacky tourist attractions and souvenir shops. If there is a way to make money on this Shrine of Democracy, someone has already thought of it. One would wish that it could be done with a higher level of class and quality, but there is never any money lost in underestimating the taste of the American public. Our collection of kitschy and cheaply-made vintage souvenirs are a lot of fun. We have shown some of our favorites in this catalog. The souvenirs made in post-war-Japan had particular difficulty in getting the presidents to look like the people they were. There is one where Lincoln looks like Toshiro Mifune from a Kurosawa samurai film. The poor quality of the souvenirs gives you a greater appreciation for the difficulty of capturing the president’s likeness while dangling from the side of a mountain by a cable with a jack hammer.

The many views of the monument all have validity. The four chosen presidents are giants-among-men. If the history of America is the biography of great men (and women), this sculpture tells much of our story. We can know their flaws and admire them at the same time. You can love Mount Rushmore, while understanding that the meaning is complex and not altogether wholesome.

We had a customer who was furious with us because we were selling a sandal with the American flag as part of the design on the straps. To her it was seen as support of right-wing factions in this country that she so disagreed with. My argument to her was that these national symbols belong to all of us. To surrender them to, in her words, “a small group of jingoistic, small minded, anti-intellectual, anti-science religious-right fringe group….” is to throw in the towel. It’s my flag too and my Mount Rushmore as well. Our history is filled with conflicts, shameful deeds and inspiring feats. My personal heroes are Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. You would be hard pressed to find two people who hated each other more or were greater political opposites. Yet out of their intellectual conflict, an adaptable form of government was created. It has allowed change when people demand it. If we don’t like what is going on, it’s our responsibility to do something about it. Whining doesn’t do much good. Nothing worthwhile is ever created without conflict.

Stalking Willa

Willa Cather circa 1912
(Courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society)

Rippling waves of heat shimmered off the black top in front and behind me. With the official temperature at 107, I had no idea how much hotter it was standing on the asphalt. My concerns were about heat stroke. I stopped to grab ice from the ice chest in my bicycle trailer to put inside my ball cap. I needed to keep my brain from melting. I had been looking for some shade to have lunch under but I hadn’t seen a tree for 40 miles. There were no trees on the horizon. It is a stretch of road with no services and no houses for seventy miles. This is Cherry County Nebraska between Valentine and Thedford, the halfway point in my bicycle ride from the Black Hills of South Dakota to my home town of Lawrence, Kansas.

When I planned my bicycle tour, I had stared at this portion of the map for hours wondering “How in the world would I get through this empty prairie?” I knew I would need a few gallons of water, more than I could carry with normal panniers. My solution was an aluminum bicycle trailer. The advantage of the trailer is that you can carry a lot of stuff. The disadvantage of the trailer is that, lacking discipline, you wind up carrying a lot of stuff. As my trip progressed I remembered accounts of pioneers on the Oregon Trail, passing through Nebraska dumping heirloom furniture by the side of the trail, realizing that they just couldn’t carry it any more. I too had to leave behind books and unnecessary clothing—too much weight. I did need the trailer for my ice chest and four gallons of water for the trek across Cherry County. Even so, I ran out of ice and water 10 miles short of civilization. I didn’t think someone could even drink four gallons of water in one day. As I staggered into the bathroom of the convenience store in Thedford, I was horrified by my dust and salt crystal encrusted face in the mirror. I looked near death.

Why would someone choose to do this for their vacation? That’s a good question. Hmm..... first, let me just say that one of my favorite words is peripatetic. It basically means to learn (or teach) by wandering around. I wanted to wander around Nebraska and learn. I wanted to learn from Nebraska’s favorite author, Willa Cather. My goal was to read her novels My Ántonia and O Pioneers. Both of these books would have been perfectly enjoyable to read from the comfort of an overstuffed chair in front of my fireplace or by the light of the lamp on my bedside table. However, I wanted the landscape to inform me—make the stories real. For those unfamiliar with Cather, her books of pioneer life on the Nebraska prairie are considered her best. I’ll speak more of her later.

Going by Conestoga wagon or horse back might have been more authentic, but I chose a bicycle. It would be appropriate since Willa Cather was an avid cyclist. What better way to see the state? Bicycling would help me shake off a twenty-first century pace and somehow emerge in pioneer times. Struggling my way across Nebraska might somehow allow me to bare witness to when the plow first broke the land. Feeling the environment with all its harshness and all of its beauty would provide empathy. Understanding the smell, the heat, the wind, the people would reveal the nature of the place. After all, the word travel comes from the French word travail. Travel was never supposed to be easy or passive. It’s an adventure. Since much of Nebraska is semi-arid, trees are scarce. Graveyards are frequently the only green, tree shaded oasis you come across. They are the perfect spot to take a break—sit with your back to a shade tree reading Cather. The cemetery for Rushville, Nebraska was typical. It sits on a hill south of town but overlooking town. The manicured green lawn contrasts with the surrounding brown pasture. Hundreds of spruce, cedar and pine trees stand guard and keep the graves company. Meadowlarks, robins and turtle doves fill the air with song. The gravestones of the pioneers Cather wrote about surrounded me in tidy rows. I studied their names and dates. Though the long dead pioneers couldn’t speak, their tombstones could. Bohemian names, French names, German names, so many names from so many countries told how they left the comforts of Europe to stake a claim in this harsh environment. They spoke of the immigrant experience—the American experience of people leaving far away countries looking for a better life and transforming themselves into Americans. In the process, they transformed America. When Cather lived in Nebraska, two-thirds of the population was foreign born. The names on tombstones support that statistic.

Little lambs carved in stone marked where babies were buried. Stone lambs were everywhere. Life was hard. Grave markers told when and where people were born, what their military service might have been. Wealthy pioneers had more impressive monuments. Parents were surrounded by children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

As I left the hilltop cemetery for Rushville, I felt I already knew the city founders. In town I saw the same names. Names that I had just studied in the graveyard were now written on buildings, faded paint on the side of the old lumber yard and carved in stone at the cornice of the drug store and other buildings. Since most of these towns have had declining populations for decades, the lack of growth has allowed these buildings to remain standing. Though weather is taking its toll, these buildings are an enduring expression of the ethnic background, quality of life, sense of craftsmanship, and optimism of the pioneers who built them.

I camped my first night in Nebraska at Fort Robinson. “Fort Rob” is an old military fort that is now run by the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission. I would have stayed at the enlisted men’s quarters which are now rented out to tourists but, I didn’t have a reservation. (If you go, reservations are advisable). With the camping paraphernalia in my trailer, I was prepared. I was looking forward to dinner in the fort restaurant. I had eaten there before. It is simple, but wonderful. The walls abound with historic artifacts. Murals illustrate the Fort’s history. My camping neighbor, in his 45-foot class A motor home, pityingly watched as I pitched my puny tent. Feeling sorry for me, he invited me over for a barbecue ribs dinner. I was really looking forward to the fort restaurant but I said yes, since I was here to meet people and understand Nebraska. He was a successful real estate developer. The ribs were boneless reconstituted meat parts formed in the shape of ribs heated in a microwave, covered with an overly sweet sauce. He and his teenage kids, clad in logo emblazoned clothing, were watching the movie Titanic for the third time in the air conditioned comfort of their humongous RV. The TV dominated. Any conversation was more of a distraction. Through the windows of the RV you could see where Crazy Horse had been murdered after he gave up his resistance to the American power. Beyond, about a mile away, is where the Red Cloud Indian Agency handed out government rations to thousands of subjugated Native Americans. Red Cloud, Nebraska and the Indian agency were both namesakes of Chief Red Cloud, an Ogalla Sioux warrior. When Cather moved to Red Cloud the Indians had already been “removed”. The area around Fort Robinson is steeped in the history of the Indian’s “removal”. The denizens of the RV, though bored, had no interest in venturing outside. I appreciated their generosity but wondered why they bothered to leave home.

Around Fort Robinson

From “Fort Rob,” I made my way to Chadron on dirt roads zig-zagging through the pine covered buttes. The panhandle of Nebraska is especially beautiful. Weather was cooperating with temperatures in the 80s. From Chadron I followed highway 20 to Valentine which is sited on the Niobrara River, a beautiful river which cuts its way through hills of wind deposited sand, ground up from long distant glacial periods. Much of the river’s flow comes from natural springs filtering through sand so the water is fairly clear. Numerous waterfalls feed the river from as high as 70 feet above the river. The water is cold. The micro-ecosystem along the banks is more like northern Minnesota. The north-facing canyon walls are protected from dry summer winds and are filled with Rocky Mountain ponderosa pine, basswood, walnut, elm, paper birch, quaking aspen and big-toothed aspen.

The trip from Valentine to Thedford was rewarded with a visit to the Thedford Cooperative Art Gallery. Thedford, population 243, has a very respectable art gallery featuring artwork primarily from the wives of area ranchers. It has been in continuous operation since 1967. I enjoyed speaking with one of the founding artists. The paintings and sculpture illustrates the artist’s view of the surrounding countryside. After dinner, when the sun lowered in the sky and the temperature dropped into the comfortable 90s, I pedaled on for another twenty miles.

The pace of a bike trip allows plenty of time to think about whatever you want to obsess on. My thoughts kept returning to Willa’s arrival in Nebraska in the Spring of 1883. She was a Southerner by birth. She arrived, a precocious child of eleven. Though she had little formal schooling, she was a voracious reader of literature, ancient and contemporary. With so many neighbors of different nationalities to learn from, she became a student of the world. She was relentlessly curious. She learned Latin and French. She was fascinated by art, theatre, and music. She excelled when she left Red Cloud to go to the University in Lincoln, Nebraska. After university, she became a writer and editor, eventually becoming managing editor at the prestigious McClure’s Magazine. She had some success with her own writing but did not really make her mark until she found her style and subject by returning to her pioneer Nebraska childhood. A creature of her era, she believed in Manifest Destiny. She described the prairie as virgin territory (ignoring that Native Americans had called this place home for thousands of years) where heroic immigrants would convert it to a bountiful place.

Willa Cather about age 13
(Courtesy of Nebraska Historical Society)

My next town was Broken Bow, Nebraska, population 3,700. The downtown surrounds a town square where band concerts are played in the gazebo. I stayed on the square at the Arrow Hotel which is a wonderful old hotel listed on the National Registry of Historic Places. Just off the lobby of this fairly grand hotel was Uncle Ed’s Steakhouse. After soaking in a hot bath for an hour, I made my way down to the clanking sound of silverware on china. My neighboring table welcomed me into their conversation. When they learned I was from Lawrence (University of Kansas), the subject turned to football. In Nebraska football is a religion. Everywhere in the state you see banners pledging allegiance to the University of Nebraska football team. My fellow diners had made their way to Lawrence every other year to watch Nebraska beat Kansas. They knew the scores for each battle. They were barely old enough to remember when KU last beat Nebraska thirty-some years ago, but they knew the score of that too. (Last fall KU beat Nebraska in football for the first time since 1968.) With as much passion and enthusiasm as for football, the subject changed to sweet corn and the various ways that it should be prepared. Two of my dinner-mates were ranchers and had brought their own sweet corn with them. It was on the stalk an hour earlier. The chef at Uncle Ed’s prepared it per their specific instructions. Likewise, the beef came from the surrounding ranches. Wow!

The historical context within which Cather wrote her prairie novels was the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century. This period appropriately and inevitably followed on the heels of the Gilded Age—an era when the nation dramatically shifted from being predominately agrarian to more urban and industrial. That tectonic shift in American society created opportunities for a tiny minority of people to amass vast fortunes. The wealth and power of the nation resided in the hands of the few. Life was increasingly less democratic. Massive waves of immigration only increased the difference between rich and poor. The conflicts between giant trusts versus labor had to be addressed. The Progressive era’s defining moment was the 1912 presidential election which pitted Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft and socialist Eugene Debbs against each other. Issues were not about gay marriage and family values, but about regulating big business, shifting power back to the people, direct election of senators, conservation and preservation of the environment and a new income tax directed at the wealthy. The debate was highly democratic in nature. Cather wrote O Pioneers and My Ántonia in the shadow of that election.

I don’t know who Cather would have voted for. I presume it wasn’t the socialist Debbs or the pro-business Taft. She was an ardent democrat with a small “d”. Her novels were among the first to give immigrants heroic stature in American literature—an affectionate depiction of an ethnically diverse America. She showed that both labor and laborers were worthy of respect. The human landscape that she described was democratic with a hierarchy or stratification defined by interdependence and talent. The railroad figured as a lurking menace in the background of her novels and I believe that was in reference to the trusts that Roosevelt wanted to bust.

The next morning I bicycled on. I was getting excited as I approached Webster County, Cather’s county. I approached from the northwest. As usual, I stopped at the graveyards. The first cemetery didn’t have much in the way of shade to it, but as I walked around I began to realize that this was the graveyard where Amedee was buried and from where Emile and Marie left to have their ill-fated tryst in O Pioneers. Cather used real people and places to form her stories. I was functionally standing inside her book. As I pedaled on, her books enveloped me more. In the next graveyard, surrounded by spent peonies, was the grave of Annie Pavelka, the woman for whom the character Ántonia was based. Her abandoned home was not far off. You can walk in and around it. The porches are dangerous with all the wasp nests. From the back porch you can see the root cellar from whence all her children sprang after a storm in the climactic fertility scene in My Ántonia. As I headed south, I realized that I was on the high ground dividing two watersheds. In Cather’s books this area was called The Divide. From the high ground, past several ridges, I could see the Republican River. Red Cloud, also known as Hanover, Blackhawk, and Sweetwater in her various novels, was on that river. I knew it was downhill for the rest of the day. I was looking forward to staying at Cather’s Retreat Bed and Breakfast, which is the home Cather’s parents moved into after Willa left home. You are able to stay in the bedroom where Willa would sleep when she would come home to visit her parents. The inn keepers were Cather fans and had all sorts of Cather stories.

Anna Pavelka’s tombstone.
She was the model for the character Ántonia in Cather’s My Ántonia.

Downtown Red Cloud

Silas Garber’s tombstone.
He was the founder of Red Cloud, Nebraska and the model for the character Captain Forrester in Cather’s Lost Lady.

The next morning I went to the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the life and work of Willa Cather. The organization has since moved into a recently restored opera house where Willa had sometimes performed. The organization was staffed by wonderful volunteers who answered all my questions. For a small fee they offered a tour of various Cather sites. In one of the volunteer’s cars we drove around town and surrounding countryside with her pointing out various houses and buildings which were prominently featured in Cather’s books. For a separate tour, you may go through her childhood home. It is restored to what it looked like when she lived there. You can climb the steep steps to the attic area where her bed was tucked away in the dormer of the roof. If you are a fan, it is a very special place.

Red Cloud’s broad brick streets were busier in Cather’s day. Now, there are numerous empty storefronts. It is losing population to urban areas. The upside to that is that Red Cloud is a nearly perfectly preserved literary historical park. For Twain’s Hannibal, Missouri or Steinbeck’s Salinas/Monterey, California, the experience is touristy. For Cather, Red Cloud is much as it was. Reading My Ántonia and O Pioneers while en route to Red Cloud was a wonderful experience. More than other books, I felt I knew the characters and their environment. It was as if I had been living with them.

The Red Cloud train station figured in several of Cather’s novels.

From Red Cloud back to Lawrence I came upon a couple of interesting sites. In Seneca, Kansas, while mailing postcards, I found a Joe Jones mural painted on the wall of the post office. The postman behind that counter had lots of stories about all the community conflicts which occurred during the painting of the mural. The second was finding the grave marker for John Steuart Curry in a church plot in Winchester, Kansas. Both Jones and Curry were painters of the Regionalist style and were roughly contemporaries with Cather. They depicted on canvas some of the same subjects as Cather did in print. All three artists’ work spoke of the intrinsic value of an agrarian life in response to a rapidly changing America. It would have been marvelous if some of the editions of Cather’s books had been illustrated by either of the artists.

John Steuart Curry’s tombstone

Back in Lawrence, I read a couple of books on Cather’s life that I had purchased in Red Cloud. I found that she had written much of My Ántonia in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, a town where she repeatedly returned to vacation and write as an escape from the summer heat in New York City where she lived the latter part of her life. She would stay at the Shattuck Inn, in an upstairs room with Mount Monodnock out her windows. Neighbors to the inn would set up a tent out in the meadow for her to write. She loved Jaffrey so much she wanted to be buried there.

I realized that my Cather obsession would not be complete without one more graveyard to visit. New Hampshire would be beautiful to visit in October. We found a bed and breakfast half a block from her burial site and a mile and a half from the meadow where her tent was pitched to write My Ántonia. It is now a golf course. My first stop was the Jaffrey public library. They had an entire folder of articles about Cather’s time spent in Jaffrey and local people who wound up in Cather’s novels.

Willa Cather’s tombstone

Cather’s grave took awhile to find. It was a large cemetery with stones dating back to the Revolution. This particular graveyard was the inspiration for Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. The fall color was in full swing and the first layer of snow was on the ground. So many graves, so much history—finally, tucked in a corner of the grounds, I found her stone. Evidently many devotees make their way to Cather’s grave. Various pilgrims had left little stones and mementos by her grave. She was an aesthetic person. You would be hard pressed to find a more beautiful graveyard.

I wasn’t an English major and wouldn’t attempt any literary criticism. Simply, the reason I love Cather is that she illuminates the characters in her novels to such an extent that they become real—in fact, super real with the myth and symbolism which is embedded into their characters. They are complete in their humanity for us to get to know. Since she wrote her novels in response to the first Gilded Age, they are especially relevant in our current Gilded Age. In our own world where we have become mass consumers, our humanity eroded and our connection to the land severed. It is refreshing to read Cather, to better understand what being human means. It gives you the strength to swim against the current of our corporate consumer culture.

For more information on Cather, please visit www.willacather.org. This is a wonderful organization.

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Postcard Views of Early Lawrence, Kansas

At a recent shoe convention, a speaker read the following statistic: 80% of all footwear sold comes from big-box retail corporate chains. That leaves a mere 20% leftover for all the mom-and-pop independent shoe stores. As one who appreciates the value of locally owned small businesses, that statistic is frightening.

We are in Lawrence, a college town located in northeastern Kansas. Lawrence was recently rated as one of the top ten places to live in the United States. This is due, at least partly, to the fact that Lawrence has a vibrant downtown, still populated with mom and pop specialty shops. But, now that Lawrence is approaching a population of 100,000 people, there is an ongoing and accelerating invasion of national chains into our community, displacing the mom and pop shops. With the help of local historian, Steve Jansen, we looked back into our town’s past to see what it was like when we only had one national retail chain. We had to go back to the year 1910. The national chain was the Singer Sewing Machine Company.

In 1910, people sent postcards like they now send e-mails. It was a quick and easy way to keep in touch. Over a billion postcards were produced that year. Postage was two cents. This is probably where the phrase “putting your two cents in” came from. This was a transition period. Formerly, you could only have the name and address on the non-picture side. As a result, you could only write your message on the picture side. By 1910, the Post Office allowed a divided back where you could have an address on the right side and message on the left. There were two specialty postcard stores in Lawrence.

Collecting postcards became a big fad with the introduction of the picture postcard at the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. Later, every dinky little town had postcards showing local sites with pride. Lawrence was no exception. Postcards showed the new Carnegie library, amusement park, water works plant, storefronts, and just about anything you can think of. I’ve been collecting them for a while and would love to find one showing our storefront. Throughout this catalog we show little thumbnail images of my favorite postcards from around 1910 and then show each as a larger ghost image behind our footwear. Although we have lost some really cool buildings to progress, Lawrence has done well with preservation.

In 1910, Law