“So, Uncle Anson, when did you decide to become an architect?”

Simple questions can require complicated, even convoluted reply. This deceptively innocent question opened a welcome conversation with my great uncle Anson Curtiss Tennant, the man who died twice. I was nineteen years old and he was seventy-five. Funny thing: our discussion straddled the divide between my intense curiosity about the past and his passion for what lay ahead of us all. Let me tell you what I learned.

Some teenager — probably a lot like me at that age; I can’t recall — is storied to have written Frank Lloyd Wright for his definition of “architect”; Wright responded by parsing the word. “Arch” he said was chief, principal or encompassing person. “Techne”, coming from the Greek, was craftsmanship, craft or art. So, taken together, an architect was the Master of the Know-how. From my earliest memories, that was uncle Anson: the go-to guy when things went wrong, awry; off course, despite my best efforts. I knew that he’d been an architect before World War I but then had gone a different way. I wondered: Was he still an architect in deed, if not by title?

You probably need to know a little about the Tennant family, my family, which begins with a bastard: Gaudeamus Tennant, illegitimate child of Marie-Hélène Cachemaille and a family that bought her silence and their reputation. Living in the Channel Islands and speaking a patois of Medieval French and English, Gaudeamus — “we are grateful” in Latin — learned the island ways of smuggling and tax evasion. Then, about the time of the American Revolution, mother and son emigrated to New Jersey and a better life. Later two of his sons helped found a town in northwestern Iowa — the Agincourt that’s been home to five Tennant generations. We tend to stay put. “Grow where you’re planted,” says my old friend Marilla.

“Architect. It was like I knew the word from birth,” he told me.

Anson was the second child and only son of James and Martha Tennant. Summers on grandpa Curtiss’s farm taught him carpentry (we’ve got birdhouses galore to prove it) and in the fall of 1905 he built a dollhouse for his little sister Claire. Hardly the start of an illustrious career?

Claire had contracted diphtheria and wasn’t expected to live, so the ’05 Christmas had to be special. He recalled a rainy weekend in the attic, cross-legged among piles of magazines, where he found a house he liked in The Scientific American Architects & Builders Edition. It served as model. But what sense does a sixteen-year-old make of perspectives and technical drawings? Illusions and abstractions? Claire lived, by the way, so the better question is: Does architecture have the capacity to heal? Like those who’ve nominated Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí for sainthood, Claire’s children and grandchildren (my cousins) believe it can — and did.

The next summer, to make room for the girls turning into young women, Anson moved to the carriage house loft, his treehouse/studio for a few years, and the summer after high school Jim Tennant asked him to remodel and enlarge the house itself. It’s a bed-and-breakfast now, owned by another family, so you can stay there and see what he designed — his first official commission, I suppose, if you don’t count the dollhouse.

“Dad had confidence in me,” as my own did in me.

Practical experience is one way to become an architect; book learnin’ is another. Anson’s father sought the advice of his friend Lyman Silsbee, an old school, hard-knocks architect who recommended the program at the Art Institute of Chicago. So, in the Fall of 1910, young Anson ventured from the quiet cove of small-town Iowa into the fullness of Metropolis.

Education for entry to the architectural profession was sketchy a hundred years ago; even the title “architect” had diverse meanings, especially in small-town and rural America, and becoming one could follow several different paths. So Anson enrolled in classes at the Art Institute and found part-time work in an office recommended by Silsbee, the family friend; I forgot to ask which one, because he soon volunteered at the office of Louis Sullivan, then working on two Iowa projects in Cedar Rapids. “Being in a room with him, you understood his constricted practice, yet saw no decline in his mental powers. I would have paid to work there — if I’d had the funds. In those few weeks, I learned one important lesson. ‘Safe solutions are tepid; they lack conviction,’ Sullivan said.”

And so it was after some twenty months of “formal” education, young Mr Tennant returned to Agincourt and began a professional life. He was twenty-three.

I’m still reconstructing Anson’s brief three-year practice. It included remodeling—which is to say “unmuddling”—the Wasserman Block, where he bartered an office as his fee. Then there was the public library competition, which must have consumed much his time and energy. We also know about the Crispin chapel, but that was built posthumously. He may also have been involved with St Ferreolus at the lakes. What other jobs did he take on? I should have asked when I had the chance.

“Then everything went blank for twenty-six years.”

The tragic story of his sailing on the “Lusitania” is too uncomfortable to repeat once again. But reminding us of the coïncidental passing of a Basque fishing boat has allowed the story to continue, for it brought him to a convent hospital outside Donostia (the Spanish San Sebastián) where his health returned but his memory did not.

Map of Donostia / San Sebastian from the time of Uncle Anson’s time

“I learned to trust my intuition.”

Graxi Urrutia worked for the nuns, cooking and keeping house, but took special interest in the thin man who’d come to port with the cod fleet, on her brother’s boat. Weeks of quiet care (just how many we aren’t sure) at the hospice in the hills south of Donostia restored Tennant to physical health. But the loss of memories, his very identity, was more debilitating than days clinging to debris had been, adrift in the North Atlantic; here there was little to cling to. “Graxi knew that busy hands would divert a heavy heart. As soon as I was able, she brought me to her father’s shop. Therapy that was far more than physical.”

“The long way home….” 

Twenty years in the Basque Country hadn’t made Anson a native, but his Basque (Euskara) was far better than his Spanish language skills. So when the Spanish Civil War erupted in July 1936, his sympathies were well set. Married into the family of Mattin Urrutia, unapologetic Basque Nationalist, and now the father of three small children, Anson in one respect had the advantage of being a man without a country. His amnesia, the lack of any papers, and a low profile gave him the liberty to pursue carpentry and contribute to his new extended family. Then came Guernica and nearly everything changed.

“Reunion”

Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls may be the best telling in English of Spain’s Civil War. If Uncle Anson had met Hemingway, he never mentioned it. Though he is more likely to have made the brief acquaintance of Pablo Picasso, whose painting “Guernica” brought worldwide attention to the aerial bombing of the Basque market town of Gernika on 26 April 1937. It was about that time — though unrelated to the actual bombing, which took place many miles from Donostia — that Anson’s memory returned. “It was like coming back to the play, the second act, after a long and diverting Intermission and reminding myself where the plot had left off,” he described it for me. “So much unresolved; so many loose ends.”

Armed now with a name (albeit a slippery, hesitant recollection), Graxi telegraphed the British consul in Bordeaux, who, in turn, spoke with their American counterpart. Several cables back and forth to Washington confirmed that, yes, there had been an Anson Tennant aboard the “Lusitania” but he was listed as “missing.” There were questions, of course — How had he come ashore 2,000 kilometers from the sinking? Why now after twenty-one years? — and Graxi provided his compelling edge-of-your-seat narrative. At some point the family were contacted in Iowa. Anson’s father Augustus James had died in 1919 (the simple answer to four years’ grieving) but his mother and sisters received the news with utter disbelief. It was agreed that Molly and Claire would sail immediately for Bordeaux and wait.

But crossing the border at Irun-Hendaye would have been far too conspicuous for two adults and three children, especially one without papers, and leaving them behind for a later reunion was unthinkable. So Mattin arranged transport by the very means that had brought Anson to this haven: they would leave discretely by fishing trawler and make an excuse to put in for repairs at Biarritz; then a train to Bordeaux and the steamer for New York. He would leave as he had arrived, with his bother-in-law Eitor at the helm.

Anson and his family passed through the main train station in Bordeaux on their way “home” in late 1937

“Back from the dead”

What a shock to see Molly and “Mouse” (Anson’s pet name for his youngest sister) after twenty-two years. Local newspapers reported Anson’s Return from the Dead but many of his old acquaintances had passed or moved away. There was celebration nonetheless, making the rounds like a 30th high school reunion, where faces had changed, but voices remained the same. Getting back into architecture looked too painful, though, like trying to imagine nothing had happened. His carpentry skills, however, had sharpened considerably under Mattin Urrutia’s guidance, so here was a tangent path to follow.

“Old dog. New tricks.”

From the fall of 1937 until he died thirty years later, Uncle Anson became the craftsman he had tried to be in his teenage years. An artistic handyman who remodeled kitchens, built new porches and repaired old ones. He even reworked some of the old Public Library before it moved to new quarters in 1970. But the project he most enjoyed was a simple table and chairs for his old teacher Rose Kavana, now retired from her job as principal at Charles Darwin School. Anson “dated” these pieces with a two peseta coin he had accidentally brought back from Spain in his coat pocket.

Two peseta coin issued by the government of the Basque Country (Euskadi) in 1937

Miss Kavana had seen something in fifth-grade Anson; recognized a penchant for drawing and making. She may even have provided the introduction to William Morris (who got it from Chaucer who, in turn, got it from Hippocrates) and encouraged Claire’s dollhouse. “Ars longa, vita brevis.”

I miss my Uncle Anson.

“The lyf so short, the craft so longe to lerne. 
Th’ assay so hard, so sharp the conquerynge, 
The dredful joye, alwey that slit so yerne; 
Al this mene I by love.”  (Geoffrey Chaucer, Parlement of Foules, I, 1-4)

Once Upon a Time

Michael William Six, an S.U. grad from a few years ago (please don’t say “back in the day”!), sent me a link to Blank Space. In its own words, Blank Space is “a new online platform for architecture founded … to uncover the true power of architecture by creating new opportunities for design to engage the public.” How could we not applaud.

There was a time in the 60s that many of us did sense that power and hoped to bring it to bear. What Michael specifically wanted me to see, however, was “Fairy Tales”, a competition announced by Blank Space, that Michael thought would interest some of us in Agincourt. My immediate enthusiasm has been only slightly tempered by a closer reading of the competition brief:

Once upon a time, Architecture was at the forefront of social innovation, addressing issues that the entire society felt were worth finding creative solutions for. A curse was then cast on Architecture: the Evil Witch of Banality tricked the architects into believing that their ideas were worthless, that society didn’t care about them, and that the only way to advance their projects was to produce vacuous glitzy renderings. Only those would lure developers into financing projects, and publications into publishing them. You are the hero that is being given the chance to battle the Evil Witch of Banality. Your magic power is Creativity. Your ace in the hole is Good Communication. Will you accept the call to this epic battle?

How can I say “no”?

Am I wrong to imagine that this applies directly to The Project? That our work during the last six years can somehow be pared and pruned and pollarded to fit five 11 by 17 sheets of graphics, two 8.5 by 11 pages of text and one page of participant bios? I registered in fewer than ninety seconds. And those few dollars are a good investment regardless of whether I/we actually enter. I wish the project success with or without my entry.

Agincourt has had many participants and gratefully holds on to a few loyal true believers. One of them is coming this weekend, so I asked him to collaborate (our potential success, I must admit, depends on his skills, not mine). Happily, he said yes.

If Agincourt has an underlying fairy tale, it’s the life of its architect-protagonist Anson Curtiss Tennant [1889-1915/1968], the man with two death dates. I’ve imagined his life in some detail and considerable context. And if pressed to give him physical appearance, I am happy to claim this pencil sketch as representing him (though it is actually an 1899 sketch of Edward Julius Detmold by his twin Charles Maurice Detmold). Would the story of a young person’s discovery of “the architect” as a life course be sufficient narrative to constitute this “fairy tale”? That discovery and that quest are the core of the Agincourt Project and have been since its beginning.

Suggestions are welcome.

Oh, by the way, the deadline for submission is January 17th—my 69th birthday. Coincidence? I think not.

While we’re on the subject of the Dutch in the United States and in Iowa particularly, I recalled a postcard I’d seen some time ago: “The Dutch Room” in the National Hotel, Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was one of those sumptuously appointed interiors with linen table cloths and napkins; the sort of place populated by Edwardian “ladies who lunch” and at other times by Bull Moose businessmen transacting the Big Deal du jour. I suspect smoking was acceptable, mostly cigars with coffee and desert. Surely there were those who thought of cigars as desert.

Every town of even moderate size had one of these; the Twin Cities undoubtedly had several. Since we’re talking about the Dutch—which, by the way, often meant German (i.e., Deutsch) rather than a native of the Low Countries—this one came to mind. I had thought one of this type would certainly have been in The Blenheim, Agincourt’s fashionable hostelry built circa 1900, though its potential decor hadn’t crossed my mind until this evening.

Themed restaurants were popular at the turn of the last century, especially if it was “Old World” and affected. East Coast ostentation spread quickly to Cincinnati, Chicago, St Louis, Kansas City, Omaha, anywhere that affluence and conspicuous consumption prevailed. Remember, there was no income tax.

I’d imagined The Blenheim in that category, though very likely scaled down a bit for a town the size of Agincourt, which would have looked to Des Moines and Omaha for models. Agincourt men would certainly have traveled for business, even to Minneapolis and Chicago, and brought back stories of fabulous food and elegant decor; they might even have formed stock companies to replicate those experiences at home. That’s how I imagined The Blenheim’s beginning.

I though of it in terms of elegant cooking and baking (such as Vandervort’s Bakery, which might have been a supplier of breads and pastries) but also because its kitchen had hidden Tadao Ito, a hyphenated Japanese-American seeking shelter during the Second World War. But that’s another story for tomorrow. The last thing I need right now is another design project. Still, how can I avoid the richness in Agincourt’s narrative that might evolve from such a notion.

All I’ve drawn of The Blenheim thus far has been a second floor plan: rooms on a single-loaded corridor surrounding a two- or three-story skylit court. On the ground level, one of those four sides will open into the Blenheim’s dining room, its answer to elegance, posturing and pretension. Whether its a cozy inner elevation or a glazed facade on The Square could be decided soon.

In the meantime, any ideas for the menu?

PS: While I’m thinking of it, have you ever seen Davenport’s Restaurant in Spokane? More food for thought. Or is it more thought about food?

Perhaps it’s time to reacquaint with Alexis de Tocqueville, that guy you recall from high school U.S. history taught by the basketball coach. No wonder your recollection is foggy. So is mine.

Tocqueville wrote about us when there was sufficient perspective for his observations to have meaning. He was, after all, a European and our revolution (and his) was at least a generation behind them. Tocqueville’s Democracy in America appeared in two volumes in 1835/1840, at the heart of the Jacksonian Era. America was yet in the throes of inventing itself; self-birth has got to be painful. I wonder what parallels might be made between the 1840s and the 2000-teens, which is to say, What would Tocqueville make of us now?

The image above isn’t some family reunion of the late-summer sort, siblings sipping beers while cousins cavort in the late afternoon stillness and heat. This is something else; something troubling that Tocqueville would have noted. This is a picture of democracy still being born.

Leith is a town with sixteen inhabitants (according to the 2010 census) situated in Grant County in south-central North Dakota; a place where real estate goes begging and it’s a buyers market. Enter the American Nazi Party, intent on establishing a “White’s Only” enclave—it would soil the word “community” to have used it in this context—by snarfing up all the properties available for literally pennies. North Dakotans are hardy people; isolation and extreme weather have made us that way. Remember a few years ago when Rand-McNally published a U.S. atlas that neglected to include North Dakota? That sort of treatment can make you cranky. There’s a wide streak of cantankerousness hereabouts that 1) demands its Second Amendment Rights, while simultaneously 2) clinging to boldly Socialist institutions like a state-owned bank and a state-owned mill and elevator, all the while not seeing any conflict inherent in these contradictions.

Now, I don’t think Agincourt is ripe for a similar take-over. But I do hope there might be a comparable independence among its citizens. And that its patterns of association and assembly would be worthy of Alexis de Tocqueville’s discerning eye and discriminate pen.

Homecoming and its Cohorts

Tocqueville was captivated by the tendency of Americans to associate at the drop of a pin. We form, reform and unform, cluster and scatter with such rapidity that sociologists are hard-put to keep track, let alone take stock. In a typical year in Agincourt, how many gatherings will have brought together people variously of like mind and similar intention? My friend Howard needs to write about some of these. Consider:

• High School Homecomings and Reunions (either year-specific or “all-school”)
• National holidays that are community oriented, such as Memorial Day, the Fourth of July/Independence Day, Labor Day (despite the anti-union sentiment so prevalent today), and
• National holidays that are more family oriented, like Thanksgiving
• Religious holidays like Easter and Christmas (despite its secularization); but where do you put New Years?
• Purely local holidays, like Founders’ Day on October 25th (celebrating the incorporation of Agincourt as well as the actual Battle of Agincourt, for which the town is named)
• Elections (local, state and national) that bring us out as “party animals” of a different sort
• School graduations (grade, high and college)
• Pageants
• Anniversaries (personal, i.e. birthdays and weddings; and those of businesses and institutions), especially those ending in a zero or two (50th, 100th and 150th anniversary celebrations)
• Cultural events, like sport, music, theater, art, etc.
• Protest, like the folks converging on Leith, to say that it is both American and Un-American to form a community of like-minded individuals and to protest that exclusionary process

What have I forgot? And how should we prioritize them for treatment in the narrative?

This week my friends Dave Pence (a.k.a. Diesel Dave) and Elizabeth Eiseloeffel celebrate the sesqui-centennial of the Eisloeffel family farm near East St Louis, Illinois. Congratulations and many happy returns for a rare survivor among genuine family farms in the 21st century world of agribusiness. I’m not buying the argument that enormous scale is the only way for growing stuff to make a buck. Kudos to the Penciloeffels and their families—for persistence, if nothing else.

From the growing folio of pix on Dave’s facebook© page, my mouth has begun to water, for there is clearly a banquet of epic proportion in the making. I can almost smell the pies from here. All of which fits nicely in the madness of the moment: This is just one of the many sorts of “re-union” that beg to be incorporated in the Agincourt story. Do you suppose Dave and Elizabeth will let us “borrow” their story? [The pic above, by the way, is an unauthorized filching from his FB page.]

The story will either be appended here or as a continuation in version 1.something.

There are as many ways to re-unite as there are relationships between and among us.

I’m writing this at O’Hare airport in Chicago, waiting for the return flight home and still reflecting on last night’s festivities at Mama Luigi’s restaurant, venue for my fiftieth high school reunion. I’d been too shy to attend the tenth and was still reluctant to be at the twentieth, so soon after my father’s death (and all that that had entailed). I thought I’d been dis-invited to the thirtieth—except that there hadn’t been one, so no harm, no foul.

When the fortieth was announced, I ponied up the requisite shekels but promptly forgot to note the date on my calendar [yeah, like I really have a calendar]. So, a week after the event, I’d missed another one. I vowed the fiftieth would not be unattended, and my surgery in June only stiffened that resolve.

Everyone knows that birth months are each assigned a semi-precious stone, in the way that each house of the zodiac has its sign, grouped in cycles of fire, water, earth and air. I’m “earth” but you can see that a half mile away.

Wedding anniversaries also have their symbolic assignation for gift-giving, though I only know a few of the biggies: paper, wood, tin, for example, representing the 1st, 5th and 10th. But did you know there is an unspoken theme, a hidden agenda attached to each decennial gathering of your high school class? Here’s what I’ve gleaned from my sources:

• TEN: The tenth, given our age approaching the late 20s, is guaranteed to focus on possessions; the things that measure our achievement. [For “achievement” read “acquisitiveness”.] “Oh, really? Just the one boat?” the debate team captain snarks to the football quarterback.
• TWENTY: By the twentieth, with each of us in our late 30s, the bloom is off the rose. Kids are essentially grown and gone; the nest is borderline empty, while eyes and possibly other body parts have begun to wander. The theme is divorce. “Really, she took you for that much?” the car wash manager says to the corporate VP.
• THIRTY: Now in our late 40s, those same body parts have began to fail and even fall off, the thirtieth—the one I missed—dwells uncomfortably on medical procedures: “Well, as long as they were in there, the gall bladder ought to go, too,” the overly-tanned candidate for carsinoma says to the hypochondriac.
• FORTY: All the foregoing stress of acquisition and infidelity probably contributed to those operations and, time not being on our side, the late 50s may have thinned the ranks. I wonder at the fortieth—another one I missed—how many times you heard “No one told me! He/She was so young,” grateful you weren’t asked to be a pallbearer.
• FIFTY: The fiftieth, I’d been warned, could evidence the onset of senility, given that the gray cells are beginning to catch up with all the other deterioration. Listen, my friend had further distressed me, for the telltale signs of failing recollection: “I wasn’t in ‘The Diary of Anne Frank,’ you idiot. That was [fill in the blank],” or even “Who the hell are you?” or, offhandedly, “Is this the right room?”

Happily, Saturday night’s event bore no resemblance to that last one. And I haven’t been told what to expect at the sixtieth—if it even happens, due to our shrinking numbers. So I’ll get back to you. But in the meantime, let me tell you what did happen during six hours Saturday night.

My exchanges with people were proportionate to the degree of interaction we had had in school. 1) I saw and spent considerable time with the handful of folks who had meant the most to me during those fateful, fitful years; I loathed high school and barely survived it, thanks to their good company and extended grace. 2) I planted a seed to regain contact with some who were not there or who had graduated a year before or after me. 3) I learned that many had, in fact, gone prematurely to their reward and, sadly, that I had not been able to say goodbye and share my gratitude for what they had meant to me, with or without their express intention to mean anything at all. 4) Erik and I got reacquainted and I built a bridge with his wife Donna. 5) I danced with Flo, while she thanked me for teaching her about Frank Lloyd Wright and how to draw 3-D. 6) I received an honorary gift from my dear friend Stella and equally valuable intangibles from good friends and bare acquaintances, again whether they knew it or not. All things considered, I was accepted and excepted, each with equanimity. I would have it no other way.

Today, I write these few words for those of you looking into the future, down a longer corridor of time than I can at 68. They do not pass for wisdom; just advice.

And to the memory of Ken “Pookie” Herd, Jerry Rasmussen and Wanda Lee Roberts, I miss your presence among us.

Homecoming

You might know this would morph into an episode of “All things Agincourt”.

Reading the biography of Michael Pauluzen Van der Voort (1615-1690), among the earliest settlers of New Amsterdam, I’ve learned that the name (and its many variants) probably comes from the Voort River in the Netherlands, but also that (reading between the lines) it more generically refers to someone from far away. Odd.

Odd because I chose a name that means something similar for another character created for a different part of the story. Urrutia (oo–ROO–shuh) is a surname from the Basque Country of northern Spain and far, far southwestern France. I’ve been fascinated by the Basques for decades and chose their city of Donostiako (San Sebastian in Spanish) as the fishing port where Anson Tennant was brought when he nearly went down with the Lusitania. Graxi Urrutia was the nurse who cared for him in the convent hospital where he recovered—physically, because he still suffered from amnesia until the first shots of the Spanish Civil War were fired. For Picasso fans, you’ll recall “Guernika”, his editorial statement about the war. Guernika is a Basque village.

Oh, by the way, Urrutia means “not from these parts”.

Ultimately, Anson (though he didn’t know his name) married Graxi and they spawned three children: Aitor (Hector), Mikel, and Alize. That story has been told in part before and will, no doubt be told again, since Anson did return home and live the last twenty years of his life commuting between Agincourt and his wife’s family in Euskal Herria. Adds another dimension to being “bi-coastal” doesn’t it? But I digress.

When Piet Vandervort arrived in Agincourt (date yet to be determined) he was certainly “from far away”. But his story causes me to rethink my defaults: patterns that I choose, not because they are prevalent in my own life, but because I wish they had been. Dr Bob will tell you that The Project, as we call it, has enabled me to work through a wide variety of issues from childhood, several of them focused on continuity (or its absence).

Take a local institution like Adams’ Restaurant, for example. Maud Adams (Mrs Benjamin Franklin Adams) had become a widow in 1889 and, lacking any financial resources, was supported by friends in the establishment of a restaurant. The image of Adams Restaurant was so vivid, and the profile of Mrs Adams strong, that the establishment survives today. The Same can be said for Anton Kraus and his foundry: his great-granddaughter Tony Benedetti is CEO of the successor firm today. There are other examples of similar continuity, but I suspect that they would be more rare in real life.

So, now there is Vandervort’s Bakery and Piet Vandervort, whose family may not wish to have been successive owners of the place. It may be that the strong reputation of Piet’s product lives on but the business has passed to others. And that story, perhaps opens doors for a different, more difficult narrative than is my default.