Home » 2013 (Page 2)
Yearly Archives: 2013
Johan Thomas Skovgaard [1888-1977]
[From the catalogue-in-progress for “Landscapes & Livestock”, a loan exhibition for Agincourt Homecoming in the Fall of 2015]
SKOVGAARD, Johan Thomas [1888–1977]
“Lammegrib Zool. Have”
1915
oil canvas mounted on board / 14.7 inches by 13.8 inches
Who but a naturalist would choose the Bearded Vulture for subject matter? And who, for that matter, would hang it on their living room wall?
Known primarily for his church decoration, Johan Thomas Skovgaard attended The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts during 1907-11, a pupil of Viggo Johansen. He later worked with his uncle Niels Skovgaard, and assisted his father Joakim Skovgaard, decorating the Viborg Cathedral in 1912. J.T. Skovgaard is also recognized, however, for his paintings of birds, though not in the familiar Audubon-like rendition. This 1915 work shows two impressionistic vultures in the Copenhagen Zoölogical Garden. He would continue to work for another sixty years.
The Community Collection can be viewed in several different ways, each of them equally artificial. Presented chronologically, they represent a mini art history, a sequence of styles. Grouped by medium, a different story is told; by subject, they reveal yet another aspect. Perhaps a more insightful perspective comes from the order of their acquisition, in which case this is one of the most recent. It was given in 2012 by the children of Virginia Lawton, long-time science teacher at Fennimore County High School, as a memorial. Skovgaard’s painting had hung in her classroom as testament to the balance of Nature.
Howard’s Dead End
The enclosure that Aunt Phyllis mentioned in her letter to Howard was more than a little surprise; but more about that in a moment. In the meantime, you should know that Phyllis Tabor lived at home until the week before she died.
Phyllis Tabor—one of Fennimore county’s “Daughters of Flight”, a title she shared with her twin Ella Rose—might have attained “greater glory” in the bigger world, if she’d wanted it. But the Dirty Thirties brought her home to tend the family business with her younger brother Warren. Ella Rose was engaged in missionary work in China (from which she never returned) and brother Dwight had died in childhood; Mary Grace was too young. So Phyllis and Warren shepherded Tabor Industries through the late Depression and war years. By 1950 their diversification and employee profit-sharing had saved the company.
Phyllis continued to live at home with her widowed mother Lucy until Lucy died and maintenance of the old house tipped the balance between nostalgia and nuisance. She moved into a small apartment above Van Kannel’s Drug and sold her interest in the business. But the Tabors aren’t the sort to slip discreetly from the scene. So Phyllis continued to fly into her sixties and was easily recognized round and about town in her red Indian “Chief” motorcycle with sidecar, one of the last produced by the company in 1953.
During the second half of her life—though she couldn’t have known there would be a second half—Phyllis accomplished many things. She learned Chinese and made a trip there to investigate the 1937 disappearance of her sister. She taught engine maintenance at the high school. She taught her nephew Howard how to pickle and preserve. She taught Sunday School at Saint Joseph-the-Carpenter with her good friend Rev. Chilton Fanning Dowd and disagreed on certain theological points with pleasant persistence. But more important for our story, in 1957 at the age of forty-five Aunt Phyllis bought a decrepit farmhouse near Fahnstock and undertook a fifty-year renovation that gradually whittled the old place away until it had been transformed as “Howard’s Dead End”.
With apologies to both Carl Larsson and E.M. Forster, that house has been brewing in my head for twenty years or more, and it’s time to give it birth.
Oh, and the surprise in her letter to Howard was a deed to the property with a curious proviso: the house would be made available as a writer’s retreat to any who applied. If you’re looking for an out-of-the-way spot to conceive the Great American Novel, I can put in a word for you. The landlord’s a friend of mine.
George Murray Gilbert [born 1870]
[From the catalogue-in-progress for “Landscapes & Livestock”, a loan exhibition for Agincourt Homecoming in the Fall of 2015]
GILBERT, George Murray [born 1870]
Basket of Fruit
1938
oil on board / 10.0 inches by 8.0 inches
Who was George Murray Gilbert?
Standard sources are silent on the identity of Gilbert, artist of this still life.* Dated 1938, it is more characteristic of the 19th century, the period of its frame. Neither do we know its source for the collection or the date of acquisition.
*On-line genealogical sources reveal a George Murray Gilbert who was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1922. A sixteen-year-old could have painted this still life. However, a nephew of that Gilbert has written to say that it was more likely his great-grandfather, who was born in 1870 in Nebraska and still active about the time this work is dated. The 1940 US Census places Gilbert in Brooklyn, NY, aged seventy, and still an artist. We are grateful for the clarification.
Ghosts of Christmas Past #8: “Dear Nephew”
June 16th, 2012
Dear Nephew—
Our lunch last Saturday was enjoyable, more than you can imagine. Not only because we had each other’s undivided attention, but your cooking has improved considerably. (Is Rowan teaching you?) The wine was also a treat, considering I rarely open a bottle here at home. One glass at a time—it goes to vinegar before I can finish it. One day at a time, too—and I’m going to vinegar, as well.
Thanks also for the draught of our family history. Technically, I’m not a Tennant, so trimming the in-laws and cadet branches will simplify your task. And we both know a few who would best be forgotten; the less said, the better. So, thank you for the opportunity to add a few words about myself. Now, in my hundredth year, friends treat me with deference and relatives with tongs. Most are concerned that I’ll break — and a few that I won’t.
You ask about twinship. Being one qualifies me as an “expert” I suppose, but only in the way that you can testify credibly about being a male. Eller and I—I forget that you never knew her; your personalities are so much alike—were identical; Dwight and your dad weren’t. She and I spoke little to one another; we just seemed to know. Then Barnett Fentress entered the picture. Barney, Eller and I became a “couple” of sorts—a friendship that was very modern for the ’30s. People wondered when he’d choose between us, but that was never a possibility. The three of us, after all, were looking for a good man.
One summer in ’35 or ’36 we entered a dance marathon in Kansas City; Barney loved to dance. They didn’t know, of course, that Eller and I would alternate. Wearing identical dresses, she and I switched places in a dark corner by a cluster of potted palms. Barney carried the show, and it was he and Eller who eventually won. We gave the prize money—$50 if recollection serves—to the soup kitchen at St Mary’s church and laughed ’til we cried. Eller left for China the next Spring; I never saw her again.
Uncle Malcolm (Father’s brother-in-law; married to Kate) was a missionary in China, teaching at Saint John’s College, Shanghai, but he also operated a clinic for women in rural parts of Jiangsu province. Eller had trained as a nurse but flying was her real contribution toward increasing the missionary outreach. I treasure her letters from 1937—until they stopped suddenly just before Christmas. We never learned what happened, but it had something to do with the Japanese invasion. The State Department offered no explanation. Ironically, it happened just about the time your great uncle Anson was restored to us. There seems something karmic in the exchange.
I’ve made a few more notes for your writing project (a rough outline) and will include them with this note. There is also a surprise for you and Rowan, a gift I hope you two will enjoy long after I’m gone.
Your loving aunt,
Phyllis
PS: You’ll know where to scatter my ashes.
Self-indulgence
Why is the way ’round the barn so long?
Dr Bob rarely asks specific questions. Anything more pointed than “What’s your mood?” would be unusual; out of character. So he took me by surprise Friday morning with this one: “Are you self-indulgent?” That zinger was followed with a cautionary “…and you don’t have to answer right away.” I don’t need to admit my answer here—it was spontaneous and quick, by the way—but there was a follow-up query which morphed into a homework assignment. Damn, he’s good.
Indulgence is inherently no bad thing. For me it has been a double-edged sword, cutting when I do or don’t indulge, but especially when I do. The personal price I pay is often great, and that would be acceptable were there not considerable collateral fallout—sometimes for others, sometimes from them. Had I “world enough and time” an apology would be forthcoming; I’m working on it. Really. In the meantime, Dr Bob advises balance.
Agincourt is, of course, my ultimate indulgence. And invention has been its greatest, its most satisfying pleasure. But not, as you might guess, the invention of buildings and landscapes. No, I find the characters and their stories far more gratifying work. Not work at all, really.
Oddly, I had hoped for something else.
Henry Joseph Darger, Jr.
Perhaps not the ideal model for a citizen of Agincourt, Henry Darger has become a prototype nonetheless. Look him up.
I had lunch today in the Food Court at West Acres, our regional shopping center, and found myself among people who could just as easily have been from Agincourt. Over garlic beef and orange chicken, I wondered about that random sampling of my fellow creatures; about how diverse we are and how ever diverging. What wondrous eccentricities were represented there.
The distribution of a Darger or a Robert Walser is limited, but their presence in a Chicago neighborhood or a Swiss bank changed a life or two, even if it didn’t, couldn’t change their own.
The trip ’round the barn is long but worth the investment. And it is long in time, not distance, because there are so many wondrous distractions along the way.
Now, about that apology….
Ghosts of Christmas Past: Toward #8
The Centenarian
Twins run in Howard’s family. His dad Warren had a fraternal twin Dwight who died young. And the boys had older twin sisters, Phyllis and Ella Rose, who were identical. I don’t create twins to perform experiments on them—shades of Dr Mengele—but as an only child myself, they interest me as a more intense version of the siblings I never had. Siblings on steroids of a sort.
Phyllis and Ella Rose entered the ever-expanding Tennant family tree in 2007 when the Larson sisters Merritt and Mallory wanted to play in the sandbox with the rest of us. Their dad is involved with the Fargo Air Museum, and the girls wondered about the history of aviation in Fennimore county and thereabouts. A deft flick of the pencil added the Tabor Twins to the left of Dwight and Warren, and the Larson girls entered a full-blown collaboration with Milt Yergens on the design of an early airport and an entire manufacturing enterprise, including some rather ungainly aircraft fabricated from corrugated grain bin components. Borne of the mind, if not the air.
Phyllis again joined the story line briefly on Election Eve 2008 when Howard couldn’t take the pressure of returns on MSNBC. He and his dog Digger walked over to Aunt Phyllis’s house to pick up some of her renowned green tomato chutney. And all of that morphed into a rumination on the architecture of Agincourt’s Episcopal church building, Saint Joseph-the-Carpenter. Incidentally, until that night I didn’t know Howard even had a dog. As it turned out, he’d had more than one, which began the town’s heritage of four-legged citizens.
Frayed as I am (and more so every day), a loose thread like the Daughters of Flight can’t be left to its own ends. I suddenly realized that Aunt Phyllis was ninety-six on Election Eve; that she can’t have lived forever, but also that she had lived so long. How had she lived? And like so many of the women in my life, she had lived an undeniable, powerful and purposeful life. We should all claim as much.
A hundred years to write! And perhaps as many new threads to weave. New people, new patterns. Cross purposes? Do you suppose the Larson sisters might be willing to shape this chapter? After all, what the hell do I know about aeroplanes?
Ghosts of Christmas Past #7: The English People, Part 2
“A few figs from thistles…”
by Howard A. Tabor
The English People, Part 2
To the people who live here, to those born and reared here who still think of this square mile as home, Agincourt is America. But each small town and big city neighborhood surely feels the same about its own native turf. So it was with some surprise that our new friends Alec and Margaret Parks expressed their desire to visit Agincourt—and only Agincourt—for two weeks in the Spring of 1990.
Hal Holt and Alec had corresponded for a year or more on subjects of mutual interest—Alec in Heathfield, a market town in the English county of East Sussex about forty miles south of London, and Hal here at home—and the two discovered friendship. Believing Great Britain to be a very crowded island, however, it may come as another surprise that Alec’s community is only a fourth the size of ours; that he and his wife were coming from a village to a throbbing metropolis. Hard to think of Agincourt that way.
Alec had made reservations at the motel on Highway 7 by the fairgrounds entrance, but Hal would hear nothing of it, guessing that public transport in the UK was superior to what passes for it in the United States. Good bet. Rowan and I were renovating some bed-and-breakfast space that might be ready in time; and with borrowed furniture and kitchenware, it was almost cozy. We picked them up at Des Moines late one night, drove home and tucked them in. Then the fun began.
Mr and Mrs Parks were in their late 60s, early 70s. Alec, a former school headmaster had served in Burma and then as a farm manager in Rhodesia; Margaret, mother of two, had played piano in silent movie houses. Flaming Liberals in the thick of the Thatcher Regime. We found ourselves in what another old friend called “heated agreement.” When the car hit a pothole, for example, Mrs Parks blurted “Maggy bump!” from the back seat, a bad joke about Britain’s own crumbling infrastructure. There’s was where ours is going.
Heathfield is one of those organic English villages that grew through hundreds of years; a hierarchy of paths and lanes more like your circulatory system than an Enlightenment grid of American streets. So mid-morning Hal got a call from Alec admitting he’s gone on a “reckie” (i.e., a reconnoiter) of the neighborhood and got lost. Cartesian grids, apparently, are anathema to the English mind patterned by the Middle Ages, and Alec could never quite get the hang of which way streets and avenues ran. With luck, he’d read some of our Transcendental authors.
Everyone took a turn shepherding Alec and Margaret about. They were driven far and wide and often; the weather cooperated. They spent a day at Sturm und Drang. There was a play at the college and an opening at the Memorial Gallery. A barbecue in rural Fahnstock. Tea with Aunt Phyllis. Father Barnstable stood in for the C of E. Alec compared our landscape to his native Rutland. Margaret played the piano. And through it all, the Parkses were as curious as five-year-olds, inquiring about news and rain and real estate and brussels sprouts and things the rest of us find commonplace, like presidents and…oh, well, you get the point. Two weeks we enjoyed their lovely company. Then they returned to Sussex and, no doubt, told stories about us.
Visit Gnostic Grove in spring and enjoy the two-stemmed tree lilac planted there to commemorate the Parks family visit. What it needs now is the likes of their memorial bench in Sussex. Both of them are gone to glory, recalled fondly as “the English people”.
Learning from others is about discovering yourself.
Rutland, Rhodesia, Burma—three places you can no longer find on a map. A visit to Agincourt seemed in keeping with Alec’s track record.
Ghosts of Christmas Past #7: The English People, Part 1
“A few figs from thistles…”
by Howard A. Tabor
The English People, Part 1
Agincourt has had its share of foreign visitors.
My own family counts for some of them: Aunt Grace’s husband is French and Great Uncle Anson’s wife and their three children hail from the Euskadi, the Basque homeland of northern Spain. But in this neck of the woods, someone from Alabama might be considered “foreign”, so let’s set our sights a little higher.
Two of our most interesting foreign visitors with no local connection may have been Alec and Margaret Parks, who came for a two-week visit in the Spring of 1990.
It all begins with our late great local historian Hal Holt in the 1980s. Hal had been investigating some of the British wheeling-dealing in Iowa agricultural land a century earlier, most of it in Larchwood up in Lyon County. Some of you will know that the Close Brothers organized the “Iowa Land Company” for investment by British capitalists, acquiring nearly 50,000 acres toward that end. Much of it was intended to be sold as small holdings—the sort of homestead farming seen in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois in the relentless march of Manifest Destiny— but the sale of large acreage involved others in the speculative game. Richard Sykes was one (owner of the Larchwood townsite) and Francis Logie-Pirie was another. Hal became interested in Logie-Pirie and opened a correspondence with the local historical society in East Sussex, Logie-Pirie’s county of residence.
Volunteers, many of them retired, handle inquiries in Britain’s local history network, and Hal’s letter (this was long before email expedited this sort of thing) came to the attention of one Alec Parks, retired headmaster of a school in Durham far to the north. Parks replied to Holt’s questions, providing insight to the wealth that had enabled the displaced Scotsman Logie-Pirie to engage in American speculation. And that might have been the end of it, if we were dealing with folks other than Holt and Parks, cut from similar cloth and curious about each other as much as their historical interests. Hal shared their evolving correspondence with me; Alec was someone he had clearly begun to like.
Then, one evening, Hal got a phone call: a cheery British accent at the other end introduced itself as belonging to Alec Parks and wondered if a visit to the Colonies might be in order. Alec and his wife Margaret proposed a visit in the Spring, a prospect eagerly accepted by Hal and his wife Muriel. The insertion of the Parks into the rhythm of local life will not likely be forgotten by many of us for years to come. But the details of that visit will have to wait for another installment.
In the meantime, enjoy the image of a memorial bench placed in Alec’s memory along the Cuckoo Trail in 1995. It seems entirely in keeping with the man we met nearly twenty-five years ago.
I hope to rest on that bench some time soon and savor a few of memory’s happier moments.
Chutzpah
Chutzpah is a Yiddish word denoting audacity, for good or bad; just audacity.
Looking for some biographical material today on the Columbus, Ohio architectural firm of Yost & Packard, I stumbled upon this design for their Toledo & Ohio Central Railway Station in Columbus and was reminded of architectural audacity.Why is it that I enjoy architecture of this sort so much and encounter it less and less frequently. Not only is no one building it, they are also actively tearing down the few remaining bits from a more audacious time.
I offer them here for both offence and enjoyment. Look if you dare. Look away if you can.
Incidentally, our friend Larry Schwartz defines chutzpah thus: after murdering their parents for the inheritance, the children seek lenience from the jury because they’re orphans.
Frank Morley Fletcher [1866-1950]
[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]
FLETCHER, Frank Morley [1866–1950]
“John Platt at Lunch”
1922
oil on board / 9.5 inches by 7.5 inches
Fletcher introduced the ukiyo-e “floating world” of Japanese printmaking to British art. Working primarily as a printmaker, Fletcher was also an educator, serving as director of the Edinburgh College of Art (1907–1923) and then in the United States at the Santa Barbara School of the Arts (1924–1930). He continued to teach, paint and exhibit in Los Angeles until his death in 1950.
This small painting is more completely titled “John Platt at Lunch Our Last Day at Chantemerle-sur-Seine, July 1922” shows his friend and fellow artist John Edgar Platt on holiday in France.
Coïncidentally, the collection includes works by Fletcher’s friend John Edgar Platt.