Journey

Grand Forks, North Dakota 1981

Since Harley Straus’ 
photo-journalism class at the University of North Dakota, cameras have been part of my life.  Assignment 2: capture a ‘style of life.’ Exploring Grand Forks’ fading downtown I met this waitress. While on break, resting her feet, I took her photo.

Harley taught me how to burn the overexposed window, making print after print until I got it right.  Counting seconds my prints were in developer, stop bath, fixer, then wash,  hours flashed by. 
 As an English major, tussling with complexities of literature,  this tangible language appealed.  Now in my virtual darkroom I do nothing and the window pane is perfect.  When I see this photograph, though, I'm back in that school dark- room with the smell of photo chemicals whiffing to the exhaust fan, the chatter and banter of fellow photog students, the sweep of the second hand on the large darkroom clock, and Willie Nelson on the tape player, for Harley instructed. ' he's essential-for-good-printing.'  This quirky mix made magic of the developer’s oily slickness, swirling  between my fingers, as a hint of exterior window frame finally appears.

           
                                               Self-portrait for Harley's class, Grand Forks, ND 1981

After receiving my B.A. in English, with an emphasis in photojournalism,   I produced audio-visual slide shows in northwestern Minnesota . I worked on issues facing most rural communities everywhere:  limited access to medical and social services, job creation, low wages, transportation limitations, school closings, aging populations.  Living on the Great Plains was the wildest, most remote place I’d ever lived.  It suited me.

I was born in Washington DC, moved to St. Louis at age nine, and in my mid-twenties, moved to England with my husband Jim and our toddler daughter.  We lived near Jim’s family in Lancashire, then Cheshire for the richest period of my life.  When the economy tanked--double digit inflation, miner’s strikes, rolling blackouts, terrible unemployment--we left England for North Dakota.  At the rim of the American West I cultivated the seeds of the person I am today. 

Leaving England was the hardest move we’ve ever made, as we struck out all on our own in a remote region, losing the tapestry of family and friends the likes of which I’ve never found again.  I discovered what it’s like to be an emigrant from and an immigrant to my own country, finding surprising gains and profound losses, like migrantss everywhere. 

Road to Kief, North Dakota 2010

Ten years later we left North Dakota, for Boston, then Galveston and finally Virginia, just outside Washington DC.  In 2005 I completed the foundation year at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, Washington DC.  My favorite course was Resources taught by Raya Bodnarchuk.  Each place has added a dimension to how I navigate the world. This odyssey has brought me nearly full circle.  The place that evokes the most wistful resonance is North Dakota, where the possible seemed closer to earth.

Jim collecting the mail and wildflowers, friend's farm near Kief, North Dakota 2010

When we moved East I dreamed--in color--of the Great Northern Plains we’d so cavalierly left behind for the bright lights of the East.  In sleep I navigated freely beneath a cerulean sky, vast horizon, all burnished with an incessant wind.

            This was the road over which Antonia and I came on that night when we
            got off the train in Black Hawk...I had only to close my eyes to hear the
             rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by that
             obliterating strangeness.  The feelings of that night were so near that I
             could reach out and touch them with my hand.  I had the sense of
             coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man’s
             experience is.  For Antonia and for me, this had been the road of
            Destiny had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which
            predetermined for us all that we can ever be.        
                                                      --My Antonia, by Willa Cather 1918

Near Grand Forks, North Dakota September 1996

The Gift

First published online November 16, 2009

Four p.m. February 1, 1999 I was driving east in northern Virginia,  50 miles west of Washington DC.  I’d just had a meeting at the remote FEMA compound on The Mountain, near the West Virginia border. 

While driving through the wintery foothills of the Blue Ridge, the radio announcer interrupted programming, “Paul Mellon, one of America’s wealthiest men--philanthropist, art collector, thoroughbred horse breeder and son of Andrew Mellon--has died at his farm  in Upperville, Virginia.  He was 91.”  I'd never heard of him.

French style, Trinity Episcopalian Church endowed by Mr. & Mrs. Paul Mellon 1951

In the churchyard, Andrew William Mellon's well-tended grave

As if scripted, there I was, driving through Upperville, past the stone Anglican church, 17th century pub, dry stone walls framing meadows well-stocked with fine horseflesh, clad in Tartan blankets.

Not until years later did I learn more about Paul Mellon’s father Andrew and how instrumental he was in shaping the face of American capitalism, industry, banking, art museums, The Mall, Washington DC’s Federal Triangle, plus the surprising limits of his deep pockets in the 1930s. 
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Andrew Mellon was born in Pittsburgh in 1855, educated at Western University of Pennsylvania, his father was a successful investment banker, from County Tyrone, Ireland.  With his father, brother, plus longtime business partner Henry Clay Frick, Andrew built one of the most powerful industrial empires of 20th century America. Their empire included the Aluminum Company of America, Bethlehem Steel, early investment in Spindletop (the Texas oil gusher that opened up the Gulf Coast oil industry) railways, construction, banking, and insurance.

He was a financial genius, and from written accounts by his children and others, an emotional cripple.  His sensitive son Paul said his father was a lot like Soames Forsyte, the frigid art collecting banker of John Galsworthy’s Man of Property, first book of The Forsyte Saga.

This cautious industrialist’s one spontaneous act in life was his choice of mates in 1900, at age 43.  He asked Nora McMullen to be his wife.  She was 19.  Their union was disastrous, ending in divorce in 1910.  they had two children, Ailsa and Paul.

      Bethlehem Steel Works, a watercolor by Joseph Pennell,
             depicting Bethlehem Iron Company in May 1881  image: Wikipedia

He took his bride from her home in Hertfordshire, England, to live in sooty Pittsburgh.  Upon disembarking from the train she said, “We don’t get off here?  You don’t live here?”  The marriage was an oil and water affair, his family unemotional, cold, introverted; hers outgoing, affectionate, vibrant.

When his personal life was at it’s most wan he turned to art collecting, around 1904.  Unlike most dilettantes  he had a personal fortune coupled with astonishing  business acumen.  He amassed one the finest private art collections in the world. By the early 1920s he shared with friends his intent to establish a national gallery.

President Harding chose Mellon as Secretary of Treasury.  in 1921 the U.S. was recovering from the 1918 Spanish flu (650,000 dead) World War I (116,000 U.S. dead, 205,000 injured) a post-war depression, with 20% unemployment, and a federal deficit of $6.3 billion, inflated by war spending.

Mellon reduced the deficit to $4 billion by 1922.  He stayed on at Treasury for Presidents Coolidge and Hoover.  Under his stewardship by 1928 unemployment was down to 1.6%, the lowest ever recorded, and the economy booming. 

Black Tuesday-October 29, 1929-changed everything, including Andrew Mellon’s standing in America.  The Roaring Twenties gave way to the seeming collapse of the American financial system, coupled with a severe drought and horribly damaging farming practices on the Great Plains.  Free-wheeling capitalism was out, government salvation in.

Mellon did not endear himself to his fellows when he sanguinely commented that the Depression was a “mere 15 minutes in the history of the United States.”  Cold comfort for goodly chunks of whole states’ population who’d lost farms, income, even a guarantee of the next meal.

When son Paul attended Cambridge University in England in the early 1930s, Mellon left Treasury and was appointed Ambassador to England.  We’ll never know if the Great Depression would have been less disastrous had Mellon stayed on as Franklin Roosevelt’s  Secretary of Treasury.  Instead, Mellon spent the last 3 1/2 years of his life defending himself against tax evasion charges brought by FDR’s Justice Department.

The pinnacle of Mellon’s art collecting was his 1930-31 purchase from the the USSR of some of the greatest masterpieces of European art.  The Russian government was in dire economic straights, justifying the sale of a chunk of the tzars’ art collection from the State Hermitage Museum.  They’d little need for Western art while trying to industrialize the communist state.  Although a year later, when news came out of what a great deal Andrew Mellon got, Stalin put the breaks on any more sales of Hermitage art.

The Alba Madonna by Raphael was regarded by noted a British art connoisseur as finer than any works then extant in all of Great Britain.  Mellon paid over $1 million for it, the largest sum paid to date for a painting.  He also purchased half of the Hermitage’s 50 greatest paintings, for close to $7 million.  

In 1936, in the midst of his trial, Mellon sent FDR a request:  ‘Would President Roosevelt approve the donation of his art collection to the USA, including a suitable building on the Mall to house the collection?’

Roosevelt accepted, “...I was completely taken by surprise but was delighted by your very wonderful offer to the people of the United States.  This was especially so because for many years I have felt the need of a national gallery of art...”

I suspect the most joyous part of Mellon’s last year of life was spent working with architect John Russell Pope, on the design for the museum.  They decided sandstone would not do. The final design was a sleek neo-classical structure of Tennessee marble.  It cost $10 million, an additional $2 million for the marble alone.

Pope had worked with Mellon before.  He designed the National Archives in the Federal Triangle, built in the late 1920s, under Mellon’s direction.  The project included the creation of a federal building complex, and Constitution Avenue.  It was during this period that Mellon became smitten with the spot where the National Gallery of Art would be built,  Constitution and 4th St. NW. 

East entrance, National Gallery of Art

I.M. Pei Glass pyramid addition

European sculpture gallery

In The Forgotten Man Amity Shlaes describes the philosophy behind Mellon’s gift.  “He was not trying to bribe the government, or even placate it.  He was trying to outclass it.  For years he had tried to show, through business, that the private sector could give to the people, just as government could, and sometimes more.”

Andrew Mellon died August 27, 1937.  He was 82 and did not live to see the completion of the museum.  You’d be hard pressed to find his name there.  I’ve lived near Washington DC for the past 17 years and found the story of his gift while researching the Great Depression.  Also of note:  his collection is not all together, but organized by period and style, mixed in with donations and purchases since it’s inception, further blurring his stamp.

In our age of self-promotion and aggrandizement its stunning to glimpse a time when the opposite was the norm.  Andrew Mellon was shy, reputed to be miserly and cold in temperament.  Yet he gave, quite possibly, one of the most generous gifts to a nation anyone has ever bequeathed, while the government of that nation was waging war against his life's work.  He gave us the past as well as a place to share our future, in that universal language that reaches out to the troubled and untroubled alike: art.

____________________________________________________________

December 1937, three months after his death, Andrew Mellon was found not guilty of defrauding the United States of tax revenue.

The National Gallery of Art opened March 17, 1941.
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Sources:
-Mellon, An American Life by David Cannadine 2006

-The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes 2007

-Rising to Harding’s Level, column by M. Charen Jewish World Review Oct. 2009

Sunflowers, Then & Now

For 10 years, I lived on the North Dakota side of the Red River of the North.  Minnesota was across the river.  For approximately 30-40 miles on either side of the Red River, is The Valley, a minute remnant of ancient Lake Agassiz, which eons ago covered parts of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Ontario, North Dakota & Minnesota.  Lake Agassiz is noteworthy today because of what it left behind in the Red River Valley: one of the finest agricultural lands in the world.  Top soil three feet deep, rich and oil-black.  Starting in late August, you can drive by whole sections of the grandest, tallest, most full-headed, classic sunflowers.  And it's true, they follow the sun, in the morning, thousands of sunflowers face east.  By sunset, they are looking west.

My first autumn in Galveston, I pleaded with a college friend to harvest a bunch of sunflowers from a field near her house, the non-oil ones, and mail them to me!  But when they arrived, upon opening the box, the Red River Valley didn't spring out.  Instead, there were nine forlorn, albeit large, shriveled up sunflowers nestled among the newspaper.  Something was lost in the translation.

I later discovered a constant supply of volunteer sunflower seedlings growing along the railway tracks that ended at the Galveston port.  I'd swing by the tracks on the way to the shrimp boats to harvest those wee sunflowers, my flower of choice for most of our dinner parties there.  

After a couple of giant catepillars ate all of our pepper plants, we gave up trying to grow edibles in the tropics.  It took Jim all of one summer just to excavate the rocky debris for a vegetable garden at the side of our Virginia house.  After importing top soil and other amendments, we planted the works, including sunflower seeds.  Birds ate them all before they even germinated.  I next planted seedlings, again, the infinite nearby woodland wildlife made short shift of those.  I even planted two foot tall vigorous plants that cost the earth at the local garden center.  ZAP-Gone too. That was twenty years ago.

Granddaughter's sunflowers!

Fast forward to last summer, when our granddaughter didn't want veggies growing in her garden, no wonder, she's not yet a fan.  Instead, she planted zinnias and sunflowers, plus a few strawberries.  She has the magic touch, for her sunflowers flourished, enough so we even spotted a couple of volunteers this spring, so we babied them along.  Although they are mighty tall, at least 10 feet!  The flowers are classic second generation sunflower offspring, middling flowers, yet flowers nonetheless!
                                                                                                                                                                              

 

Seeing the success of our granddaughter's second generation sunflowers, we planted a couple of packages of seeds in the only truly full-sun area of our garden, right outside our front door.  To our surprise they survived seedling-hood, only to be attacked by deer right before flowering.  Instead of caving, we gently pruned the gnawed tops, and began covering them each night with gossamer garden fabric.  Voila!!  Although these too are diminutive compared to the northland sunflowers of my memory, they fulfill a long-standing connection to our once grand North Dakota garden. 

Our daughters know how much I love sunflowers, so they often, just for the fun of it, bring me a bouquet of big, bold stunning sunflowers -they are an excellent cut flower too, for they last a good week, even two, if you trim then every other day, and give them fresh water!

I am reminded, in a small way, of Kristina, the wife of Karl, the Swedish couple in Swedish-born, American writer Wilhelm Moberg's series, The Immigrants.  Karl and Kristina fled a Sweden far different than the Sweden of today, for they'd almost starved the winter they finally decided to emigrate to the New World.  

Karl was a driven man, and to Kristina, who was a devout Christian, he'd been corrupted by the wealth he acquired in America as a very savvy farmer/land owner.  She ached for the country she left behind, and the strong Christian fellowship she had there.  Kristina carefully carried a little packet of Swedish apple seeds in their trunk on their journey to America.  They were the first seeds she asked Karl to plant, once they'd cleared their Minnesota homestead of pine trees.  On her deathbed, Karl gave her a taste of her homeland, one of their first Swedish apples.  

Front cultivated sunflowers

 

Baba's Birthday Hike, Virginia Arboretum, near Paris, VA Photos by Carol & Molly

Granddaughter's treasures

Fauna & Flora

Lovely evening light

Checking out upcoming events

Molly & son plus grand old tree

Day is done