A Room with a Vision

The Sears Vallonia could be configured for five or eight rooms, one bath. The line forms here.

When my folks moved to Tulsa in 1949, was our first house there a Sears kit home? Could be. It sure looked like this one described as "Offered for a mere $1,465 in 1921, the Sears Vallonia could be configured to include five or eight rooms, depending on whether the owner wanted a second floor. The exterior is characterized by its large porch and a broad dormer with a three-paned window." (Compliments of Bob Vila, in an article on vintage catalog kit houses.)

Vallonia or not, wherever we moved, I always got the topmost floor with leaning ceilings that would bump my head if I wasn't careful.

The folks went to the trouble of selling me on this particular upstairs attic-like room. (“Hell, boy, I wish I’d had a room like this when I was your age.” I’m betting he had a better one. This was my stepfather who called me “boy” because it was kind of John Wayne-ish back then. Or was he calling me Hellboy, which would have been way cooler.)

I was born too late. I could’ve had a Caddy with paper route savings.

The Sell. That’s how I knew it was a raw deal. Hot as hell in summer, stuffy in winter. But there was no wiggle room, I knew I was stuck. My sister got a room with the adults downstairs. The Sell. They used it for broccoli, for “applying yourself” at school. For acting more like polite kids who are probably doing time in Leavenworth if they’re still alive.

But I learned to deep-read in this room thanks to stuff the previous owner left as not worth carting away. In this Vallonia-like house on Wheeling Ave. in Tulsa, a huge stack of old Saturday Evening Posts and Fortunes was my inheritance. Fascinating stuff. They'd been there since the 20's, and bore the owner's name on mailing labels on the covers.

The gateway drug to motorcycles…

I looked at every page of every magazine, marveling at the low costs of automobiles in the 1930s (Cadillacs for $800 up) and reading wonderful fiction stories about Alexander Botts and the Earthworm Tractor Company. I probably read my first F. Scott Fitzgerald story in one of them. There were also some Ladies’ Home Journals in there, but the Fortunes and Posts captured my interest. The covers were thrilling and the stories and ads whirled me back in time. They were musty smelling but the inks were bright due to their time-capsule-like storage.

I read that "the war to end all wars" was WWI, and it puzzled me greatly because the year was 1949 and WWII had ended four years before. Why hadn't the first big war prevented the second? But I didn’t dwell on existential questions for long. By the dormer windows in a cabinet I found a neat pile of vintage Popular Mechanics with ads for Velocette motorcycles, Whizzers and King Midget automobiles. How to make your own Jet Pack. I could fly out that dormer window and buzz the neighbors, zoom over to Utica Square, strafe the mean dog on Peoria with my Red Ryder BB gun.

I was introduced to flying automobiles and a car that would become a boat as you drove into a lake or the ocean. Cooking with radar and microwaves—like that would ever happen.

1949 was the year, Truman was president, and a wildly inventive car had just come on the scene, one with an enveloped silhouette without bulbous fenders, the 1949 Ford. The Sears Roebuck catalogs listed televisions and it looked like we might get one. Tulsa was a boomtown, Oil Capital of the World, and I was infected for life with the optimism of the era.

To this very day, I think “It’s a Tulsa kind of Day,” when things are going right and I’m relatively free of aches and pains, and the dogs are playing as we walk. The 1949 Ford in the driveway somehow reifies and bridges the feeling first encountered in the maybe-Vallonia on Wheeling Avenue. A room with jetpacks, cheap Cadillacs and F. Scott Fitzgerald—and outside that room, an infectious boom town attitude and blue skies and the world on a string.

As Kurt Vonnegut said, “Enjoy the little things in life, because one day you’ll look back and realize they were the big things.”

"Where do you get your ideas?

I was heading out on the road from my driveway to walk.  A truck stopped, disgorged four or five people who were, it seems, there for the farm tour and the winery store down the road. A man stood looking at me, fists on his hips, rared back, said, gruffly, loudly. Even accusingly. "You do all this stuff?" He looked around, surveying an expanse of pasture, fence, house, vehicles, maybe two sculptures. I'd been asked that in the past, and learned the shortest answer suffices. "Yessir!" I answered matching volume and gruffness. He looked around more. Meanwhile a woman had sidled up. Her question was, "Where do you get your ideas?" 

Now, this is a benign though broad query impossible to answer. I have a story concocted about conjuring. "I build a fire of sage and hedge, read the smoke. I import pigeons from New Orleans, hexed birds from a priestess down there, and I roast one over the fire. Then I conjure over it. It tells me what to do and I do it."

Everything is connected. It’s in the book.

Instead I said, "I don't know. It just sort of happens." That amused all of them, and they conferred over it as I walked away. I played with the thought that the lady was quite serious. Maybe she thought there was an idea store, where silly ideas cost maybe fifteen cents, good ones ten bucks and up. An idea box store.

Where did I get ideas anyway? When I started out in advertising, a notorious sucker-upper of ideas, in a small agricultural print agency in Omaha, I wondered if I would have enough ideas to make a career of it. Daily I scoured the ideascape of my mind for anything that might apply to the problem at hand. Usually how to present grain bins or pesticide or hoof-rot cures to farmers and ranchers. Boilerplate describes the accepted approach.  

Cows in galoshes and gun-toting ag sprays masqueraded as ideas for awhile, but I wanted more substantial stuff. I wanted Bill Bernbach Volkswagen ideas.

An unprepossessing little book…

This was about 1961. I frequented old book stores and thrift shops back then, as now. A book printed in 1940 titled "A Technique for Producing Ideas" found me. It was by James Webb Young, an ad icon. A slim hardback of about forty pages with a ho-hum dust jacket. The designer hadn't read the book. I read some of it there, the rest sitting in my shitty old Valiant. I read it again at home. At work. In bars, waiting rooms, lunch counters.

It's a great book. Great. As with a lot of the really great books, people "update" it, improve it, write new forewords to it--my advice, get the original. A first edition can be found for around $25. Five bucks if you're thrift-shop lucky. If it's in hardback it'll always be an old one. One of them has a foreword by Bill Bernbach--you can't go too wrong on that one. The original's foreword is by Reinhold Niebuhr, and it needs no refurbishing, even by a giant like Bernbach. But many things ain't broke, and they get fixed anyhow (in the book you'll find the Pareto principle and some Paretoisms which deal with that a bit).

I'm not going to tell you what's in the book, but here's a rather too-long review of it, the later edition, by a 2012 Brain Picking. Worth a scan if not a read. Get the book.

It’s called “Everything is Connected.”

On the day the lady asked me "Where do you get your ideas?" I had begun a sculpture. It's called "Everything is Connected," and, as you'll discover by reading Young's book, it's a bit of a coincidence. Or is it? I had started the piece desultorily, not knowing where it might be going. I had a couple of nicely closed pieces of square tubing from Machine Head, and thought I might use them as the base for the piece. They ended up sort of swinging around in the air instead.

So, where did I get that "idea?" From the past. Connections. Some applied physics. Some things that worked and knowing I could weld mild steel to cast iron if it penetrated well enough. Stuff like that. And a certain lack of fear of being wrong, or being derided. In sculpture as in writing there's their way, there's my way, and there is no "the" way. Get the idea? You will if you get the book. Guaranteed. It's not full of a lot of BS or convoluted exercises.

May your ideas be many and bright.

I'm going back someday, come what may, to Blue Bayou

Looks like sculpture to me…

If only in my mind and sculpture and MacBook. Back before the beginning of time, or so it seems, I roamed St. Joseph, Louisiana, the parish seat of Tensas Parish. (Pronounced ten-saw, by the way, like Arkansas) As we get older, I'm told, we become more in touch with our youth and more aware of the distance between now and then. That particular season of my existence began to surface after a spring storm this year which downed some fair-sized trees at Wise Acres. Too large and too heavy to drag off to the brush pile, I resigned myself to sawing them up into manageable chunks.

But the more I looked at them, the more they reminded me of something. Something I had seen many years ago. Tupelo and cypress trees in the bayou, reaching barkless dead fingers out of backwaters and sloughs. And something else. Art made of these expressive pieces of nature. Primitive art, all the more powerful for its lack of, or even avoidance of, artistic sophistication.

I was also experiencing writing blockage on a novel I'm trying to finish for publication in 2019. A switch to sculpture often frees up creative inertia in writing so I began making pieces influenced by childhood memories of Tensas Parish. I became so immersed in it that I didn't much care about the writing; it has become an idée fixe, and the show even has a name this early in the game. "A love letter to Tensas Parish."

A fascinating man, Mayor Fields…(Washington Post Photo)

Four pieces in, I decided to contact some people from there. A talented poet/librarian named Garland Strother surfaced online. He agreed to send me a picture and a short bio. I will be posting his Tensas-oriented poems and materials at the show. I found a young entrepreneur from Tensas Parish, an LSU grad, Joel Brannan, who is building a distillery for his Magnolia brand vodka. I talked to the Mayor, Elvadus Fields, for a delightful hour. The list of honorees is growing.

If you come to the show (Hilliard Gallery, KC crossroads, May, 2019, First Friday May-June) expect to see representatives of Tensas Parish and St. Joe, the parish seat, on the walls. These are interesting people. All the more so, because they belong to an exclusive club: the least populated parish in Louisiana, and they're all making marks.

A little about that neck of the bayou: there are three towns in the parish, St.Joseph, Newellton and Waterproof. The parish butts up to the Mississippi River, and has a couple of big oxbow lakes. Lake Bruin is about 3,000 acres of extremely clear water.

Among the celebrated from Tensas Parish is a bodyguard for Huey P. Long who was present at the "assassination." That's in quotes because it's looking less and less like a murder and more like a ricochet accident. The assailant may not even have been armed, but the gun (they say) he had was a .32 revolver. Long died from a .38 caliber wound. Check it out here for some fascinating history.

Part of what makes Louisiana, Louisiana…

I shot my first duck in the parish bayou, a merganser. We were in a johnboat among the cypress trees, my stepfather, me, and a sweet water spaniel named Suzy who lived with us later in Tulsa. The shotgun was nearly as tall as I was, an Ithaca 16 guage pump that still hangs on the wall all these years later. The duck hit the water but was alive enough to slip in among the cypress roots and evade us. Suzy jumped into the water and caught it, swam back to the boat. It was the only duck we got that day.

So, a rite of passage occurred down there. But I quit hunting altogether about forty years ago. Blasting unarmed creatures when you don't need to do that to survive was counter to my idea of myself. Many things are. But the good people of St. Joe and nearby towns own qualities I would do well to aspire to, even at this late date.

Tensas Parish keeps declining in numbers, in income, in solutions. But I'm thinking with notables like those I've mentioned and those I'll meet, that may start to reverse itself. The mayor mentioned a lady named Vivian who left St. Joe to get a top nursing degree in Maryland. She came back and is investing in the town. She runs a restaurant and is rehabbing a derelict mansion as a home for women who need a sanctuary. I want to get her bio and a photo for the show. And others. I hope to have a nice wall of fame for the show in May. Y'all come, hear?

And I hope that book is on Amazon by then, and you've got a copy and recommended it to your book club and Oprah, and my royalties are better than the $12.74 I got last quarter.   

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

They sleep a lot. Then they run and play a lot. Works for people, too.

4th of July where'd you come from? Last I looked it was, oh, April or something. I was putting up temporary fencing for two tiny aussie pups, and yesterday I took it all down, rolled up the wire and put it in the barn. I have a t-post puller thank god, as they were pounded in deep. I'm just a fencing fool. Today I pledged allegiance to a neglected lawn, and mowed the front area. It's a big sucker. I'll do the back maybe friday. The pups love the lawn and the front pasture.

The new bookmarks are here! The new bookmarks are here! I'm living and coping with adult onset optimism so it doesn't take much to get me all abuzz. Good thing, too. Too many people are out to rid the world of natural highs just by being pissed off all the time. Life is short I think they will find, probably at the too late mark and then they'll only have time to say "wha...?"

What a voice. It could be a bass saxophone.

By the way, talk about laid back and cool, David Basse, KC's jazz legend, has such a resonant everyday speaking voice I asked him to say a word or two about a couple of books on the new bookmark. Then I sent the mp3's to a podcast I frequent. Give a listen--it would be enjoyable to hear David read a to-do list. (These are short, :30's)

Got to thinking while on the mower today (there I go, thinking again) how I used to welcome summer as a kid. No more teacher's dirty looks. The heavy pneumatic doors of Horace Mann School with their glass and chickenwire prison windows closed behind me and the free world of summer hove into view. A kid's mind regards three months of summer freedom pretty much as a lifetime, an infinite vista. "The endless laboratory experiment of being alive," as Scott Bradfield put it in a recent book review.

Joe, Joe, ease off. But what a summer!

I didn't know what I'd do out there, I just knew it would be fun and no one would grade me on it. Multiple choice took on fresh meaning. One such summer I was introduced to McCarthyism. Commies were everywhere. I was enthralled. Maybe some of my grandmother's neighbors were communists. Or spies. The rabid senator made that case on black and white TV. I had just gotten a little printing press with rubber type and I put out the first fake newspaper. I wrote libelous things about neighbors, then hawked the paper on the street. Few takers at a nickel apiece. If only I'd known about the magic "An anonymous source said..." plausibility ploy.

This summer I'm doing what I can to not finish a novel and the internet is helping immensely; I'm even reading my Tommy Hilfiger emails and thinking of answering them. I'm resisting the thousand words a day groove, but I'll get back into it. Why not? All the other books are making me so rich, (an anonymous source alleges) why would I not finish another one to put into the grinder? I read somewhere there are 600,000 to a million books published each year in the U.S. alone. About half are self-published. Mine aren't, so far. Maybe they should be. On average these million books sell 250 copies a year. But like I said, that old optimism works for me.

Happy summer! g

The Reset Button: Cole Lindbergh

Horses See Ghosts. Published in April.

Busy year. When you're flogging away doing the stuff that you're meant to do, writing, welding, it's a focused flurry. Not much room for anything else. Then when that book is published and that sculpture show has opened, you come down on the graph like an S&P correction, BLAM. Running on empty it seems. Valley, not peak.

That's the time to get started on more projects, after a suitable rest. So a podcast happened. Number 44. It's up right now on Cole Lindbergh's Kansas City Podcast, and what an honor. This young guy has accomplished a lot since his even younger days at Worlds of Fun, the premiere KC entertainment park. He's the reason for a lot of the fun at that institution of rides and games. Cole is walking, talking, dancing, singing exuberance and positive energy--and what a treat to meet him. (Click here to hear podcast)

Cole, helping Worlds of Fun earn its last name...

We took a short tour of Wise Acres then settled into my quiet loft office upstairs in Freddie's studio building in back of the main house. I had listened to him on "This American Life" and his own podcast, and wanted to meet him, see if some of his sparkle and verve might be catching. I forgot there were microphones and a recorder as we talked. You'd think that a serial extrovert like Cole might unnerve a brooding solitudinarian, but this was a fresh fun couple of hours, indeed.

His podcast subjects range from talented rappers to paranormal investigators and everything in between; their shared commonality being they are Kansas City born. I'm off his beaten path, fifty miles south in Resume Speed, Kansas, but out he came on a Friday afternoon, helping to kick off the Memorial Day long weekend. What a reset button this guy is. If you need a lift, check out his blog and especially some of the videos of him singing, dancing and performing signature Lindbergh antics.

Not that he doesn't take anything seriously, of course he does. His concerns match many of yours, but his main cables and gears are those of a great ride at a very amusing amusement park. His earliest desire was to be an imagineer at Disney Studios. I think he's something beyond that. An imagineer of his own effervescent life journey. And a potent reminder, if this thing is only a one-time deal, have some fun along the way.

Click here to hear the episodes with Cole Lindbergh...