CV One Hundred and Five Years

In today's mail came my copy of the history of CV as it was published in 1975. What a treasure! I feel so lucky to have found a copy for sale. It was the only copy I saw on Amazon.com. I have just thumbed through for the first time and already I'm finding many pictures and articles that I will be quoting from in future postings. A little history of this copy of the book is in order.

The name on the title page is: Freda Underwood, 615 Harter, Winfield, 1996. The book is in perfect condition and someone took the trouble to have most of the Cedar Vale Historical Society Book Committee autograph the book. The only signatures missing are Harold and Myrtle Cox. (Sorry about that, Don.)

I know that several of you own copies of the book, Don and Naomi/Bea Howell for sure. I want to thank Naomi/Bea in particular for bringing the book to my attention and setting me off on the search.

In the process I came across another small book about CV, published, they say in the late 19th century. I've ordered that book also and will let you all know what I find there.

So, if I turn up missing here on the blog for a few days, you'll know that I'm busy turning the pages of my latest treasure from good ole CV.

The McDowell Colony

by Gary White

I am creating these pieces so my children and grandchildren get to know who I was and what my life was like. I'm not putting all of them up on the blog, but when there is a Midwestern reference I'm posting them here.

In 1975 I was accepted as a visiting composer at The MacDowell Colony, the oldest artists’ colony in the US. Founded in 1907 by the widow of American composer Edward MacDowell, the colony provides “an inspiring environment in which to produce enduring works of the imagination.” One applies for a residency with a creative project and one is accepted on the basis of the quality of one’s previous creative work. The colony provides room and board and the exclusive use of a studio. Composers’ studios include a grand piano, writing desk, and other furniture. If the artist is a visual artist, the studio includes complete equipment to pursue creative work. Film makers are provided for with a complete production facility onsite. If you want to read more about the Colony click on the title to this piece.

The daily routine at the Colony is breakfast on one’s own in the dining room, lunch delivered in a picnic hamper to your studio, and dinner in the main house with the other “colonists.” Residents at MacDowell Colony call themselves colonists.

I applied for a one-month residency and arrived at the Colony in October, 1975. My cabin/studio was placed well back in the woods and had a stunning view of the forest. The cabin was nicely finished all in knotty pine and a hardwood floor. There was a small porch at the front. The walls of the cabin were decorated with a dozen or more large slabs of pine, called “tombstones” by the colonists, with autographs of all the previous inhabitants of the studio. An impressive list of signatures it was. To make a list of the signatures in my studio would be name-dropping, but the names would be known to anyone familiar with mid-twentieth-century US composers. I spent the first day being overwhelmed by my surroundings. As a small-town boy from southern Kansas I felt intimidated by the big names all around me on the walls. Soon, however, I got to work on my project and settled into the routine of the Colony.

To get some picture of what life at the Colony was like, imagine twenty or thirty high-strung artists with big egos bouncing around the rural New Hampshire countryside and meeting every evening for dinner. Dinner-table conversation routinely included stories of artists who had “gone off the deep end” while in residence, discussions of who was more famous than whom, and guarded statements about how one’s own work was going.

One “deep end” story will give you the general picture. It seemed that an artist who was in residence when one of my contemporary colonists was there refused to leave the Colony at the end of her stay. The staff found her in the morning in the kitchen tied to the kitchen stove. Professionals had to be called in to talk her down and get her on her way.

The “more famous than whom” stories included discussions of prizes won, articles in New Yorker, New York Times reviews, etc. The majority of the artists at the MacDowell Colony reside in New York City and what the Times says is considered to be the gospel truth. As a small-town boy from the Midwest I felt that I was undoubtedly the least famous person at the Colony. No one took any effort to disabuse me of that perception.

In any group of twenty or thirty artists in the midst of the creative process there will always be some whose work is going well, some who are struggling, and a few suffering from absolute creative block. This makes for an atmosphere filled with underlying tension. There were occasional emotional outbursts and other forms of acting out. I witnessed an evening when one of the Colonists leapt up on a dining table, did a furious dance, and ran from the room in tears. Other colonists took such events totally in stride, having witnessed nearly everything before.

Day-to-day life was fairly intense. There was my own struggles with my project, the egos of the other colonists to deal with, and predictably unpredictable behavior at dinner. Artists would be found to be missing, sometimes for several days and the staff would become concerned about their well being. There was an absolute rule at the Colony that no one but the colonist him or herself could enter the studio without being invited. “Missing” colonists could sometimes be tracked by whether the lunch basket was taken in and food consumed, but the staff had to more or less “read the tea leaves” to determine if a colonist was OK. If an artist was really hot on a project, he or she might work day and night for several days and then sleep in for a day or so.

When I got into the routine, my project progressed very well and I actually finished several days before the month was up. This allowed me to take walks in the woods, drive out from the Colony into the New Hampshire countryside and be a bit of a tourist. All in all, the MacDowell Colony experience was very productive and I could have applied again for another residency, I’m sure. Perhaps it was only my feeling of not belonging to the inner circle of New York artists, or perhaps my own struggles with the creative process were enough to have to deal with. I decided to create my own individual settings for my future creative retreats and never returned to the MacDowell Colony or any other artists’ colony.

OK girls, what about you?

I just heard from Naomi/Bea Howell and she thinks this blog is just about us guys:

"It seems to be a guy type blog and you guys are doing a great job. I really don't feel that I have much of interest to contribute."

What I have to say about this is that, so far, it has been a one-sided blog. Sure, Reva has shared a lot of her later life, but my sense is that there is a very large unplumbed territory that needs to be explored here. My question is:

What was it like being a girl growing up in the 1940s and 1950s in Cedar Vale, Kansas? Grade school memories? What were the girls talking about in all those times when the boys weren't present? If we are going to get the complete picture you gals are going to have to supply it. We guys want to finally know what was going on in you girls' heads. You were mostly mysteries to us. So, at age 70 you can let us in on your secrets. We are all adults now. So, come on girls, lift the veil of mystery.

What do you say, guys? What to hear it from the girls perspective? Let them know!

CV Memories of Wayne Woodruff -Page 5

MEMORIES PAGE 5
Watching my parents, especially father, put up with the hard work, stress and worry of farming determined me not to be a farmer. I especially remember the night that Dad worked until one a.m. combining the soy bean crop because it was ready, we needed the money and there was a big storm coming that would ruin the beans. And getting the bales of alfalfa off the field and into the barn before more rain was another on-going worry and stress that I believe must have contributed to his early heart attack, He seemed always to have something to worry about, and work that had to be done.
Besides picking strawberries, there were other things about the farming that I hated. Gathering the eggs was one.! The procedure was to go into the chicken house, located the nests where the hens were laying eggs, reach into the nest and pick out the eggs that had been deposited during the day. At best, you grabbed an egg that some chicken had decided was not her best work and she had also defecated on the egg, so you grabbed a handful of chicken-sh-t. That was bad enough, but at times in the dark evening of the dark chicken house, one would reach into the nest and encounter the unwelcome contact with a four foot black-snake that was taking his evening meal of raw egg. But even when there was no snake and no sh-t, there were times when the hen was still on the nest and she objected violently to anyone trying to reach a hand in under her to steal her eggs, and I still have little scars on my hands from those sharp beaks.
Hoeing corn rows, some of them a half a mile long, in the heat of the summer for 50 cents an hour was another task that embedded itself in my mind so that when school work seemed too much, I could always remember those long, hot, dirty rows of corn and the hoe that never seemed to be sharp enough.
Milking the cows was some good and some bad. When things were going well, it was almost peaceful sitting quietly on the little one legged milking stool with your head against the warm flank of the old cow as you gently extracted her diurnal contribution of milk. She didn’t seem to mind because she had her oats to eat while I milked and she was a contented cow. But there were times that milk cow Helen was in a bad mood and probably sore from mastitis ( although at the time I did not know that and just thought that she was a nasty beast) and objected to this mean kid pulling on her teats and making her hurt. So, consequently she tried to kick the source of her agony, which was me. If not kicking me, she could always manage to kick over the almost full bucket of milk. But we did have a device that were called “kickers”. Kickers were clamps that fastened around each hind leg and a short chain between the clamps that kept the cow from kicking with one leg. But that ingenious device did not hamper old Helen. She learned to kick with both legs at one time which was quite picturesque but not very smart because when both of her back legs were in the air kicking at her tormenter, it meant she was totally without any means of balancing upright and ended up lying of the floor in the puddle of her own mess and usually a bucket of milk ,her head still caught in the stanchion, which were two heavy boards mounted vertically which kept her head in place during the milking procedure. Getting the poor cow out of this predicament with her fighting every effort was never any fun. One more reason to never be a farmer.
As mentioned earlier, I had a little sister, Barbara, who was four years younger. She was a brilliant pianist and even though I struggled for days trudging though a Chopin sonata, she could sit down at the instrument and play it beautifully the first time through.