adventures of expatriates in Paris and Majorca

New and improved version of this video talk is now free online at <https://youtu.be/gPD-IIW_1yA>. Share with anyone interested in Modernism, Iowa, American expatriates, the Lost Generation, literature, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, World War I, Red Cross, Americans in Paris, architecture, painting, Le Corbusier, French Academy, humor, Majorca, Spain, Rome, Independence Iowa, William James, portrait painting, Chicago, Alfred North Whitehead, Russian Revolution, Alice B. Toklas, Isadora Duncan, Cubism, William Edwards Cook, and much more.

Ames / link to early avant garde modernist film

In 2021, I produced a three-part video about the life of Adelbert Ames Jr. (aka Adelbert Ames II), the American artist, psychologist and optical physiologist who became well known (in the 1940s and 50s) for having devised the Ames Demonstrations in perceptual psychology. That trilogy has been available on my YouTube channel (@camoupedia) for the past five years.

Regrettably, I've never been happy with the third video in that series. The voice-over narration was awful. Finally, after years of wanting to replace it, I've now been able to reconstruct that third segment. The new version is greatly improved, and I have posted it online (the link is above), although it has now been retitled as Adelbert Ames and Anamorphosis / New Version / Part 3. It is entirely free to watch and to share with others.

Ames served in the US Army Signal Corps, and was involved in research that pertained to optics and vision. As far as I know, he did not contribute directly to the development of wartime camouflage, but as this video explains, he did have some connection to camouflage, in part because an artist / friend (who designed frames for Ames' paintings) named Hermann Dudley Murphy was an inspector of ship camouflage for the US Shipping Board.

Hermann Dudley Murphy

Another surprising link is this: Murphy's son was Dudley Murphy, a young Hollywood filmmaker, and an expert on lenses and cameras, who (at his father's suggestion) was hired as Ames' technical assistant at Dartmouth College during the summer of 1921. 

The younger Murphy then moved on to Europe. In the UK, he befriended the poet Ezra Pound and the Vorticist photographer Alvin Langdon Colburn. In France, he met the Surrealist artist Man Ray and the French painter Fernand Léger. It was Murphy and Léger (not just Léger, as if often mistakenly claimed) who made the famous experimental film called Ballet Mécanique. 

This video tells the story of that, and ruminates about the link between that film and Ames' later experiments in vision. It's really quite interesting.

Ames distorted room

they have a telephone and a martini / one each

Roy R. Behrens, Embattlement (©2026), digital collage

Donald Barthleme in "Brain Damage" in City Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970—

The Wapituil are like us to an extraordinary degree. They have a kinship system which is very similar to our kinship system. They address each other as "Mister," "Mistress," and "Miss." They wear clothes which look very much like our clothes. They have a Fifth Avenue which divides their territory into east and west. They have a Chock Full o' Nuts and a Chevrolet, one of each. They have a Museum of Modern Art and a telephone and a Martini, one of each. The Martini and the telephone are kept in the Museum of Modern Art. In fact they have everything that we have, but only one of each thing...They can conceptualize but they don't follow through. For instance, their week has seven days: Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday, and Monday. They have one disease, mononucleosis. The sex life of a Wapituil consists of a single experience, which he thinks about for a long time.

don't go all the way / get off prior to blackpool

Roy R. Behrens, Clockwise (©2026), digital collage

ANON [English woman from the 1920s about preventing pregnancy] We were on the bus and Harold knew the conductor and he asked Harold if we were married. He said "Don't forget, always get off the bus at South Shore, don't go all the way to Blackpool." That was how they kept the family down.

what old age is really like / illusion & despair

Roy R. Behrens, Automaton (©2026), digital collage

Doris Grumbach in "What Old Age Is Really Like" in The New York Times (I November 1998), Op Ed Section—

The most lamentable loss in the elderly spirit is the erosion of hope. The climate of the old country is pessimism. Oscar Wilde's mother wrote: "Life is agony and hope, illusion and despair, all commingled, but despair outlasts all." 

a switch on Mitch / present but not really voting

Philip Stevens photograph on Wikipedia

Oh, for heaven's sake. How strange. A friend of mine just shared a dream in which he visited University College in London. In the student center there (this is factual, not a joke), on public display in a large glass case (shown here), is the preserved body of the famous English philosopher, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), quietly seated in a chair, so that, even in death, he might still attend meetings ("present, but not voting").

It was Bentham's original wish that his head would also be displayed, but its mummification (albeit successful technically) "left the head looking distastefully macabre, with dried and darkened skin stretched tautly over the skull." While no longer on display (it had become the "target of student pranks"), there is a photograph of the head on Bentham's Wikipedia article, as well as elsewhere online.

Enough of that. Back to the dream of my dutiful friend: in his nocturnal misadventure, when he visited Bentham's case, it was not his body on display. Instead, it had been inexplicably switched with that of American congressman Mitch McConnell, the "sitting senator" from Kentucky. How bizarre. Fortunately, no votes were taken during the dream.

Frank Lloyd Wright / two sets of kitchen tools

Roy R. Behrens (©2026) digital collage

Edgar Tafel, About Wright: An Album of Recollections By Those Who Knew Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: John Wiley, 1993), p. 259—

It was arranged that we [members of Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesen Fellowship] would arrive [at the home of Wright's cousin, Richard Lloyd Jones, in Tulsa, Oklahoma] in time for early dinner, see the house [which Wright had designed], and camp there in our sleeping bags for the night. After dinner Mrs. Jones took us around in a group, telling about living in the house: its excitement, the flow of spaces, and experiences of each season with light pouring in in different ways. The tour ended in the kitchen, where she made her final pronouncement: "We have two sets of kitchen utensils—one for cooking, of course, and the other to catch the water from the leaks."

Opening spread of chronology in Roy R. Behrens, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mason: Architectural Heart of the Prairie, with photograph by Carol M. Highsmith. 

Elizabeth Cady Stanton on US immigration

Roy R. Behrens, Cloud Seeder (©2026) digital collage 

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (diary entry), in Theodore Stanton & Harriot Stanton Blatch, eds., Elizabeth Cady Stanton As Revealed in Her Letters Diary and Reminiscences, Arno & The New York Times; New York, 1969. (Originally published by Harper & Brothers Publishers in 1922)—

I am much worked over the infamous Geary bill against the admission of the Chinese into the United States. How my blood boils over these persecutions of the Africans, the Jews, the Indians, and the Chinese. I suppose the Japanese will come next. I wonder if these fanatical Christians think that Christ died for these peoples, or confined his self-sacrifice to Saxons, French, Germans, Italians, etc.?

lingering memory traces of artist Salvador Dali

Dreams of Fields

Above Book cover for Dreams of Fields: Memory Traces of Iowa's Past, essays by Roy R. Behrens. Ice Cube Press, 2025. The portrait on the cover is that of surrealist artist Salvador Dali, who spoke at the University of Northern Iowa in 1952, as described in one of the essays.

•••

James Thurber

The naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dali as an old ukulele in the attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts.

WPA / in praise of the Index of American Design

Three years ago, I completed a series of thirty posters for the purpose of drawing attention to an affiliate program of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) called the Index of American Design.

The WPA is well known by those who are acquainted with the Depression Era of US history. It is especially famous for hiring unemployed artists to create public murals for government buildings. Even when I was young, I knew about the WPA because one of the murals was in the post office lobby in my hometown.

Only years later did I learn about the Index of American Design, which was a companion agency that existed from 1935 to 1942. It too hired unemployed artists (some sources say 400, others say 1000) for the purpose of making 18,257 watercolor paintings (most or all of which survive), as a means of documenting hand-crafted folk art, functional wares, and decorative components from American history, beginning with the colonial age. Unlike the post office murals, no one remembers the names of the Index artists, who were more or less ignored (dismissed as craftsmen, not artists) who had previously been employed as commercial artists, designers and illustrators.

Looking closely at the Index works, I was soon persuaded that the work of those artists is surely as deserving as the WPA muralists. That led to producing the posters. I have never exhibited them in a gallery setting, but I have just now produced a twelve-minute video talk, called Index of American Design: Commemorating Arts and Crafts, by which I share my discoveries on YouTube at this online link.

Take a look. Hopefully, you will enjoy it, and will share the news of its release with artists, designers, historians and others.

Poster / Roy R. Behrens © 2022

screwed / the vital necessity of engaging in war

Anon, Evolution of the Screw 1871

Simone Weil What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war.

•••

Wilbert Snow, Codline's Child (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1974), pp. 37-38—

There were no septic tanks and no sewers in our village. Each home had a backhouse that had to be cleaned out once a year. For three years, when I was between ten and thirteen, I did this chore for [a woman neighbor named] Fronie. Each time she gave me five dollars, and five dollars to me then was far more than five hundred would be to me now. In those days no lime was thrown over the dung to make the task easier for the shoveler. Each time I became deathly sick, but I needed the five dollars so desperately that I saw the job through. I have no words to express the horror of those two or three hours each year. I would lie on my stomach and throw up when there was little or nothing to yield. After the job was over, I would go to the Mill Cove for a swim and to Patten Point to smell the fragrance of fir trees and bayberry bushes.

Agassiz's hands-on science teaching innovation

Anon, Grasshopper becomes human, Finland 1885

Louis Agassiz, in Lane Cooper, editor, Louis Agassiz as a Teacher: Illustrative Extracts on His Method of Instruction (Ithaca, NY: Comstock Publishing, 1945), p. 82—

In 1847 I gave an address at Newton, Massachusetts, before a Teachers' Institute conducted by Horace Mann. My subject was grasshoppers. I passed around a large jar of these insects, and made every teacher take one and hold it while I was speaking. If any one dropped the insect, I stopped till he picked it up. This was at that time a great innovation, and excited much laughter and derision. There can be no true progress in the teaching of natural science until such methods become general.

writer Henry Miller shares his genealogical line

Anon, Birth of a Woman 1907

Henry Miller, in Robert Snyder, This is Henry, Henry Miller from Brooklyn. Los Angeles: Nash Publishing, 1974—

And so, if my memory serves me right, here is my genealogical line: Boccaccio, Petronius, Rabelais, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Maeterlinck, Romain Rolland, Plotinus, Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky (and other Russian writers of the nineteenth century), the ancient Greek dramatists, the Elizabethan dramatists (excluding Shakespeare), Theodore Dreiser, Knut Hamsun, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Élie Faure, Oswald Spengler, Marcel Proust, van Gogh, the Dadaists and Surrealists, Balzac, Lewis Carroll, Nijinsky, Rimbaud, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Giono, Céline, everything read on Zen Buddhism, everything I read about China, India, Tibet, Arabia, Africa and of course the Bible, the men who wrote it and especially the men who made the King James version, for it was the language of the Bible rather than its “message” which I got first and which I will never shake off.

Dean Schwarz (RIP) relives the loss of his father

Above Roy R. Behrens, exhibition poster for Dean and Gunnar Schwarz: Pottery, Form and Inherent Expression (2007), Gallery of Art, University of Northern Iowa.

•••

It is not often that I cry. I cried when my father died. I cried when one of our parrots (Zooey, an African Gray who had bonded with me) died one evening in my arms. And I found that I was crying again just this morning as I was reading the memoir below in this post.

That memoir is not something I wrote. Rather, it was written by a friend (and my primary mentor), the Iowa potter Dean L. Schwarz, who died on March 18. Gerry, his wonderful wife (and one of my favorite people) was there, as were friends and family. His grandson Will Schwarz reported: "Music filled the whole house, and the afternoon sunlight which he loved to watch filtered through the pines and filled his room."

Since then I have been thinking about how I might pay tribute to Dean. And it occurred to me just yesterday that I should share with others a beautiful memoir he wrote in 2005, in which he remembered his father—and, more to the point, his father's death. Here it is—

On the Death of My Father, His Frank-ness by Dean L. Schwarz

It is with a mixture of pleasure and pain that I now stand where we, as family and friends, have stood so many times before, and where we will undoubtedly stand again in the future, when others also come to rest. Is it a blessing to be here? Will someone still be here to stand when we ourselves die? Surely, my "little sister" (Beverley) and my "knee-action brother" (Bill) will never fail to stand on behalf of our family. They know that the future is never the past, and that the present will only be good for those who strive to make it so. Beverley and Bill, I thank you, for your passion in making our father's departure from "the good life" a time that was also worth living. Beverley resides within a sweet bouquet of family, while Bill is receiving the benefits of family buds bursting into full bloom. We all give thanks for what we gained from the teaching of our parents. And to my wife, Gerry, and our children—and to their children's children—"I give thee flowers to strew thy way."

I myself have been lucky to know a handful of people who were not afraid to die. They and others like them found the courage to deal with the termination of their lives. My mother Nona, my father Frank, and (his brother) my Uncle Roger all died in the process of teaching, and each died with dignity. One used his observational skills to help others as a hospice volunteer—he knew how to make wise use of medication. Another knew when to stop eating at a time when that resource failed to provide sustenance for the life that he desired. And yet another was consoled by the belief in having been visited by angels in the hospital.

My friend David Cavagnaro once said to me, "Dean, why fear death?" He went on to tell about thousands of people, from the widest range of cultures, who, in one way or another, were able to cross the border between life and death. Stamped on their passports is proof that they have traveled through an egg yoke yellow tunnel (free-range chickens, of course) of warmth and happiness. When their names were called to return to the life of that existence, they protested. They wanted to stay, they insisted. I have not yet experienced this but I know it is not wise to fear without cause. Fear is a tool that a person should use only rationally. We have enough problems without creating additional fears. Why invent new kinds of darkness when instead we might create more light, recalling the beauty of lilies of the valley of life?

The beloved man who has left us (Frank Lester Schwarz) will nonetheless always be with us. This is our prerogative, to which he contributed by living creatively. Of course there were exceptions: He was neither a god nor a demigod. Our family of independent thinkers has never been heavy enough to tip the balance of Dad's convictions. We have argued that chicken and fish are food, while he insisted that food was a form of hamburger. Meatloaf is food. And when Nona, his Ruby, went to the reward of her convictions, Frank's global world shrank to the size of a Swedish meatball. As a result, for the past few years, he wanted most to join his wife—our mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, great, forever great. So now our feet are expected to make giant footprints, our legacy from their legacy.

We are all related. Perhaps there was an Adam and Eve, in the form of many truths at least. Whether metaphor, science, religion, or philosophy makes no difference. Choice need not divide us, I hope.

My father, Frank Schwarz, showed us some incredible changes in his lifetime. Rising from his own father's labors in a world of steel, he himself became a welder, a "master welder." And then when everyone thought he had done enough and that his life was set in steel (even his games, such as horseshoe, were steel), he suddenly went back to school. With an outlandish bravado, he said to his teacher (as he entered the college classroom for the first time) that "I will not accept anything but an A in this class." And that, indeed, was what he received, and continued to achieve.

And then he became an avid reader. Previously he had only read a few books, including God's Little Acre. His brother Gail, who was the most successful entrepreneur in our family, had only read one book in his whole life, Smoky the Cow Horse. But now Frank began to read about history, which led in turn to reading about other cultures. No one could have anticipated that.

During this period he honored the memory of his beloved son, Steven Charles Schwarz, by making a monumental steel sculpture, based on his convictions about the Native American belief in contrarians. He had learned that contraries cried when others laughed, and walked on their hands instead of their feet. He saw the marvelous humor, introspection, and the psychological value of this tradition. His sculptural abstraction of a teepee standing upside-down at the entrance of South Bear School, a place that he referred to as his Asa Haugan Home, is about twenty feet tall. The shadows of this sundial still travel across our hearts. When the Hearst Center For 'the Arts, in Cedar Falls, invited Frank Lester Schwarz, artist, to have a show of his sculptures in the gardens on that center's grounds, he declined.

He began to see the value of looking at his own Frank-ness from the outside. This view led him to create by word-smithing, the lead-penciled yellow-paged products of which were published in Paddled Tails From Tattled Tales: An Autobiography of a Family, a family book of power and conviction as strong as his welds. (And that !s strong considering that he was hired to weld some of the most important seams in the nuclear energy plant in Palo, Iowa. Not a single bubble was found in the x-rays of his welds. So Cedar Rapids and surrounding area is safer because of Frank.) One of his playful stanzas reads: "Dean Dean, made a machine, Frank Frank turned the crank, Joe Joe made it go, just because Steven is leavin'."

Our father was a keeper of and a sharer of the lessons he learned. So is our Uncle Charlie, who speaks of the wisdom of being streetwise, a necessity for his brothers and sisters in their youthful days. Some of the lessons never taught in school are those that keep homes wise today. Ask Uncle Charlie to show you his hands: One is a map of the French coast that he stormed in World War II, the other is a pointer that teaches us about the important battles.

There were years when Frank would pout and crab at social events and drink beer into friendliness. But this was surely not the case in his later years. During those years (and there was certainly no family precedent for this), he began to make speeches at social gatherings. He became an orator. Yes, an orator, truly! And he liked to say the Lord's Prayer, aloud and loudly, with great reverence and conviction, and in what his deaf ears thought to be unison, very s-l-o-w-l-y. Some people had finished their dinner before he finally said A-a-a-men.

Beverley was witness to his growing love for children in his later years, and how he got so good at it. He became a grand grandfather. He quit suffering the little children to come unto him. He began to make it very pleasant. He loved to baptize them with new names, names they will forever remember in his spirit.

Our Aunt Jeanette is a wise woman. In the pains of our recent yesterday she kindly reminded me of a fact that is one of the most important ideas for to remember from the wisdom of El Franko: "He was a rich man. " And yes we often heard him say, "I am the richest man in the world." If you think it so, so it is. Such direct teaching has made all of us rich: We are a rich family finally, because we have inherited a great legacy, a richness beyond money.

Our many memories now tease the passions of our lives, lives that could not have been lived without our "Why-Nona?" and her "Frank husband." But now they are together again. His mission is complete, and now it is our responsibility to insure that the heaven we seek is the one we will receive. One of my hopes is that wherever Frank and Nona are—and they ARE together—that each of them can simultaneously enjoy the low and high volume of their television set.

For many years I suffered because I could not say words of endearment to Frank without hollering loudly, because of his deafness. And even if he did hear what I heard coming from my shouting mouth, it never sounded intimate, no matter how hard I tried. And the pathos was made even greater because I knew that he could only see a shadow of who I am…

So now, dear Father, for the first time in many years, I can say to you in a softer, pleasant voice that all can hear, from a radiant countenance: "l love you, please say hello to Mom and Stevee."

•••

A few years ago, I made a short slide loop video in tribute to Dean and Gerry Schwarz in connection with an exhibition at the Hearst Center for the Arts. It can be viewed online here. Dean's memoir of his father was initially published in Ballast Quarterly Review Vol 20 No 4 Summer 2005.

from memories of a catholic girlhood / Mussolini

Mary Snyder Behrens / Backpack 2026

Mary MacCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957), p. 50—

It is our parents, normally, who not only teach us our family history but who set us straight on our own childhood recollections, telling us that this cannot have happened the way we think it did and that that, on the other hand, did occur, just as we remember it, in such and such a summer when So-and-So was our nurse. My own son, Reuel, for instance, used to be convinced that Mussolini had been thrown off a bus in North Truro, on Cape Cod, during the war. This memory goes back to one morning in 1943 when, as a young child, he was waiting with his father and me beside the road in Welfleet to put a departing guest on the bus to Hyannis. The bus came through, and the bus driver leaned down to shout the latest piece of news: "They've thrown Mussolini out." Today, Reuel knows that Mussolini was never ejected from a Massachusetts bus, and he also knows how he got that impression.

poet e.e. cummings / elephants were his totem

John Dos Passos, The Best of Times: An Informal Memoir. New York: New American Library, 1966, p. 135—

[American writer E.E.] Cummings' delight in certain things was contagious as a child's. Christmas tree balls, stars, snowflakes. Elephants were his totem. I would never have enjoyed snow so much if I hadn't walked around Washington Square with Cummings in a snowstorm. He loved mice. He had a great eye for sparrows and all pert timid bright-eyed creatures.

The last time I saw him the summer before he died he was entertaining a tame chipmunk. We ate supper on the porch of his father's old hilltop house in the woods above Silver Lake. The chipmunk kept popping through the vines and out onto the brick floor of the porch for peanuts. You couldn't tell whether Cummings or the chipmunk enjoyed the little scene more. They had the same glint in their eyes. They both looked their best.

the sunset tree / tum, tum, tum, and tum again

Above Until now, I hadn't realized that British novelist Samuel Butler (1835-1902), as in Erewhon, was also a capable artist, as confirmed by the self-portrait reproduced here.

•••

Samuel Butler The Way of All Flesh. London: Grant Richards, 1903, pp. 109-110—

In the course of the evening they came into the drawing room, and, as an especial treat, were to sing some of their hymns to me, instead of saying them, so that I might hear how nicely they sang. Ernest was to choose the first hymn, and he chose one about some people who were to come to the sunset tree. I am no botanist, and do not know what kind of tree a sunset tree is, but the words began, ‘‘Come, come, come; come to the sunset tree for the day is past and gone.” The tune was rather pretty and had taken Ernest’s fancy, for he was unusually fond of music and had a sweet little child’s voice which he liked using.

He was, however, very late in being able to sound a hard "c” or “k,” and, instead of saying “Come,” he said ‘Tum, tum, tum.”

"Ernest,” said Theobald, from the arm-chair in front of the fire, where he was sitting with his hands folded before him, “don’t you think it would be very nice if you were to say ‘come’ like other people, instead of ‘tum’?”

"I do say tum,” replied Ernest, meaning that he had said "come.”

Theobald was always in a bad temper on Sunday evening. Whether it is that they are as much bored with the day as their neighbors, or whether they are tired, or whatever the cause may be, clergymen are seldom at their best on Sunday evening; I had already seen signs that evening that my host was cross, and was a little nervous at hearing Ernest say so promptly “I do say tum,” when his papa had said he did not say it as he should.

Theobald noticed the fact that he was being contradicted in a moment. He got up from his armchair and went to the piano.

“No, Ernest, you don’t,” he said, “you say nothing of the kind, you say ‘tum,’ not ‘come.’ Now say ‘come’ after me, as I do.”

“Tum,” said Ernest, at once; “‘is that better?” I have no doubt he thought it was, but it was not.

“Now, Ernest, you are not taking pains: you are not trying as you ought to do. It is high time you learned to say ‘come,’ why, Joey can say ‘come,’ can’t you, Joey?”

“Yeth, I can,” replied Joey, and he said something which was not far off “come.”

“There, Ernest, do you hear that? There’s no difficulty about it, nor shadow of difficulty. Now, take your own time, think about it, and say ‘come’ after me.”

The boy remained silent a few seconds and then said “tum” again.

I laughed, but Theobald turned to me impatiently and said, ‘‘Please do not laugh, Overton; it will make the boy think it does not matter, and it matters a great deal;” then turning to Ernest, he said, “Now, Ernest. I will give you one more chance, and if you don’t say ‘come,’ I shall know that you are self-willed and naughty.”

He looked very angry, and a shade came over Ernest’s face, like that which comes upon the face of a puppy when it is being scolded without understanding why. The child saw well what was coming now, was frightened, and, of course, said ‘tum’ once more.

“Very well, Ernest,” said his father, catching him angrily by the shoulder, “I have done my best to save you, but if you will have it so, you will,” and he lugged the little wretch, crying by anticipation, out of the room. A few minutes more and we could hear screams coming from the dining room, across the hall which separated the drawing room from the dining room, and knew that poor Ernest was being beaten.

“I have sent him up to bed,” said Theobald, as he returned to the drawing room, "and now, Christina, I think we will have the servants in to prayers,” and he rang the bell for them, red-handed as he was.

dumbstruck / a cultural history of ventriloquism

Above The dust jacket of my favorite book about the history of ventriloquism—Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. UK: Oxford University Press, 2001—and below my childhood attempt at the same.

he paced the deck with his bantam swagger…

Digital Montage / Roy R. Behrens © 2012

John Dos Passos, The Best of Times: An Informal Memoir. New York: New American Library, 1966, p. 20—

He was particularly fond of crows. He said their caw-caw was really ha-ha. They were laughing at us. He would dance his little dance and pace the deck of the Gaivota with his bantam swagger and laugh back at the laughing crows: "Ha haha."

more info

cartoonist recalls meeting famous US generals

Sherman montage / © Roy R. Behrens

Walt McDougall, This Is the Life! New York: Alfred Knopf, 1926—

I was born in 1858, in Newark, NJ, and about ten years later the President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, took me in hand and, recognizing qualities not yet discernible by parents, teachers or companions, with one prophetic sentence planted in me a firm, enduring conviction that I was destined for great things, along with a deep-seated aversion for hard work. The exact date of this memorable event may be found by ascertaining just when President Grant drove the famous Dexter around the track at Waverley Fair Grounds, a couple of miles south of Newark.

I was there with about half the boy population, but every incident of the day is forgotten except this historic happening. Loitering back of the judge's stand, a circular structure, the vast crowd blocked my view except aloft to this bird-house wherein I knew the President and a number of notables were watching the races. An enclosed stairway led to the upper platform, supported by a three-inch post, and urged by Destiny and exuberant vitality, I amused myself by climbing up this support. Reaching the platform, I was, of course, checked by the paneled balustrade and slid down, but on a third or fourth attempt I looked up to find a bearded face looking down upon me with kindly amused eyes. A hand was extended to me and raising mine, I was drawn up and lifted over the balustrade.

"You'll get up in the world, my boy!" said the bearded man as he set me down. Every eye in the judge's stand was fixed upon me and I expected an instant expulsion, but a pleasant grin upon the handsome face of Patrick Quinn, the Secretary of the Waverley Association and a friend of my family, gave me some confidence. I stared eagerly about me but saw no face resembling the well-known one of General Grant. After a moment, Congressman Courtland Parker, also a family friend, asked me with a teasing smile: "Who are you looking for, son?"

"Why, I'm looking for General Grant!" I stammered. "I thought he was up here."

What he replied I cannot recall, but there was a general laugh following it, and in my embarrassment I turned about toward my introducer as a refuge. Instantly I recognized the familiar face, but wreathed in a broad smile. The shock was such that I bolted down the stairway, unlatched the door and fled. Before I reached home I was highly exultant, but when I told my story my mother was deeply mortified by such unseemly conduct and insisted that I write the President an apology. Poor mother, with six boys to guide, had none as erratic as I, and she feared that my little adventure would get into the paper, but, unfortunately, it didn't.

One day in '86 I went with James Kelly, the sculptor, to Grant's house in 65th Street to watch him make some sketches for a battle monument he was designing. I asked the General if he remembered driving Dexter at Waverley. He said that he had driven the horse several times but did not recall the name of the place in New Jersey, and he was highly amused when I related how he had uplifted me and given me a slogan to live up to.

•••

Somewhere about the same time as the Waverley incident a great Industrial Exposition, the first of its kind, I think, in our quiet city, was opened at the Washington Street Rink and General William Tecumseh Sherman was the main attraction. An immense throng attended that formed an endless line to shake hands with the hero of the March to the Sea. I remember well the gaunt yet handsome figure he made as he underwent this ordeal. I slipped into the slow-moving line and finally felt the tingling thrill of contact with that smooth but formidable sword-hand. The sensation was delicious, but, not content, I wormed myself into line again and took another electric shock. When I reached him for a third thrill, the General glared down upon me and said gruffly:

"You get out of here! I've shaken hands with you twice already!"

One evening years afterward when I had come to know him, as I shall relate in another place, I told of this incident at a big theatrical banquet. The General wrinkled his brow meditatively for a moment, then smiled and said:

"Why, I remember that little episode very well, but you've got it wrong. Didn't I kick you? Seems to me I did!"

"You did not, General, but I deserved it," I replied. "I suppose it irks you to discover that you neglected an opportunity?"

"Well! Well, I still think I did!" he insisted, grinning. "Anyway, I guess I knocked a lot of conceit out of you!"