The Mystery of Pico Miran … aka Winslow Wilson

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The Art of Winslow Wilson/Pico Miran opened on June 8 at RAA&M and will remain on view until July 8, 2019

by Peter Anastas

Woman with a White Collar (Winslow Wilson)

During the summers of 1956 and ‘57, I had my first job in journalism editing the Cape Ann Summer Sun, a weekly eight-page supplement to the Gloucester Daily Times. Drawn to contemporary art, I often reviewed the shows of the Cape Ann Society of Modern Artists (CASMA), whose gallery was located in the old Red Men’s Hall in Rockport. While covering the exhibitions of what was then considered controversial art (compared to the traditionalism of most Cape Ann painting), I became interested in the work of an artist who called himself Pico Miran. Whenever the occasion arose, I wrote about his paintings, which I felt were uniquely distinct from the rest of the work displayed at CASMA. It turned out that Pico Miran had another name – his real name – Arthur ‘Winslow’ Wilson. A native of Texas, Wilson had been a classmate of poet E. E. Cummings at Harvard in 1911-1915. After college and the war (Wilson served in the Air Force, Cummings drove an ambulance), they moved to Paris in 1923 to paint and then back again to New York, where, for a time, they shared a studio in the Village.

Cummings was one of our finest early Modernist poets, as well as a considerable painter himself. Wilson, who retained a studio in New York and another on Cape Ann, beginning in the 1940s, taught portrait and landscape painting classes at the Rockport Art Association for many years in addition to exhibiting portraits and seascapes at RAA, as well as nationally. Wilson also produced a radically different kind of painting, which – in a catalog for a 1951 exhibition of his work at the American Art Gallery in New York – he called “Post-modern art,” employing a term which the poet Charles Olson brought into currency at the same time. In his catalog essay for the exhibition, Wilson wrote: “The new art will be Gothic American, in the sense that it will brush aside all soft precedent in the whole life span of art, and treat forbidden truth, and be moltenly ductile to the shape of realities never before considered proper for painting.” Wilson showed this highly experimental new work at CASMA, under the name Pico Miran.

At first glance, one might consider the paintings inspired by Surrealism; but Wilson-Miran eschewed the term. “My drawing is straight classical naturalism,” he wrote in a letter to the editor of the Gloucester Times during the summer of 1956, “the very kind that surrealists have violently rejected…. My art has no relation to that of Salvador Dali, whom I knew in Paris.”

Ectoplasmic brain remembering its own skull (Pico Miran)

Wilson liked my attempts to understand his “Pico Miran” paintings and he wrote a further letter to the editor indicating his appreciation. I responded to Wilson’s letter and we exchanged several communications before he invited me to his studio in the Bradford Building on Main Street.   What I discovered was a conventionally dressed older man, with thinning hair and a brown beret. He ushered me into his sparsely furnished two room apartment in an old Gloucester redbrick downtown building that would sadly be demolished after a fire in the early 1960s, a conflagration in which Wilson lost the only copy of an autobiography he had been working on. We sat in a wood-paneled front room. There were no paintings in evidence. He gestured at the door to another room where, he said, he painted. At the time I did not know that Winslow Wilson and Pico Miran were the same person.

As we sat and talked in the room that smelled faintly of turpentine and linseed oil, he told me about his friendship with Cummings, with whom he was still in touch. He asked me if I had read anything by Samuel Beckett and I told him I had read Waiting for Godot and Beckett’s trilogy of novels. Wilson responded that living in the Bradford building among single old men was like inhabiting a Beckett novel or play. He also told me that he had been corresponding for some time with the American philosopher and critic Kenneth Burke, who told Wilson, “You sure can make with the paint!”

Wilson’s conversation was as literate and knowledgeable as his letters. He explained to me that one of the themes that lay behind his paintings was the fear of a nuclear holocaust and its subsequent annihilation of all forms of life. He said it was the reigning anxiety of our age and that Beckett’s novels, written in French during the war, were the primary art of our post-war, post-atomic bomb world, reflected in the title of his painting, Apocalyptic Galaxy with the Little Doors to Nowhere.

Apocalyptic Galaxy with the Little Doors to Nowhere (Pico Miran)

Over the next several years, Wilson and I corresponded. He sent me two books by Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change and Philosophy of Literary Form, which had a significant impact on my thinking about literature. Also during those years, when I was home from college, we would run into each other on the street or at the post office, where Wilson maintained a post office box while continuing to teach at the RAA.

Wilson had moved from the Bradford Building to the bottom floor of a house on Ivy Court near  Fitz Henry Lane house, a house soon to be demolished during urban renewal – what Charles Olson called, “renewal by destruction.” I visited Wilson there several times but was not shown the room in which he painted, and our talk was mostly literary. Wilson was one of the most well-read artists I had met, especially in the avant-garde literature of Europe that I was also immersed in, including the novels and plays of Beckett and the “theater of absurd” plays of Eugene Ionesco, many of whose images would recur in the paintings he showed under the name of Pico Miran.

Before I left for Europe in the fall of 1959, Wilson invited me for lunch at the Gloucester Hotel. I remember that we ordered chicken croquettes, then a staple of New England cooking, and we talked long after our empty plates had been taken away. We did not correspond while I was in Italy; but immediately upon my return I looked him up again, finding him back on Main Street in an apartment located where the present courthouse and police station have since been built. Like the Bradford Building it, too, became a casualty of urban renewal. I often wondered about the effect on Wilson and his art of having repeatedly been forced to leave the spaces where he lived and worked.

During the following years, Wilson seemed to drop out of sight, though I learned that he continued to teach at the RAA and show at The Cape Ann Society of Modern Artists, until the group disbanded sometime in the late 1960s.

There is no doubt in my mind that Wilson is an important American artist. His seascapes and portraits painted under his own name compare with the finest paintings in those genres that have been exhibited on Cape Ann or elsewhere. His paintings done under the name of Pico Miran, as strange and disturbing as they may seem on first viewing, may now more than ever reflect the turbulent times – the Cold War, the nuclear threat, Korea, Vietnam – in which they were first painted, not to speak of their significance for our own age of terror and displacement.

It had long been my hope that Wilson’s work from the entire range of his singular productivity would one day be shown. From when I first encountered his paintings in the 1950s, they stimulated my thinking about the role of art in our understanding of who we are as a people and a species, and also about the remarkable person who created that work. Now, fortunately, through the generosity of the RAA&M and with the support of a committee of friends of Wilson’s legacy, including family members, this has now been made possible.

Old Ocean Was! (Winslow Wilson)

 

 

Peter Anastas, editorial director of Enduring Gloucester, is a Gloucester native and writer. His most recent book, A Walker in the City: Elegy for Gloucester, is a selection from columns that were published in the Gloucester Daily Times.

 

 

 

 

 

PERCUSSION

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Variables  2017             Ed Touchette

percussion from the truck
on the flatiron
call of a gull
over the wall
knee high rubber boots
on the old man
In the parking lot
and on the young mother
who uses them gardening
a fall climbing the rocks
unbalanced by the bag
full of water and clothes
pulled up by a young woman
who says Be Careful
her friend offers a path
No Thanks It’s poison ivy

Melissa de Haan Cummings
6 June 2019

 

Melissa de Haan Cummings majored in French and English Literature at Bryn Mawr. She has published poetry in a number of journals.  She describes her interests as including, “much small boating around Cape Ann, love of Charles Olson, Hatha yoga practice since 1969.”

 

 

Gloucester High School in the Fifties

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Gloucester Gone By © Laszlo Kubinyi

The McCarthy Debate

Peter Anastas           

In the spring of 1953, our Gloucester High School history club held a debate about the anti-communist crusade of Senator Joseph McCarthy. As a sophomore, I had little understanding of politics and I knew less about communism. Yet, I voluntarily argued on the side that favored the junior senator from Wisconsin’s red-baiting tactics.

At the time of the debate Dwight Eisenhower was president, the Cold War heating up. We had recently concluded Harry Truman’s unsatisfactory “police action” in Korea, a prelude to the war in Vietnam, both in terms of the way the war was fought and the manner in which it was sold to the American people. After Korea, the sense of relief and victory that swept through the nation following the Second World War had turned into a mood of defeat, if not outright paranoia, as our leaders pressed upon us the need to combat “the Communist menace,” at home and abroad.

My parents had once voted for FDR, whom my father idolized; but like many immigrant families, who began to prosper in their new country, they were inherently conservative. They favored Eisenhower for president over the urbane and sophisticated Adlai Stevenson, not only because they were enthralled by Eisenhower as the great general and father figure, who had played a major role in winning the war for us, but also because they didn’t want to seem out of the mainstream of this new American life they believed had been good to them.

Peter and parents

Eisenhower was the hero in our family, as he was in many middle-and working-class homes. But McCarthy was a different phenomenon. You couldn’t turn the TV on without seeing his scowling face and slicked back hair, his snarling insistence on “point of order” in any congressional debate or committee hearing.

Although the upstart senator soon proved to be a drunken bully, many Americans of goodwill fell for his anti-communist crusade, as McCarthy attempted to “rout out” putative communists and “communist sympathizers” in the government, feeding a national hysteria, during the course of which teachers, who were thought to have held “subversive” opinions, or to have been “card carrying” members of the Communist Party, or even “fellow travelers,” were driven from their jobs, while Hollywood instituted its infamous Black List, under which many actors, writers and film professionals, who were believed to have had a left-wing history, were prevented from working in the industry.

One of the ways this hysteria played out in small towns like Gloucester was that our parents would constantly be asking us if we had any teachers we thought might be communists. They demanded to know what we were being taught and, especially, if our teachers expressed any “extreme” or “radical” opinions, which they might be trying to impress on their students.

Anti-communism was in the air when I was fifteen years old and McCarthy had not yet taken on the Army and been silenced, if not humiliated, by their attorney Joseph Welch during a famous exchange in which Welch commented, “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or recklessness…You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn

That hearing concluded on June 30, 1954, after which the country, having tolerated McCarthy’s scurrilous behavior on TV for several years, began decisively to turn against him. On December 2, 1954, the senate voted to censure McCarthy, effectively terminating his influence and his career.

All this happened after our history club debate, so that when the debate occurred McCarthy was still a powerful figure, at least in the popular mind. Among many other students, our classmate Bob Stephenson was known for his anti-communism. Bob’s father had been a member of the diplomatic corps. After his death, Bob’s mother, whose family had been lighthouse keepers along the New England coast, brought Bob and his brother home to Gloucester. The Stephenson’s lived in a small, yellow 19th century house on Mansfield Street, with a green picket fence and an ample backyard. Over their front door was a green-painted sign in the form of a metal circle around the inside of which were positioned three legs. Bob described it to us as being a “triskelion,” the official symbol of the Isle of Man, having its origins in Medieval Sicily.

His parents had obtained it while vacationing on the British island. It became one of many artifacts his mother showed Bob’s friends when they visited, including beautifully woven red and white striped Central American serapes and a gourd with a silver straw from which yerba mate tea was sipped in Paraguay, where Bob’s father had once been stationed. These artifacts, along with a number of landscape paintings and photographs of places where the family had traveled during Bob’s father’s postings, lent an exotic atmosphere to Bob’s house.

Bob’s mother Cora was a woman of strong opinions to whom my mother deferred because, as she’d say, “the Stephenson’s have traveled a great deal.” She disliked Democrats, even finding Eisenhower too liberal, and would be constantly on guard lest her two sons be indoctrinated by what she called “free-thinking teachers.”

Bob echoed his mother’s views, along with his own brand of subtle but extremely mordant humor, while his quiet brother chose the sea as his calling. It would be convenient to claim Bob’s influence in my choice of sides in the McCarthy debate; but in reality I came to my own decision about McCarthy, having discovered a book in pulp format among the magazines on my father’s newsstand. It was McCarthyism: The Fight for America, published in 1952 by Devin Adair and written by none other than the senator himself.

No McCarthyite, my father offered me the book to read, when he saw me flipping through the cheaply printed edition. I took it upstairs to my room and by the end of a summer afternoon I had read all of its 101 pages, interspersed with grainy newspaper photographs of the senator in his characteristic stance, before a microphone, a sheaf of papers in his left hand, presumably containing the names of the requisite number of communists he had lately discovered to be in the employ of some department of the United States government. The numbers seemed to change from week to week, if not daily.

However, it wasn’t the numbers that attracted me to McCarthy’s crusade; and it certainly wasn’t the man himself in his oily, rumpled-suited presence. It was the stories the book contained, stories of how the American Communist Party, under the alleged control of Soviet Russia, had “infiltrated” every level of national life. This was also the era of the televised Cold War anti-communist series “I Led Three Lives,” the presumed story of Herbert Philbrick, who by day was an advertising executive in Boston, while by night he doubled as an undercover agent and a counter-spy.

Philbrick had infiltrated the American Communist Party on behalf of the FBI in the 1940s and written a bestselling book on the topic— I Led Three Lives: Citizen, ‘Communist’, Counterspy (1952). The series premiered in 1952, a year before I read McCarthy’s book, which influenced the stand I took in our history club debate. So for me there was a certain amount of intrigue in the drama of those who operated secretly, both on behalf of democracy, as I then believed, and against what I also assumed to be the dangers of communism.

I didn’t know a great deal about McCarthy as I entered the debate, and I understood far less about Marxism (it wasn’t until a year later that I read The Communist Manifesto and found it compelling, as workers were exhorted to throw off their chains and transform the world). Before the debate, my head was filled with slogans and with arguments I’d heard from Bob and his mother. As for myself, I couldn’t even define “totalitarianism.”

None the less, Bob and I volunteered to present the case for McCarthy. Our opponents were Laszlo Kubinyi and Bruno Modica. Laszlo’s parents were ceramic artists, who owned a gallery at the opposite end of Rocky Neck from Dad’s luncheonette.  While the Kubinyis had lived for some years in Gloucester, Bruno and his family had recently arrived from Genoa. His father was an engineer in a fish processing plant on the waterfront, and his mother, once Bruno and his sister had gone off to college, began to teach Italian at the high school’s adult education center. Laszlo played drums, and Bruno, like most young Italians I would come to meet nearly a decade later, had a passion for current events, especially for politics.

 

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All four of us sat at a long table in front of the history classroom in which the club met monthly. The debate was monitored by the club’s president, Lincoln Higgins. Our faculty advisor, the department chair, Miss Hammond, stood by to see that we all observed the proper debating procedure.

I was wearing a gray tweed sport jacket, a starched white dress shirt and one of my father’s Haband neckties; Bob was dressed similarly, except that he favored a maroon corduroy jacket. Bruno, whose coal black hair was always beautifully cut, wore tailored Italian suits that we would die to have owned, while Laszlo, though he obeyed the dress code of jacket, tie and slacks for boys, wore his hair longer than most of the boys, even those who slicked theirs back into DAs.

The question up for debate was whether McCarthy’s tactics were acceptable and whether or not they served the purpose of exposing those who were thought to be a menace to American democracy. Bob and I argued in favor, while Bruno and Laszlo argued against us. They were far better prepared than we were, and they argued more soundly. As the debate progressed, I knew that Bob and I had lost because we really didn’t put forth cogent arguments based on carefully articulated critical distinctions. Instead, we relied on exactly the kinds of pat slogans, clichés and emotional outbursts that the McCarthyites employed—“Well, how do we defend ourselves against those for whom everything is a means to an end?” “Would you like to wake up one morning and find the country taken over by communists?”

In contrast, Bruno and Laszlo quoted from magazine and newspaper articles and editorials, and from the testimony of those who had suffered under McCarthy. They recounted the story of Owen Lattimore, a leading American scholar of Asia, who had been slandered as a “top Russian spy” by McCarthy; and they described Richard Nixon’s attack on congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, against whom Nixon ran for the senate in California, calling her “The Pink Lady” for her supposed communist friends and supporters. They spoke eloquently about First Amendment Rights, about free speech and freedom of association. They particularly stressed that, as of the moment of our debate, not a single one of McCarthy’s allegations had been found to have substance.

But when it came time for the club members to vote on which side had prevailed, the students overwhelmingly chose Bob and me. Once the debate was over, I knew I’d been mistaken in taking McCarthy’s side. My position in the debate and the club’s vote against Laszlo and Bruno created a chill in our friendships. Miss Hammond said nothing; but when I later studied American history with her, I could tell from her teaching and the texts she selected for us to read that she was no right-winger.

Graduating from high school, Bob studied art in Boston before initiating a career in military intelligence that took him over most of the world. He mastered several languages, including German and Arabic, returning to Gloucester after his retirement to resume work as an artist in a Zen-like studio just off Main Street, overlooking the harbor.  His magic-realist paintings of the city and the waterfront seemed to incorporate the imagery of the cultures he’d come to know intimately.

 

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He never lost his fine sense of humor, which, if anything, had become darker over the years. Nor had his politics changed—he once visited me in Florence, claiming to friends back home that he’d come to save me from Italian communism.

Peter and Bob in Florence.  1959

Bruno went to Brown University, after which he entered the world of international business, serving in executive capacities for multinational corporations in Italy, France and Belgium. Laszlo played drums in my brother Tom’s big band during their final years of high school, and later in New York. Tom and I were invited to some lively parties in the rambling family house near Cressey’s Beach, gatherings at which Laszlo’s parents danced Hungarian folk dances and served delicious food.   After high school Laszlo attended the Museum School in Boston, followed by a career as a prolific illustrator, artist and author of children’s books.

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As for me, I became an activist in the 1960s, while the war in Vietnam raged—going to teach-ins with my students and attending anti-war demonstrations. In a word, everything that McCarthy would have abjured.

In Memoriam

Bruno Modica passed away on Tuesday, December, 11, 2012, in Sun City Center, FL. from complications of Parkinson’s disease.  Bob Stephenson died on Sunday, August 9, 2015, in Seacoast Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, Gloucester, after a brief illness.

(This is a chapter from Peter Anastas’ recently completed memoir, From Gloucester Out.)

 

Peter Anastas, editorial director of Enduring Gloucester, is a Gloucester native and writer. His most recent book, A Walker in the City: Elegy for Gloucester, is a selection from columns that were published in the Gloucester Daily Times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

John Wieners in Gloucester

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Spring. 1996   Albert Alcalay (1917-2008)

Reading in Bed

by evening light, at the window, where wind blows
it’s not enough to wake with morning 
as a child, the insistent urge of habit

sounds, to write a poem, to pore over one’s past 
recall ultimate orders one has since doubted
in despair. Inner reality returns 

of moonlight over water at Gloucester, as
fine a harbor as the Adriatic, Charles said, before the big storm 
blew up to land moorings, shards against sand 

of memory at midnight; ah yes the dream begins
of lips pressed against yours over waves, tides,
hour-long auto rides into dawn, when time

pounds a mystery on the beach, to no death out of reach .

January 9, 1970
                                      John Wieners

Moonlight. 1874  Winslow Homer (1836-1910)

John Wieners (1934-2002)

John Wieners, born in Milton MA, was a Beat poet and member of the San Francisco Renaissance. He earned a BA from Boston College and studied at Black Mountain College with Charles Olson, who remained a life-long mentor. Wieners often visited Olson in Gloucester, and for a period of time he lived on Dennison Street, at the edge of Dogtown.

Wieners’ honors include awards from the Poets Foundation, the New Hope Foundation, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, as well as a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. For the last 30 years of his life he lived at 44 Joy Street, on Beacon Hill, in Boston. Supplication: The Selected Poems of John Wieners, was published in October, 2015.  This poem was written on the day before Charles Olson died at New York Hospital from liver cancer.

 

 

 

When Artwork Whispers: Cape Ann’s Creative Heritage

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Summer, Marine Railways.    Nell Blaine (1922-1996)

by Holly Clay

You could say our geographical roots are showing at Cape Ann Collectors (CAC), a recently opened art gallery at 474 Washington Street in Gloucester. The pieces on display celebrate the best of the island’s oeuvre, and do so comprehensively.

For starters, the gallery features works by artists who contributed to exhibits at Gallery-on-the-Moors on Ledge Road, in East Gloucester, (1916-1922), the first local venue to show Cape Ann artists’ works. Prominent artists such as William Meyerowitz, John Sloan, Stuart Davis and Frank Duveneck were featured.  Founders William and Emmeline Atwood hired architect Ralph Adams Cram to design the building, which, like the exhibiting artists’ reputations, still stands.

Atwood’s ‘Gallery on the Moors’

CAC dedicates itself to acquiring, displaying and making available these once-upon-a-time trend-setters. Among a host of other Cape Ann masters, CAC has presented works by painters who showed at the premiere exhibit at Gallery-on-the-Moor, in 1916, including: Theresa Bernstein (1890-2002); Hayley Lever (1876-1958); Jane Peterson (1876-1965); Ethel Louise Paddock (1887-1975); and Child Hassam (1859-1935).

Janet Ware, Ann Mechem Ziergiebel and Molly Ziergiebel Anderson launched CAC collaboratively, with an eye to past masters. Just like the art they promote, the three CAC principals have deep roots on Cape Ann

Molly Ziergiebel

“It is a perfect storm of us three,” says Ann. “Each of us has another full-time career.”

And, each woman is an artist in her own right, with an abiding and passionate interest in others’ work. Perhaps it’s appropriate that the new gallery is owned and managed by women. Half of the artists represented at CAC are women.   In keeping with the pioneering tradition of women in the arts on Cape Ann, CAC has featured Teresa Bernstein and Ethel Louise Paddock, who were muses for each other and participants in the early feminist movement.  CAC has also shown art by Virginia Gruppe, the lesser-known sister of Emil Gruppe, and by Nell Blaine, who was an established painter in New York before coming to Gloucester.

The gallery equally reflects the proprietors’ Gloucester and Rockport experiences. Janet, the director, has collected local art for decades, while owner Ann, grew up in a family deeply immersed in the fine arts. The same might be said for gallery manager, Ann’s daughter Molly. On a professional basis, Molly has run art galleries in the greater New England area. But as far as inspiration is concerned, daughter, like mother, can look to a long, arts-imbued line of ancestors.

Ann Ziergiebel & Janet Ware holding works by Teresa Bernstein and Ethel Louise Paddock.

Ann’s grandfather and Molly’s great grandfather, Frederick H. Norton, taught at MIT. A ceramicist and ultimately professor emeritus of ceramics, he developed a superior terra cotta clay in the mid-20th century. Walker Hancock and George Demetrios, Norton’s neighbors and sculptors-in-arms, tried and tested the product.

The two “coveted” the material, says Ann. “It had unique qualities of elasticity, allowing for multiple castings.”

In addition, Norton’s sisters and Norton himself were artistically inclined, Ann says: “My grandfather regularly hosted portrait and figure study sessions at his cathedral-like studio on Revere Street, in the Lanesville Wood. These were attended by many prominent Lanesville artists of the time including Hancock, Demetrios, and Virginia Lee Burton. Peggy and Dorothy Norton were acclaimed members of the renowned Folly Cove Designers.”

Ann, Janet and Molly didn’t start out to assemble a collection of Cape Ann masters, or any other kind of collection, for that matter.

“We didn’t think it (Ann’s house) would be a gallery,” Ann says.

However, three pieces of artwork emerged on their immediate horizon: two Walker Hancock basketball player sculptures and a George Demetrius’ drawing (pencil on paper). If one were to count, crafted by her grandfather, there were four pieces. These acted as a catalyst for a reaction the three didn’t expect.

The sculpted head of 12-year-old Ann Norton Mechem (Ann Ziergiebel).

“The gallery started as a ‘salon.’” Ann and Janet say: “We placed items together [in a sitting room on the ground floor). There’s lots of light. Dusk is beautiful, the sunsets, too. It’s on the water. All the key elements are here.”

The space became a metaphor for a collection of works depicting sea-drenched Cape Ann. It mirrors the history of the arts on Cape Ann and the community of artists.

“We found ourselves drawn to bring the most historically and artistically significant works from Cape Ann into this space,” says Ann.

Ann, Janet and Molly write: “Cape Ann has been home (and second or third home) to thousands of talented artists over centuries. While we find inspiration in almost all of them, our collection focuses on the artists who have made the most significant lasting contributions to the Cape Ann artistic legacy.”

“There’s no reason why anyone cannot own extraordinary art,” Janet and Ann claim.

According to Ann and Janet, their aim is to acquire “undervalued or underestimated art, pieces that have been over looked or misinterpreted… The ‘Movalli’ we have is a good example of this,” they explain.

Lobster Cove, Annisquam.    Charles Movalli (1945–2016)

CAC had Movalli’s oil painting completely restored. The gallery offers Movalli’s Lobster Cove, Annisquam for a respectfully moderate price, in keeping with their mission to encourage viewers and buyers from all socio-economic backgrounds, and most especially those with limited resources. Thus, at CAC works range from an affordable hundred dollars up to just a high of ten thousand dollars.

Their approach is calculated to keep the costs down. To begin with, CAC finds and displays underrated works of Cape Ann masters. Then, in addition, the gallery’s proprietors have unusual control. CAC owns every piece offered for sale.

“We bring back these treasures responsibly,” says Ann.

They make an investment in refinishing and reframing, replacing old mats with archival ones, and using museum glass to protect framed pieces. The expenditure affects the quality of a piece more than it does the price tag. Thus, they keep a lid on prices while simultaneously maintaining high standards.

In the three years since CAC’s founding, the gallery and its overseers have evolved. The three talk extensively when exploring acquisition of a piece. As a consequence, the gallery’s three rooms currently house 51 pieces by 23 different artists.

Mystery Ship.    Artist unknown.

“Molly is the ‘acquisition genius,’” say Janet and Ann. “She works with a network of dealers, collectors, and galleries that know what we are looking for. In addition, a lot of pieces come over the transom by word of mouth or from private collections.”

A number of the works that have found their way to the gallery were lost . “The art objects are ‘lost and found.’ It’s like other processes, like grief is loss,” Ann says. “Molly usually runs across these ‘lost’ objects.” Ann and Janet join her in assessing them.”

For example, they found the George Demetrios drawing, the Hancock bronze sculptures, and the sculpted head of a girl, Ann, in the studio at the Norton Farm. Following a path that unearths a consequential find in the wake of loss, bestows a buoyant feeling of discovery, the owners say

“It makes us grateful. We’re grateful for the community heritage,” Ann adds.

Nude.    George Demetrios (1896-1974)

The “lost to found” process has reaped a visual and historic feast of rewards. In addition to the artists already mentioned, CAC has featured works by Charles Allan Grafly (1862-1929) and Anna Vaugh Hyatt [Huntington](1876-1973), renowned sculptors, displayed in 1916 at Gallery-on-the-Moors. So have pieces by Frederick Mulhaupt (1872-1938) and J. Eliot Enneking (1881-1942), whose works were also displayed at Gallery-on-the-Moors in 1917 and 1918, respectively. Further, in 1919, Gallery-on-the-Moors featured William Meyerowitz (1887-1981). Two of his etchings are currently shown at CAC.

Then, as now, Cape Ann brewed a dynamic mix of artists and styles. Beyond the generalized appeal of sculptures and images that represent Cape Ann’s familiar scenes in tantalizing ways, Cape Ann’s “legacy of egalitarianism” stands out prominently in its arts community. Firstly, women were accepted into the ranks of working artists on Cape Ann. But also, personalized expression and innovation were encouraged. Thus, style-wise, the visitor finds everything at Cape Ann Collectors: expressionism, modernism, realism, as well as lithographs, etchings, watercolors, and sculptures. The artists herald from both national and international backgrounds,

Sky Hook.    Walker Hancock (1901-1998)

Mulhaupt and John Henry Twachtman (1853-1902), ostensibly the two most famous artists whose works appear at CAC, experimented stylistically and technically, as did many of the others whom CAC collects. Emile Gruppe (1896-1978), whose paintings have been known to grace CAC walls, went through a number of stylistic periods, as did Virginia.

In some cases the artists worked in multiple genres, and CAC offers these for viewing.

“We have six of Nell Blaine’s pieces, silk screens, water colors, prints and drawings,” Janet says. “The breadth of Nell Blaine’s (1922-1996) oeuvre: silkscreens, lithographs, water colors, brightly colored oils and prints has been an inspiration.”

“We have Hayley [Lever] (1875-1958) represented in oil, water color, etching, and ink and crayon,” she adds.

Sunset, Niles Beach.    Hayley Lever (1876 -1958)

Ann says having examples of artists’ work in multiple media allows “a comprehensive look at each artist. It draws people to see how the artist grew in her or his passion for work.”

The artists’ products evoke their life stories, compelling fodder for the viewing public. If one looks closely, and in an analytical way, which the gallery owners encourage, “the connection between the story and what inspired the work of art” become clear.

In order to foment a stronger connection between viewer and artist, CAC emphasizes relaxed open houses and socializing, a salon atmosphere in a home. Pieces become “animated” in the rooms of a house, the gallery owners believe.

Ann says, “The key is we want people to celebrate with us the deep historic and artistic roots on Cape Ann.

“When you love Cape Ann landscapes, people want to share. We want people to join us in investigating the settings.

“We only sell a piece of art to a customer if everybody thinks it’s a perfect match. We say ‘take it home, see if it works. Keep it for a while. See how it feels.’”

And if you’re inclined towards the deep reservoir of artistic output on Cape Ann and the masters who created, experimented and breathed the sea-infused air here, feel free to take a step back in time at CAC. Explore the roots.

As Ann and Janet say, “this caliber of art can be in anyone’s home.”

CAC showcases pieces of art at regularly scheduled viewings that are open to the public. The “soft opening” was held in June 2016. Among these events have been: Palette to Palate: The Pairing of art and Wine, Modernism on Cape Ann, Among Our Piers: Views from the Docks of Cape Ann.

Cape Ann Collectors

 The next Open Hours will be Saturday, April 27, from 3-7pm. That will be followed by another themed show the last week of June. CAC is always open by appointment. Call: 978.430.0414.

 The April event, “Wet-on-Wet: Watercolors of Cape Ann,” is based on recent acquisitions. The exhibit will also include works in multiple mediums previously acquired for display and sale.

 

Holly Clay is settled in Gloucester after many years of living overseas and in Washington, D.C. Holly is a member of the Gloucester Historical Commission and the Annisquam Historical Society.  With a background in education and writing, her professional energies are currently devoted to studying and teaching yoga and meditation.

 

Stamford ’76: A True Story of Murder, Corruption, Race and Feminism in the 1970s, by JoeAnn Hart (U. of Iowa Press, 2019)

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Peter Anastas

New England Tragedy. 1934 Umberto Romano (1906-1982) Courtesy Cape Ann Museum

 

“A black drug dealer almost certainly killed his white girlfriend, then got killed himself by a police officer during an armed robbery.  What could I possibly hope to accomplish by writing that story?  Nothing. I had to shape meaning out of what seemed be to meaningless violence.”

–JoeAnn Hart, Stamford ‘76

 

Among a writer’s books there are those that come to us naturally.  But almost always there is another kind of book. It is not the book we write, but the book that writes us.  We may be at the keyboard or with pen in hand, but there is another force driving us to put down words on a page. It may be a voice from the past urging us on, or the pressure of a traumatic event, the outlines of which are still unclear.  It may be a story we have long wanted to tell, if only we could find a way to tell it, or we could discover certain details that have remained hidden or even unknown to us.

When we do tell this story, we often discover that it is a story as much about ourselves as its elusive subject or characters.   Often we find out that we are trying to learn more about who we were at the time of the story and, as a consequence of the telling, who we are now—who we have become.   Hence, we are written as we write.

This is one of the themes of Gloucester writer JoeAnn Hart’s stunning new book, Stamford ’76, published in April by the University of Iowa Press.

It is a book that works on many levels.  As memoir, Hart is writing about herself and her nuclear family in the context of an interracial relationship she embarked on after dropping out of college in 1975, at the age of 18, and moving to Stamford, Connecticut, where she found work in bars and restaurants, and eventually in a bank.

Stamford ’76 can also be read as a true crime story.  Hart and her black lover, Joe Louis, were friends with another interracial couple, both of whom died violent deaths.  The white woman, 24 year old Margo Olson, was found in a shallow grave in an abandoned potter’s field in Stamford, her heart pierced by a steel arrowhead.  Her partner Howie, who may have killed her, died at the hands of police during a botched liquor store robbery.  The circumstances of their deaths remained a mystery that haunted Hart for decades.

As Hart writes: “Leaving behind the memory of Margo had meant forgetting parts of myself, and I needed that eighteen-year-old by my side as I faced the challenge of getting three children through their teenage years.  I wanted to gain some wisdom from that girl, who was both reckless and brave to a fault, and to do that I had to open the box marked Fragile.”

“In that box,” Hart continues, “nestled along with all my stored emotion, was a three-pronged mission, (1) figure out what had happened to Margo, (2), remember what had been going on with me, and (3) try to understand why her death made me so wary, for so long.”

This, then, is the thrust of a narrative that is as revealing as it is riveting.  It is here that Hart employs her superb investigative skills in attempting to solve the question of Margo’s death as a “study in silence,” and the abandonment of her body in a makeshift grave.  Here, also, she uncovers the couples’ entanglement with drug dealing and organized crime. Equally, Hart unearths a parallel story whose outlines were unclear to her at the time of her involvement with Margo and Howie.  And that is the story of the growing presence of organized crime in Stamford, aided and abetted by the local Democratic Party establishment and the participation in criminal activities of certain key members of the Stamford police force, including the drug trafficking that led to the deaths of Margo and Howie.

Having published two novels (Addled, 2007, and Float, 2013), along with numerous essays, short stories, and works of journalism, Hart is an accomplished writer of fiction and non-fiction. Everywhere in the narrative one experiences Hart’s novelist’s eye for detail, which helps to give the book its powerful sense of immediacy.

Hart’s story also has social and political implications.  At the time of the events described (and during the country’s Bi-Centennial Celebrations), Stamford was undergoing extensive Urban Renewal, so that the city could lure major corporations out of the nearby crumbling New York City.  In order to achieve this, blacks and other minorities had to be pushed out of neighborhoods that had long been theirs to make way for the high tax payers.  As a consequence, race relations, strained during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, worsened, housing problems escalated, and Stamford became a more problematic city to live and work in, as it turned “whiter by the hour,” as Hart describes it.

Some of this Hart learned while living and working in the city and involved with Joe Louis, his family, and his friends, including Howie and Margo.  There is a particularly affecting picture of Joe’s jazz and gospel singer mother Georgia, with whom Hart remained close even after Joe’s death.  Though Joe had graduated from Columbia, much of his income came from gambling, drug dealing and flipping used cars.  He also ran unsuccessfully for public office.  As a consequence, Hart’s paychecks kept their often unstable living situations afloat.  Joe also became an increasingly heavy drinker.  A significant part of the narrative involves Hart’s attempts to come into her own as a person and a woman under the aegis of second-wave feminism, while trying to remain in a committed relationship.  Though Joe did not readily speak about it, the couple remained haunted by the deaths of Howie and Margo.

After the couple finally separated and Hart was living in Colorado, about to meet the man she eventually married, the story of Margo and Howie continued to affect her.   Her search for clues about their deaths, particularly Margo’s, as Hart traveled back to Stamford during the intervening years, searching through police records and the archives of the Stamford Advocate, tracking down people to speak with, and eventually writing about the case and her life in Stamford, constitutes one of the most dramatic dimensions of a book that will keep readers in suspense.

In the end, after all of her careful research and brilliant detective work, Hart returns to the potter’s field where Margo’s body had been found by picnickers.  It is there that she finally experiences a sense of closure.

“I had found Margo and with her, my younger self,” Hart concludes.  But in the process of this act of recovery, readers have shared the journey of a writer, who is as unrelenting in her pursuit of self-knowledge as she is redemptive of her lost friends, who, in part, enabled that important discovery.

_______________

JoeAnn Hart will be reading locally from Stamford ’76 at the Gloucester Lyceum, on April 18, from 7 to 9 p.m. and at the Gloucester Writers Center (Rocky Neck Cultural Center), on May 22, from 7:30 to 9 p.m. with discussion to follow.

 

Peter Anastas, editorial director of Enduring Gloucester, is a Gloucester native and writer. His most recent book, A Walker in the City: Elegy for Gloucester, is a selection from columns that were published in the Gloucester Daily Times.

A Round of Robins

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A Round of Robins

 

 

 

by Eric Schoonover

 

The snow from the last of the storms
melts into rivers that run down
the steps and a round of robins
jump and flutter ahead of me

in the evening’s blue snow. Six
of them, or maybe more, hop then
flutter, but the failing light won’t
tell me gender. They lead my way,

up those fifty-seven steps, to a
warmer time when snow drops
rouse and hopes enlarge to
greet a spring of warmth and light.

NOTE: There is no agreed upon collective noun
for robins: there are at least fifteen candidates, but
a round of robins seems to be the favorite.

 

Eric Schoonover is a writer living in Gloucester.
“fifty-seven steps” alludes to the staircase
leading from Spring St. up to Winchester Ct.

Former T. S. Eliot East Gloucester Summer Home Given New Life

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By Holly Clay

TS Eliot’s Boyhood Summer Home       © 2019 Bing

We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.—T. S. Eliot

Several times during the years after poet and Nobel Laureate T.S. Eliot married his second wife Valerie Fletcher, in 1956, they made the trip across the Atlantic from London to Eliot’s family house, high above Niles Beach in East Gloucester.  The old summer house on Edgemoore Road had been sold decades before, but Eliot liked paying the house and its new occupants, Mr. and Mrs. John Cahill, a visit. The Cahills recalled the famous poet’s presence while pointing out the room that had once been his. It was the smallest because he was the youngest of six. They also remembered tears in the poet’s eyes as he made his way through its rooms. Each visit brought him down a memory lane flooded with feeling.

Clare Reihill, an Eliot Foundation trustee, says, “Valerie said the home in Gloucester, was the only place he’d ever experienced pure happiness.”

In 1965, after Eliot’s death, Valerie, then 37, became Eliot’s Literary Executrix, dedicating her life to looking after his legacy.  She worked with Faber and Faber, the London publishing house aligned with the estate, where Eliot had been a director. While at Faber he founded and edited the prestigious literary journal Criterion, (1922-1939).

After Valerie’s death, Reihill and her co-trustee Judith Hooper found a letter, the contents of which came as a revelation.

“Valerie wanted to buy the Eliot house,” Reihill said.  “It had come up for sale in 1965 or 1966. She wrote to her mother, ‘I wonder if I should buy it because he loved it so much.’”

“The letter was such a wonderful thing to discover,” Reihill, said, “a blessing beyond the grave. The connection was so strong, Valerie thought acquiring the house would be consoling for her.”

But Valerie didn’t buy the house. Its $65,000 price tag would have strained her budget. As a consequence, the ties with the United States grew looser.

During his youth, T. S. Eliot and his family divided their time between St. Louis in the Midwest, and Gloucester in New England. Both places abided in Eliot’s psyche, as they did in his writing.

Eliot once commented, “In New England I miss the long dark river, the ailanthus trees, the flaming cardinal birds, the high limestone bluffs where we searched for fossil-shell fish; in Missouri I missed the fir trees, the bay, and the goldenrod, the song-sparrows, the red granite and the blue sea of Massachusetts.”

Reihill says: “Gloucester had a profound influence on Eliot. The place was enormously important to his poetry. His sisters were married here. There was a piece of Eliot’s heart here.”

Gloucester images not only enriched his writing but also “shaped him as a poet,” writes Robert Crawford, author of Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land (2016).

“Indeed, maritime images rooted in Gloucester reverberate throughout Eliot’s work,” Crawford writes, “whether it’s ‘the hand expert with sail and oar’ from The Waste Land or ‘the ragged rock in the restless waters’ and ‘the sea is all about us’ in The Dry Salvages, a poem that is itself named for a group of rocks off Cape Ann.

“In Cape Ann,” Crawford continues, “Eliot lists many of the region’s birds — the ‘Swamp-sparrow, fox-sparrow, vesper-sparrow,’ and the house itself even makes an appearance in Ash-Wednesday: ‘From the wide window towards the granite shore/The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying/Unbroken wings.’”

An acute awareness of his New England ancestry informed Eliot’s thought as well.  He once said, “My family was New Englanders…The family guarded jealously its connection with New England…”

And, so, the Eliots returned here, having chosen Gloucester as their summer residence. Initially, they stayed at the nearby Hawthorne Inn. In time, plans took shape for a home, the brainchild of Eliot’s father Henry Ware Eliot (1843-1919). The East Gloucester house at 18 Edgemoor Road, “the Downs,” as the family named it, was completed in 1896. Eliot would have been an impressionable seven or eight years of age.

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For the next almost 20 years he would reside here in summers, even “coming up” during his Harvard years. Then came the break. He visited only once between the time of his permanent move to England in 1914 and his father’s death in 1919.  The house was sold. Eliot’s mother Charlotte Champe Stearns (1843-1929) said she could no longer afford the upkeep. She was deeply saddened by the loss.

Reihill says, “She was pained” about selling the home, which has since had a number of owners, including the T.S. Eliot Foundation since 2015.

Hooper says, “So now is the fulfillment of a dream,” a dream held by Eliot’s widow and perhaps by Eliot himself.

The acquisition and rehabilitation process is a story in itself.

Hooper and Reihill say it was a “shock” to learn the house was for sale. “Someone sent us the link, ‘T.S. Eliot Summer House for Sale.’  We knew of its existence, but we thought it had been destroyed long ago. It was irresistible because we wanted to forge a new connection with America, a link.

“Sales of Eliot’s works had been lower here in the U.S.  His poems, plays, and essays are not on syllabi to the same extent they are in England. He’s a slightly forgotten, slightly problematic figure in America. We’re interested in rehabilitating his reputation and establishing the fact he belonged here.”

Hooper handled the business and legalities of buying the property, as well as overseeing renovations and upgrades.

She says, “The Foundation bought it to be a retreat for writers who could do everything Eliot could do, the full range of craft: essayists, poets, playwrights, critics, editors. The restoration had to do with making it fit a group who weren’t a family. This is a long term thing for us.”

Hooper says, “It was with warmth, the way we were accepted. Anything to do with T.S. Eliot, well, people have been helpful and interested.  People here are proud of the connection. I felt welcome, personally, so I want this house to work all the more. Fiona Atkinson, the decorator, and I spent Thanksgiving here with Dana Hawkes, the previous owner and now Director of the Eliot House in Gloucester. Then, I was here for Christmas with my family, before we got going on construction projects. It’s a strange thing to say, but it feels like coming home.”

The Foundation undertook renovations designed to make the house last another 100 years as a destination for writers.  The garage extension was converted into a handicap-accessible bedroom and bath, the other baths in the house were upgraded; the house was totally rewired and the interior freshly re-painted.

They worked with local people, for the most part.

Hooper says, “I didn’t realize that ‘local’ meant Gloucester. We actually began by finding professionals over the bridge. That’s a million miles away, I realized, even though it’s only 40 minutes.”

Once she realized how locals define “local,” she tried to contract on Cape Ann or at least nearby. “Fiona, the decorator, shopped in Gloucester, Essex, and Ipswich buying things from antique shops, and dare I say, ‘junk shops.’ We also bought a lot of Dana’s pieces. The sofa in the drawing room was Dana’s.  And, all the rugs.”

As a writers’ retreat, “the Downs” constitutes a perfect adaptive re-use for the once-upon-a-time home of a world-celebrated Nobel Laureate. Residents stay an average of two weeks at a time. They work in a variety of genres. The Foundation directors vet applications for residency.

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The Eliot House has been accepting writers in residence since 2016. They can accommodate five people and can just fit in a sixth. The foundation supports the whole effort. Hawkes even prepares dinner for the guests.

Hawkes writes, “Last year we had 22 writers residing at the house. The house is open from April to October and is closed during the winter months for now.

“We have had many inquiries about the residencies through word of mouth from those who have stayed with us, along with winners of the Chapbook Award from the Poetry Society of America and the annual Fellowship Prize of the Academy of American Poets. Most of the writers are from the US.

“We have an annual poetry reading to launch the opening of the season’s residency. We also are investigating the idea of having a T.S. Eliot Festival in the foreseeable future.”

Ocean Vuong, recipient of the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize for his poetry, reads at the Eliot House in the Spring of 2018.

In addition, the Foundation considers “the Downs” to be part of the Gloucester community. As such, Reihill and Hooper would like to see programs developed on the local front.

Hawkes comments: “We would very much like to do something with the local schools. I have made some inquiries with regards to this and the idea is at its infancy – a work in progress. If something is to be done, probably not until 2020.”

Notes:

Thomas Stearns Eliot lived from 1888 to1965. At 25, in 1914, he left the U.S. permanently. In 1927, Eliot became a British citizen, formally relinquishing his U.S. citizenship. He received the Nobel Prize for literature posthumously in 1948.

Judith Hooper and Clare Reihill serve as Trustees of the London-based Eliot Foundation, which maintains close ties with Faber and Faber. Dana Hawkes is the Gloucester-based Director of the Eliot House.

 

Holly Clay is settled in Gloucester after many years of living overseas and in Washington, D.C. Holly is a member of the Gloucester Historical Commission and the Annisquam Historical Society.  With a background in education and writing, her professional energies are currently devoted to studying and teaching yoga and meditation.

 

Grateful in Glo, 01930

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Thanksgiving © 2013 Elynn Kröger

Five years ago today, I was driving to Mass General Hospital with my parents. This plan had been in the works for over a month. I was going to have a full​ ​thyroidectomy​ whereby my superman, Dr. Richard Hodin, would remove any cancerous lymph nodes that he found upon opening me up. I still remember sitting in the back seat and hugging a pillow while having some deep talks with the Universe.

While I would never wish cancer to enter any of your households – never, ever, ​ever
​ – my own personal experiences with it wound up teaching me one of the most valuable life lessons to be had. As we all know, crucial life lessons, or as my dad likes to call them, takeaways, tend to elevate our experience on this planet, maybe even carry us through the darkest of times.

This particular takeaway changed my life forever.

I GOT GRATEFUL, FAST.

I became grateful for my blunt and strong as hell sister, who picked me up off my bathroom floor after I was told over the phone that I may have lymphoma. Meg’s response, “So what? You’ll beat it.” She then handed me my daughter, Emerson, who was only two and a half at the time.

“She’s your reason,” she said, not mincing words as she referred to my baby girl. “Now get up.”

Thank you for giving me strength, Meagan.

I became grateful to my father who somehow rallied the competitor inside of me. During our lymphoma scare, my parents never once left my side. On a two mile drive from Gee Ave to Granite Street, my dad said, “Lu, this is just one more big game. And all you have to do is score more than 30 points. You’ve done it before, you just need to do it again.”

Thank you for bringing out the champion in me, Dad.

I became even more grateful for my mother, the woman I caught crying in my kitchen, telling my father, “Timmy, why Lori? I just wish it was me.”

And that, my friends, was the turning point.

I had awoken. Gratitude felt like it had literally just washed over me. I knew then that I belonged to a Universe that blessed me with a mother who would fully embrace such overwhelming love and sacrifice. What more could I ask for?

From that moment on, I vowed to no longer feel sorry for myself. I didn’t want my Saint Nance to experience any pain. Not her.

Not my mom.

Thank you for raising me right, lady.

Shortly after that kitchen moment, thanks to my mother and the efforts of our family friends, Kate and Jack Andrews, I was connected to an elite doctor at Mass General. Through him, I received a diagnosis of papillary thyroid cancer. In short, this diagnosis was a long way off from lymphoma. I was told by my doctor that, on the wheel of cancer, I just received the best diagnosis possible. Due to my exhibiting symptoms, my medical team believed that I had been living with this for about ten years. I used this to explain EVERY bad choice I had made during this time.

Thank you, humor.

Fast forward to February 27, 2014. My surgery was scheduled for three hours. Clearly, when it lasted an hour beyond that scheduled time, my people started to get nervous. That is until Superman himself, Dr. Hodin, entered the waiting room to let my family know that the surgery was complete. It had taken longer than he expected because he had to remove 31 cancerous lymph nodes surrounding my thyroid. ​31…

Remember how many points I needed to score in this particular game?

Thank you, Universe, for having my back.

Since my surgery, I have started every single one of my days by expressing gratitude. Parts of my life, such as Brandon and our children, my nephews, my career, my home, my oceanside community, and my entire tribe of family and friends, only begin to tap into the infinite depth of possible things to be grateful for. And the more I am able to honor and express this gratitude, the more things I find myself having the opportunity to feel grateful for.

I have never gone public with this personal story. Until now. Why? Because of all of you. Because we are not alone. None of us. And each of us has a story to share and be heard…

A story to be grateful for.

Thank you, everyone, for listening.

Pictured above from left to right: my cousin Melissa Hull, me, my sister Meagan Marrone, my best friend Lauren Riley and my cousin Sara Hull.

 

Lori Sanborn was born in Gloucester and returned to live permanently in our seaside community six years ago. She has been a public educator for 12 years and is currently the Assistant Principal of Swampscott Middle School.  Lori is most proud of her role as mother to her children, Emerson and Ryder.

 

At the Farm

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Story and Photos By Susan Pollack  

It is late afternoon and frigid. Silver light streaks the western sky, illuminating barns, pastures, and frozen fields. I head down the snowy road, basket in hand, to pick up our weekly CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) vegetable share at Alprilla Farm in Essex, MA.

Smells of wood smoke and sounds of conversation emerge from the greenhouse. Entering, I’m flooded by warmth and abundance: vegetables of many kinds appear enticingly arrayed in wooden boxes, each precisely labeled. I reach for four hefty white (Elba) potatoes, a few parsnips, carrots, onions, golden and red beets, and a large macomber turnip, pondering a weekend meal of roasted vegetables. I add a handful of kale and admire the squashes. I’d been partial to buttercup, with its creamy flesh and handsome dark green skin until I discovered orange kabocha, the sweetest squash of all, baked without brown sugar or even honey. Move over, acorn squash.

Farmer Sophie Courser swings open the door juggling totes of spinach from the walk-in cooler next door; she stops to hug a friend whose infant daughter is strapped to her back. Sophie’s farming partner and husband, Noah Kellerman, sits by the wood stove, repairing a rake-like tool, part of the apparatus used to wash their profusion of vegetables. A father and his young sons look on. Across the room I spot the hostess from a summer restaurant, a local poet, two other young farmers, and Sophie’s aunt, Stephanie, who drives down from New Hampshire to help out.

The stove warms against the cold, creating a comfortable space in which to pause and chat as we select the week’s vegetables. A small group of shareholders lingers by the fire or a nearby tea urn, their half-filled baskets at their feet. The gathering nurtures a sense of community often missing during the long New England winter, when the instinct is to huddle at home, with family or close friends.

Noah and Sophie are doing something so old it’s new: keeping alive a family farm by sustainably growing tasty and nourishing vegetables. They also cultivate and mill some grains for flour while tending a small beef herd. Noah grew up on Alprilla Farm, where his grandfather had raised Black Angus cattle. Noah’s parents, a musician and a scientist, live on the farm and help out, including caring for the animals when Noah and Sophie are away.

As evening approaches, a local farmer from the summer open air market arrives, and conversation turns to the high cost of land here in Northeastern Massachusetts, where real estate values have escalated, making it difficult for young growers to get a foothold. Noah and Sophie must lease some cropland in order to survive as must many other young area farmers. They also face a relatively short growing season and the challenges of working with clay-like soil that compacts easily. To help aerate the fertile, but heavy soil, Noah and Sophie rest the fields every three years, by rotating clover in combination with grains. They work with a team of oxen that are nimble and lighter on the land than the tractor, which they also use. Sophie, the writer of Alprilla’s eloquent farm journal, is also a seasoned teamster, having worked with oxen since she was a child growing up on a family farm in New Hampshire. (Today her mother and sister sell some of their lamb and pork at the Alprilla share along with maple syrup made by her father.)

Standing here at the farm in mid-February, on the last day of the winter CSA share, I feel gratitude for the food that Sophie and Noah grow all year, which sustains me and my husband and all of us CSA shareholders through the coldest months.

I am grateful as well for the opportunity to support the farm, as a shareholder. By paying for a “share” of the harvest at the start of the season, we help farmers buy the seed and supplies they need. We also partake of the risk that adverse conditions may cause some crops to yield less than hoped or to fail altogether, while others exceed expectations. By bearing a small part of this risk, I feel a deeper connection to the land, the farmers, and the food I eat.

Then, too, I delight in Noah’s and Sophie’s excitement about the season ahead: the seed catalogues they’ve pored over all winter, the new crops they hope to grow. It’s hard not to share their enthusiasm, especially as the days grow longer, the greenhouse doors are flung open, and the frozen earth gives way to luscious mud.

My basket is full. The winter share is over. In mid-March Noah and Sophie will plant seedlings in the greenhouse, and so, a new season will begin, carrying with it all our hopes for a fruitful harvest.

 

E. Schoonover photo

Susan Pollack is an award-winning journalist and author of The Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Cookbook: Stories and Recipes. She lives in Gloucester with her husband, Eric Schoonover, a writer.

 

 

Copyright © Susan Pollack 2019