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00:00:00 - In 1941, DA taught painting as a graduate student. In the middle of the
semester, he replaced a teacher at Duluth State College. Herbert Sorenson, the
president, was a socialist and he may have hired DA because of his leftist
views.
00:03:31 - In 1942, DA and his wife Marjorie moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked
as an illustrator for the ordnance department. In the fall of 1943, DA entered
the army. He was sent to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland to be an aircraft
gun mechanic. He went through basic training in Virginia. His training group
included young men from New York and farm boys from Iowa and Illinois. The farm
boys knew how to keep their feet from freezing, but the New York men did not.
00:07:05 - DA was then sent to Cadre School, because he knew how to drill platoons and
companies. Afterwards, he was sent to a publishing unit where he designed
histories of the war. In 1946, he left the army but continued to work as a civil
servant in the publishing unit. When he heard the news that President Roosevelt
had died, DA wept.
00:10:29 - DA worked with the publishing unit for a year or so, then left to teach at
UW, although it did not pay as well. His liberality was welcomed by some of the
UW faculty. He arrived at UW in the fall of 1947. His wife stayed in Washington
D.C. until he could find a permanent residence.
00:14:24 - They were put into the "barracks" of Badger Village, near Baraboo.
There had been such an influx of new students and faculty from people returning
from the war that there were not enough places for people to live. In order to
get to a 7:45 class, one had to get up at 5:00 in the morning, have breakfast,
then travel to Madison in an unheated bus. The bus did not return to Badger
Village until 8:00 in the evening.
00:19:41 - DA was surprised at how poorly the art department was run. The faculty
consisted mostly of older people whom DA describes as having "no
talent." They knew nothing about what was going on in painting and
sculpture in Europe and America. There were a few other younger faculty members,
but they had little influence due to their junior position. Art classes were a
haven for sorority girls who had little intention of attending classes or
learning about art.
00:25:31 - In 1948, there was a centennial art show in Milwaukee. DA won one of three
$500 prizes for a watercolor. That same summer, he won a $250 prize for his
depiction of a stone hill located north of Baraboo, which was also reproduced in
Art News; this helped establish DA's good reputation.
00:28:16 - P. D. Annen, a local landlord and spouse of art faculty member Helen Annen,
complained about his hardships as a landlord. DA believed it was Annen and
people like him who made it difficult to find housing in Madison by preventing
the University from building new faculty housing. DA thus called Annen a liar.
For this and "other reasons," DA was to be fired. He was disappointed
because he felt his liberal friends had not done enough to support him.
00:32:17 - In the summer of 1952, DA invited Ben Shahn, a prominent New York artist, to
spend a week on campus. Shahn then invited DA to New York City for a week and
introduced him to may important art directors, such as Bill Golden of CBS. Shahn
sent DA to the art editor of Fortune magazine, CBS records, Harper's and
Seventeen. DA believes Shahn intended to expose him to New York art.
00:38:26 - In the UW art department, Santos Zingale and Alfred Sessler were both
politically liberal. Zingale once was accused of being a member of the Communist
Party—which he was—and was arrested when someone tipped over a police wagon.
Zingale proved his innocence and sued the police. Zingale was guilty of other
crimes but never got caught. Sessler also was accused of being a member of the
Communist Party. Though he had been for a time, DA believes Sessler was too
private to be politically active.
00:45:25 - Gimbles Department Store began holding art competitions to promote their
stores. In 1952, DA won one of the many competitions and the substantial prize
money that went with it. Life magazine did a story on the competitions in which
it reproduced one of DA's paintings in a full page spread. No one at UW ever
congratulated him on this achievement.
00:48:21 - In 1959, DA did sketches for a Harpers article on the UW. He was surprised at
the quality of his sketches, since up until that point he had not had much
confidence in his drawing ability. Four or five of DA's eight drawings were used
in the story. His favorite sketch was of the "602 Club," an artist's
hangout. The proprietor of the club, Dudley Howell, saw the sketch in Harpers
and wanted to buy the original. DA traded him the sketch for two bottles of Jim
Beam.
00:53:21 - In 1956, DA spent a semester doing drawings for a book written by Carl Smith
of the Psychology Department. Smith pledged him 5% of the royalties, but DA
received only $500 because the book sold poorly.
00:58:59 - DA was trying to show as much of his work as possible, but this was time
consuming and expensive. The financial drain made it very difficult to make a
profit showing his work, so he turned to writing instead. He signed a contract
with a publisher to write a book on design. He spent a good deal of time doing
research in the basement of Memorial Library.
01:07:45 - DA did research for about 2½ years, and in 1960 he finally sent the
manuscript off to the publishing company. Unfortunately, the editor did not
understand anything about developments in design, and they repeatedly had
misunderstandings concerning the content of the book. As a result, the
publishing company reneged on most of the promises they had made. They limited
the kinds of illustrations he could use, and decided to print the book in
paperback instead of hardcover.
01:12:55 - DA hired a lawyer to keep the publishing company from publishing the book
until it agreed to live up to its original promises. After deciding on a
compromise, the book was finally printed. He was surprised at how much he earned
through book sales.
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00:00:00
Donald Anderson (#398) BT: This is Barry Teicher of the UW Oral History Project.
Today is September 19, 1991. I'm in the home of Donald Anderson, an art professor at the university. And we're someplace outside of Mazomanie, I think. Is that the- DA: It's just northwest of Middleton. BT: In a beautiful, rural area. BT: And we're going to begin the interview today by asking Professor Anderson to briefly describe his childhood and his early years of school. DA: Well, I can't remember. I was born in South Dakota. But I can't remember any of that because the family moved to Wisconsin in 1917, when I was about two years old, so I don't remember any of that. My first memories were of Wisconsin then. And I can't remember anything unpleasant about it for a while. My father, this is a little town called Barronett. And it was between Cumberland and Spooner. A little tiny town which had once amounted to something. But a devastating fire, which I found out later, had devastated the place in 1895. And that is why the town was full of vacant spaces between houses, because the whole place burned down almost all the way. And I guess my father came there to run the town bank, a dinky bank which I thought at the time was very important. Well, anyway, he also bought a farm there. So he ran the bank and older, the children had to run the farm. And that was that. He didn't bother to milk cows or take care of horses, although he knew this sort of work. But it was up to the four boys to run the place, which they did. I can remember going out to, see, the farm that they were on was one of the, presumably an abandoned farm. And due to the fire of 1895, so that in the first years that we were there, or the first two or three, we lived in an old house that was not very promising. But my father built a new house, place. So I guess in about, oh, 1919 or so, after I was two or three years old, we moved into it. And I can remember being taken into it, but I don't remember anything else except that one of the Norwegians, everybody around there was Norwegian anyway. And one of the Norwegian carpenters who happened to be upstairs talking to my mother. And he took a look at me and he said, "I hate kids when they act smart." That's the last we saw of him. [laughter] Anyway, there was a one-room schoolhouse in the place near- [noise in background] Should we tum that down? BT: No, that's all, yeah, is that the heat? DA: Go on, tum it down. Let me do it. Okay. DA: This one-room schoolhouse was about half a mile from town on a road on which we lived. We lived about a mile from town on this farm. And my sister told me that, she's older than I am, I think she was born in 1907. At any rate, she went to this school during the seventh grade. And I guess at Christmastime, the schoolteacher became quite large, was diagnosed as pregnancy. And she had to retire. And she later married one of the prominent boys in town by the name of Amess. And some people say that marriages are made in heaven. But this one wasn't. So there's only one church in this little town. And it was Lutheran, as you would expect from the nativity of all the people around there. And the Lutheran minister said, "Well, I'll see if my sister in Minneapolis will come out here." And she did. And she was extremely capable person. So they got through the year. Meanwhile, my older brother, Stuart, had sat out the year, apparently practicing saxophone. And he said that in 1915 he had heard a phonograph record of a quartet of saxophones playing something, and became very enamored of the instrument. And he bothered my father until, well, he said that he threw himself on the floor and carried on until my father consented to buy him a soprano saxophone from Lyon & Healy in St. Paul. So I guess my older brother, Stuart, did not go to school that year at all. But in the spring, the schoolteacher suggested that my sister go to Barron, there's where they took the examination. And the schoolteacher said, "As long as you're going to take the seventh grade exam, you might as well take the eighth grade as well." So she got my father to take her over to Barron. And she said that she sat in a chair to take the exam and her feet didn't touch the ground. She was that small. And so she passed the eighth grade test and was twelve years old. So she was due to go to high school. And she bothered my father until he took her to Cumberland to see the principal. And would he allow her into the school? And he thought it over. I'll probably think of his name. But he finally said, "Well, you might as well bring her down here and we'll see what she can do. So she entered high school at the age of twelve. And she weighed sixty-four pounds. And during her first week in the school, she was wandering around, looking for something, and a very tall boy who later became a basketball star at the University of Wisconsin said to her, "If you're looking for the kindergarten, it's downstairs." So she pluckily entered the school. So she was twelve. Stuart was fourteen. And they both entered high school at the same time. So it was that eventually this one-room schoolhouse was rebuilt and replaced by a brick schoolhouse in 1921, when I guess I was six. And that is the school that I remember. DA: But presently, we had to move to St. Paul for one school year and to Duluth for another school year. And I liked Duluth a great deal, and so did my brothers and sisters. But in the spring of 1926, a bank in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, informed my father that my aunt, one of his aunts, was so old that somebody had to take care of her. She had a large house in Cedar Rapids. And that had been the hometown of all the Andersons for many, many years, anyway. So my father took us from Duluth down to Cedar Rapids in the spring of 1926. And then we lived in this very nice house on the east side. And then I started going to grade school there. I was put back half a grade because I was so small. Just a decision by the principal, a lady. And so I grew up there, and in a year or two began to have a paper route, which was very lucrative. Around Christmastime, the people on the upper end of this paper route were quite wealthy. And at Christmastime you get loaded down with various types of goods. When I grew up a little bit, I wasn't quite so small, they quit doing that. Anyway, I finally went through Franklin Junior High School, where I met a lot of my permanent friends. Specialized in the high jump. A little strange for a person being so small. But I guess when I was about four foot seven, I could jump four foot seven. But I wasn't a fast runner, I soon found that out, and I was going to remain that way. But when the time came, I finally got to the, after high school, we graduated. Somehow that's in the middle of the year, middle of January, in the wintertime. So, not knowing what to do with ourselves, we went over to the west side of town to Grant High School and took a typing course, which was kind of sensible, I thought. Meanwhile, my older brother, who had left the place and was playing with jazz bands in New York City. Well, my best friend in that town was a boy named Donald Wilson, who lived over a few blocks from us. And his aunt, one of his aunts, was the attendance teacher in high school. But anyway, my brother Stuart came back from playing in New York City. And my friend Don Wilson and me had been listening to jazz for quite some time. Earl Hines in Chicago, for example, from the Grand Terrace Ballroom on the south side. And when my brother came back, we said to him, "Is it true that the best musicians are Negroes?" We didn't use the word "black" in those days. And he said, "Of course!" And so we got sort of license to figure that it was okay to listen to anybody. DA: And after high school, then I went to work for a company that was, well, the family got, I don't think we had enough money. I didn't want to go to the local college, which was Coe College. All my friends were at the university. So I got a job in a factory that manufactured transmitters. And I learned to wire them and know quite a bit about the electrical business. And stayed there for a year or so. And so was rather late in getting to the University of Iowa. So I started school there in 1935. And I had a V8 Ford coupe. I made the mistake of trying to commute between Cedar Rapids and Iowa City for a few months. It was just impossible for many reasons that I don't wish to talk about. Nothing serious. It was just that you either were going to have a life in one place or another. So then I went into a dormitory, which I hated. And I had no intention of staying there, except that the university rules stated that I would. DA: Well somehow over the years, I don't know why, I had an attitude about injustice. And this is mysterious, because my father was not political. He never said anything about politics that meant anything. And I suppose as a bank, the person who ran the bank in town, couldn't take sides in these issues. And he just didn't have any opinion about it. And I started to have opinions in the University of Iowa right away. I fell in with a bunch of people, I got to school a couple of years late, anyway. And I fell in with people who knew the ropes around there so that I was helped along. But some of the radical people, there were a whole bunch of radical kids from New York City there. And a lot of them were frankly communists, and didn't mind saying so. And some of the natives like myself took a cue from them or from something in our background and took dead aim at the ROTC. And we gave them a horrible time. There were a lot of ways to go about it, but my first one was when we were lined up in uniform, and the roll was called, you were supposed to say, "Here, sir." I never said, "Here, sir." I just said, "Here." Everybody laughed. And it was extremely annoying to the sergeant who was in the regular army. His job wasn't very good anyway. And this annoyed him tremendously. But that wasn't the end of it. There were many people in the ranks whose sole intention was to destroy the ROTC. And they did it in many ways. There was a diver on the swimming team who wore white shoes. And the powers in the ROTC, perhaps the colonel, offered to buy him a pair of black shoes. And they did. And Arnold, that was his name, Arnold, said that they didn't fit. So he kept on wearing white shoes as long as I can remember. And there wasn't any drill that we went through that couldn't be screwed up. If they said, squad left, somebody would turn right. And it just completely ran one rank into another, with everything screwed up. And the drill sergeant getting more apoplectic all the while. And we never reformed or let them up on this. We simply made it impossible for them to be happy about us. And finally, in a bar one night, I met this regular army sergeant who was in charge of drilling this particular bunch. And he said, "Anderson, I don't care if you never speak to me again as long as you live. But would you please make it a little easier and say 'here, sir' like you're supposed to?" And I assured him that I would, and he bought me a drink. And of course I had no idea that I would comply. And we continued all year to make it miserable for them in every way we could. And one rehearsal we had for Governor's Day, which was held every spring, and the whole ROTC and bands and everyone was going to march around the track of the football field and the stadium. Well one day we were rehearsing for this. And by happenchance, the clip at the bottom of my rifle, Springfield, fell out. It wasn't my doing. It just fell out. And so I had to break rank and go back into ranks that were following to try to get this clip back and into the rifle. And as I did this, leaning over to pick up this clip, and get it back, I was given a kick. And it took me a long, long time to get this damn thing, then run around in a very large circle to get back in rank. It was appalling. And it was so bad when time came for Governor's Day, this sergeant said to me, "Anderson, you're going to get a day off tomorrow, and you will not have to appear for Governor's Day." He said, "If you'll come around in the morning and pick up some gum wrappers and that," he said, "then you can take the rest of the day off and have a good time." "You mean I'm not going to drill Governor's Day?" He said, "No!" [laughter] That's the way it happened. But I wasn't alone. I wasn't the only one. All the people who had been on this sabotage were dismissed in that way. I saw a number of them hitchhiking up to Cedar Rapids. And even that Arnold in white shoes. He said, "You, too?" He said, "No," he said, "I'm not allowed to drill, either." DA: So that was our war. We couldn't win it. We absolutely could not, and the dean's office, he said that people such as people with religious affiliations, of which there were some in Iowa, with this kind of religious affiliation could not bear arms. But they didn't let them out. So he said, "We're not going to let you out, either." So we couldn't win it. But it was a lot of fun. Later on, when I got drafted into the army, it was a strange turnaround. Because in regular army, I knew how to drill people so well that I actually was sent to cadre school to become a corporal in the regular line. So that was no problem. I had no problem learning how to drill people. It just came as second nature. And I could drill the whole company, if I had to. But that probably belongs in a later chapter, because I immediately got in trouble in the army with my big mouth, as well. It was my first week in the army, and nobody knew how to drill very well. But there was a battalion drill anyway. And I seemed to have been stuck in the back of a unit. And there the brass could not see anything, and people, and the noncoms were collected back there. And nobody was keeping in step. So the noncoms said to the soldiers in there, "Get in step, you!" And I turned to him and said, "How can they keep in step when you guys are not in step?" Uh oh. "Let me see you later." And so after the drill was over, this is all true, the noncoms were not keeping in step, and they weren't about to tell anybody how to get in step, because it was impossible for them to learn. But anyway, he said to me, "I like this name," he said to me. "Come here, Lucky." [laughs] "After chow," he said, "I have lined up a very nice shit detail for you." I said, "Okay." He said, "What you're going to do is you're going to clean the rifle rack with a toothbrush." And this was more like things that happen in the old army. The new army couldn't stand people like that. But it was sort of a holdover from years past, where that sort of thing was done. So I reported to him, and I went to this barracks, and cleaned this rifle rack with a toothbrush. It was about sixteen feet long, and very complicated. [laughs] It took about two or 1hree hours. And when I got back to my own barracks, my sergeant said to me, "Will that teach you to keep your mouth shut?" I said, "Yes." DA: Anyway, my work at the University of Iowa was really in art. I took some physics courses. And I had planned to be some kind of physicist. But it turned out that I was not very good at mathematics. And I had never had any trouble with arithmetic. But I could never get the hang of mathematics, or didn't want to. I can't remember which. But anyway, I flunked mathematics the first time. And on one Sunday I remember being invited to the home of a sculptor named Albrizzio, which is nice, because being an undergraduate, to get invited to a professor's home on Sunday. This is probably a few years later. Well, at this party, the guy showed up with a big hangover. And he turned out to be the guy who had flunked me in mathematics. It was so embarrassing for the poor guy. He was suffering so much anyway. But the other fact was that I didn't like the lab work in physics. I thought it was meant for people in the seventh grade. I just couldn't stand spending the time on such simple minded junk. But we did have a wonderful performer who performed all kinds of tricks in front of his classes, who was very good at doing something that astonished people. But I don't know if he could explain it or not. He stood on a turntable and had a bicycle wheel in front of him. And one hand on each side of this wheel. And when he spun it one way, he would tum to the right. And when he turned the other way, it turned to the left. It was notable for that kind of experiment. And I don't suppose he was very good at explaining the thing, because I can't remember why he did it, or how it happened. But anyway, I shortly decided that I would have to become an artist because that was what I wanted to do, anyway. And some of my friends still from junior high school and high school were there already before I got there. And they thought it would be okay to do that, too. So I became interested and did all the classes in art. DA: One odd thing that happened was that my brother was then playing in jazz bands in New York. And they were, during certain seasons they had different uniforms. They were elegantly made of very good cloth. Occasionally they were in the wintertime, had a certain character. And in the summer, it changed to a lighter kind of garment. But my brother couldn't stand to go around New York City in these clothes that he wore at work. So he would send them to me. And by the time I was well along in college, I had a whole bunch of these things. I wore a very spectacular jacket when I was a freshman, even, in 1935. And there happened to be a girl in that class from Hollywood, California. Her mother was a seamstress in MGM studios. And during one of the intermissions, when we were out in the hall smoking, her name was Tillie Steck. And she said to me, "What have you got on the fifth?" Which meant that she was hep to racetrack talk and she thought that the garment I had on reminded me of the racetrack towel. So she was asking me what I had on the fifth race, which amused me a lot. So I went, even later in my career, my brother had sent me a very sharp double-breasted pinstripe dark blue suit. It was sharp as could be. And so some of the art department members were invited to the president's house for a Sunday afternoon. And when we got there, the painting teacher, by the name of Fletcher Martin said to me, "What the hell are you wearing?" He said, "You look like a gangster." But anyway, I enjoyed wearing these clothes except that sometimes they seemed to be almost impossible. For example, he had, Stuart had sent me a wonderful white linen suit. And the thing was just perfectly made and was so elegant, but it just so happened there was no place in Iowa City where it could be worn. You'd look like an idiot going, if you had a date and went to a bar with that sort of thing; people would think you were a freak. So as a result of this, half of the things my brother sent me during those years just didn't get worn, because there was no place for them in this farm community college, and so on. DA: Well eventually, I got out of the place, after having a number of fine experiences with some teachers, one of which was a fellow by the name of Phillip Gusten, who had quite a reputation in New York, and possibly nowhere else. But he knew, for the head of the art department in Iowa was a man named Dr. Lester Longman. And as in art history, Lester Longman knew three Mexican painters. But Gusten knew twenty personally. This was a standard thing, there were three great Mexican painters. Diego Rivera was one of them. But Gusten knew them all, personally. Which made him quite in contempt with Longman and his sort of academic background. Anyway, Gusten was a marvelous drawer. It seemed to me that he drew so well that it reminded you of Piero della Francesca, a Renaissance person. And I just was in awe of what he could do. Very impressed. And he was a nice fellow with it. And we occasionally played poker and made a couple of trips together, particularly to Kansas City, Missouri. And I think that I benefited a lot from Phillip Gusten. His name was not really Gusten. He was one of those people whose name, whose last name was changing because of his origins. And I don't know why he thought he had to do that, but apparently he did. That's sort of a private business. I thought that if you could draw like Gusten could, that you could call yourself anything. BT: Were there any other teachers that you had who you particularly admired? DA: Well, one of the teachers there was a man named Fletcher Martin. And he had something of a reputation, and he was a nice guy. But he did not appreciate my liking for jazz. And I remember, Fletcher was sort of a Western type guy, and wore sort of a cowboy outfit from time to time, including some boots. And I remember at a picnic one time, when we were trying to play some of these jazz records out there, that he accidentally stepped on one of them. And he didn't care! He didn't like them, anyway. [laughs] Which is fair enough. He was not an influence, in spite of the fact that he had some reputation, he didn't have an influence on me because I thought that his work was a kind of personal formula and I just didn't think that that fit. I had to feel more of an individual, although he, I should be thankful to him because I painted a picture of a church uptown with some, two trees in the spring with blossoms on them out my back window. And sent it to a show in Kansas City. And he was a judge, and brazenly gave me a large prize in the show. And I asked him about it later. And I said, "Weren't you embarrassed to give one of your own students a prize in the show?" He said, "No. Of course not. I thought it was the best thing in there." That was that, you know. [laughs] That's what he thought. Nobody could charge him with favoritism, because he said, "I call them as I see them." That's the way it went. BT: Okay, we're at a good point to stop. [pause, tape change] DA: It so happened that my mother was a piano player. And that's how she met my father. He was in South Dakota and somebody in Iowa, where he was from, sent him a manuscript and he was a singer, tenor. And he went to the local school and got the musician out of there, the piano player, and gave her the score. And she couldn't play it. So he asked around, and he said yes, there's a woman, young woman named Gertrude Myers over in Calistoga who can play a lot of things, can read scores quite well. So he went over there. I don't know how far it was, perhaps forty miles or so. You could get there on the train, too. So he went over and looked up Gertrude Myers, who was living on this farm and asked if she could read it so they could rehearse. She said, "Of course I can read it." So they did rehearse that way for several times. And then they got interested in each other. That's how they got married. So my mother taught her, I don't know how she influenced my older brother, oldest brother, Stuart, in music, but there's a letter in my personal archive which states that when she was playing, he would rock back and forth in a chair and seem to be vitally interested in the music. And so, it turned out later, he wanted to play the saxophone, which he did for many years. And Evelyn, this one who was born second, she became a very good piano player, also. She could, my father said, read almost anything on sight. And I remember when I was playing flute to give her some scores by, Wilra Handel's sonatas. And she didn't have to look at them twice, you know, she just played along, and that was that. Then the third born had no interest in music, whatever, and finally became a president of a food brokerage firm. He had no interest in art. He had no interest in any cultural activity, whatsoever. He probably became a member of the country club and entertained me there several times, to my great disgust. But anyway, the child that was born after, and there was only one of them, my younger sister, Jean, she became a very good piano player, too. And she could read anything. But it turns out that the, that my older brother, John, who was the third born in the group, he wasn't very good at music, either. And he became, he went to, went through Coe College and then to a seminary in Chicago, and then to Edinburgh, Scotland, for advanced work, and became a Presbyterian minister. And so it is hard to see how the various children were, pursued these different kinds of activities. And I think it was because my father was not a strong leader of people. And I think it was up to us to decide what we were going to do. And I think that's why we separated in these things. My mother tried to get me to learn the violin, and even went so far as to hire somebody else to teach me, but we didn't get along well. And that didn't work out, either. I didn't like, I simply didn't like the violin. I didn't like the way it sounded. Or I didn't like the way I sounded it. [laughs] And this is a critical difference. I mean, if you can't make this thing sound well, you really can't stand it. But anyway, we all pursued these different kinds of activities. And I really think it was partly because we didn't have any strong direction. DA: I remember somebody on the staff here at Wisconsin once made a study of how people got to the art department. And it turned out that the professional people had sons and daughters who would not have been allowed to think about going to art school. They went into the professions, the same as their father had. And the only ones that were permitted to go to art school were the daughters. And that sort of fit a kind of pattern of American people that for some, it was a step up in terms of culture for the daughters to go to art school. The women had always been those people who were supposed to entertain people by learning the arts, playing piano and the like, which was all right for women but not quite right for men. And that prevailed even according to this study around 1950 or so. And I believe it's true. That a lawyer would try to prevent his son from going to an art school, but would encourage him to go into graduate school and go into business or be a lawyer or another type of professional. DA: But anyway, I can't really account for the diversity in the family in that respect. The one thing that rather astonishes me is that so many of them turned out to be of a liberal or radical, from a point of view of politics. I can remember myself, just in grade school, being interested in the plight of the Indians and giving a paper on that subject. And then in college, we had to take classes in speech. And I remember that one of my contributions to this was a paper on number of lynchings that had occurred in the South. There wasn't anything in my family to indicate that anyone would be interested in injustice or radical views, ever, because my father, as I said, had absolutely no, nothing to say about politics. He never said anything seriously about it. It was his own private business, apparently. And so I think my older brother in New York probably had the same prejudices that most Midwestern people had. He thought, he didn't think well of Jews when he went to New York. But after he was there for a number of years, tum around and began to think in radical terms. In fact he was a tried and true communist. And my older brother John became a minister. He also had very liberal views in politics. And although became a professor in Portland, Oregon, he was very much against the Vietnam War and spoke on that subject a number of times. Not that he made a profession of it, because he was somewhat scholarly. But nevertheless, he was a very liberal person, too, as his sons were. And again, my younger sister has no political views, either, so that a number of us were quite radical in our outlook. And there's really no accounting for it. BT: Now you mentioned that several members of your family could play the piano. And you said that you and the violin didn't see eye to eye. And you got into art later on. What were your early, when did you start to understand that you had artistic abilities and talents? And how did you go about developing these initially? DA: Well I did take, of course, art subjects were introduced in grade school in Cedar Rapids. And I was in the sixth grade, I think. I didn't show anything, I believe, for the most part, people who show something of that type is said by aunts and uncles to be talented, but nobody knows, really. And I also did some drawings in junior high school. But these weren't very good at all. And the only kind of training that I had there were by people who did three dimensional things. Like there were some boys in junior high school who were good at making model airplanes. And the first time I tried it, it was dreadful. And one of my real good friends, when he first saw what I had tried to do in the way of making a model airplane, he just laughed. And then it became apparent that if I was careful and did the thing carefully, that I could be as good as he was. And I tried that, and we did work on these things for years and years, and became extremely skillful at making these model airplanes who could fly a different, it flew differently depending on how you made them. I remember in junior high school, there was one kid who made a model airplane whose propeller turned so slowly that it would go about like this. Tick, tick, tick. And it flew up to the top of the ceiling and stayed there. And every time it dropped a few feet, the propeller would go tick, tick, tick, and the airplane was up to the ceiling again. It stayed there for an hour. I was simply astonished. And we asked him how to do this, and he said, "You've got to have a very loose rubber," that is with [unclear], which pushed the thing when it was wound up. And also, you had to have a certain kind of propeller carved in a certain way to go very slowly. And then me and my friends became skilled at making planes that could fly very fast. And we tuned up the rubber that was to propel them, and made shorter propellers. And then soon we were out at the airport doing this stuff. And it was really a lot of fun. And we had classes, we had a meeting every week where we went down and compared notes on what we were doing. And my workmanship really got much better and better and better. And you know, I was as good as the other ones at the end. And that was the first kind of experience that I had that meant that if you were in control of the thing, that you can actually accomplish something. And it was quite rewarding to be able to do that. Another thing was that the guys at the airport took an interest in us. And they would take us up in airplanes, oh, about every other day. They'd say, "You want to go over to so and so? Get in." So we'd just get up in the plane and go. And I think some of the friends I had were permanently hooked into flying. And it wasn't a bad idea. But I had to go to college. And these, the fellows who did this would stay in Cedar Rapids and get a job somewhere, and get a motorcycle, and then try to get an airplane. And I had to go to college, so that sort of put a crimp in it. But one of the kids in high school I later met at Cleveland when I was working for the government. And had a national air show there. And I was coming up from Washington, DC with a big show. And I happened to meet this high school buddy who had become an engineer in the east. And he said, "Why don't you get loose from this place." He said, "We'll rent a plane and go up." So he did. He rented a plane, went up over Lake Erie, and he said, "Well, here you are, Donald. Take over the controls." I said, "Thank you, Howard." And I proceeded to do this. To his great surprise, I was able to fly the thing. And we left and didn't see each other for about twenty years. BT: So in terms of your art? [pause] At this point in the interview, Professor Anderson said he was tired and he wished to continue it the following Monday. So that's the end of side two. BT: -at the home of Professor Donald Anderson for a second visit. It is September 23, 1991. BT: And Professor Anderson's going to start the evening by telling us a little bit about what he did during WWII. DA: Well, when I was in graduate school I was teaching painting. And it had to be especially designed for me because it was called landscape painting. Which implied I wasn't competent to do the ordinary stuff. In the middle of the semester of 1941, a teacher died in Duluth State College, which later became a part of the University of Minnesota, a branch, as in Wisconsin. And I went there in the middle of the semester of 1941 to replace this deceased teacher. And the president of the place was a man named Sorenson. Herbert, I think, but he was known as Sandy. He was a socialist. And that, I presume, is why I had been hired. Because Lester Longman, the head of Iowa, had determined that I was some kind of leftist radical. And I think perhaps that's how he sold me to Sandy Sorenson. Sorenson was a socialist. He had been put in power, or put into the position, by the farm labor party in Minnesota, which was known at that time to be quite radical. And as soon as the Republicans recovered their positions, they got rid of Sandy. Anyway, we spent, the faculty spent the evening of Pearl Harbor at Sorenson's place. And there were a number of tycoons in Duluth who had made lots of money on lumbering and shipping. And they gave a lot of their old mansions to the university there. And he said to me one night, "You know, it's quite proper that these were given to the university. And now the ordinary students have the benefit of it." So, and I thought Sorenson was rather an ideal person. Except that I found out that he gave money to the WCTU and didn't believe in drinking, especially instructors were not to drink with students. And I got the message right away, because I had already been there. DA: But at the end of the year, I was due to go into the army. And I couldn't leave my wife in that miserable town because nobody paid a living wage. So we went to Washington, DC, where we had a very great number of friends. And where a woman could get a decent wage to live on while I was in the army. So we went there in the summer of 1942, and never returned to Duluth. And then I went to work for the ordnance department as an illustrator. I had to learn the stuff on the job, because it involved an airbrush. I had to go down to a newspaper, borrow their airbrush, and do a piece in the afternoon to show that I could do it. Then I got hired in the fall of 1942. And stayed there for a year or so. And did a lot of stupid drawings for them. With the air brush for them, including air ships, tanks, everything else you could think of. DA: But then I was due to go into the army, and went in in the fall of 1943. And because of my connections in the Pentagon, I was saved from going into the army, or the navy, rather, and was shipped to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland to be an aircraft gun mechanic. I don't know why they figured that a college graduate should be an aircraft mechanic, it's beyond imagination. But there I was. And went through basic training and field training in Virginia. The first being four weeks, and the second three, I think. And the only notable thing about that was the outfit was full of New York kids. And there was a number of people, though, from Iowa and Illinois. And all the farm boys knew how to keep their feet from freezing, but the New York young men did not. So we got two field training [unclear] and the secret of it was to keep your socks dry. Do not, in the morning, put on wet socks, ever. And that is the sole secret of living in the country. All the farm boys knew that already. DA: And then after that stint, I was sent to cadre school because I knew how to drill platoons and companies. That was six weeks. I had no trouble with that. But there's one thing that I remember, and that was one of the members was a rather well known labor leader from New York was, I think, of Spanish descent. There was no doubt about it. So one day he was drilling a group of people, and he said [unclear] "Platoon!" [with accent] And it was as if he'd been thumbed out of the game by an umpire, because he was gone from that unit for saying that one word. It was because, I think, later, that you couldn't give orders to people that laughed at you. And that this one word was all they had to hear, and he was kicked out. The poor guy. He was probably very competent otherwise. So this went on for two-and-a-half years. Then some of the people were getting out of the unit by having enough points, or enough time put in to get out. So I was put in with a group of young kids. And they were, I presume, about eighteen or nineteen. And here I was, thirty or thirty-one. I couldn't stand them, they made so much noise. They stayed awake all night. I couldn't stand that thing. So I went in, back to the Pentagon, where I knew a lot of people. I didn't realize that in the army you could shop around for jobs. You just go to a place, "You need such and so?" And if they could take you, you'd get orders to move. So I just went down to the Pentagon and got another job in a publishing unit designing histories of the war. And I stayed there, in uniform, and then stayed there as I exchanged uniforms in 1946, in the spring. And I exchanged my uniform for a very loud sports coat. It was a lot of fun. I should remind you, though, that in the army, when President Roosevelt died, I was walking with a kid from Philadelphia. And when we heard the news, we both wept. DA: Anyway, I got out of the army and into this unit, and stayed there for a year or so and then wanted to get back into teaching. And sent out a word to friends here and there. And I had a friend at Michigan State, and he said, "Well, you're just a coward. You don't want to go back into teaching until they pay you something." And I said, "That's right." At the time, in civil service, I was making $4800 a year. And I sent out these various messages to friends, and got a reply from the University of Wisconsin, who wanted to pay three thousand dollars. So I said, "Couldn't you make it thirty-two? I could stand to drop from forty-eight to thirty-two if you could do it." And they did. I think the reason I got the position was because I had known a fellow named Bill McCloy, who was on the staff here. I knew him at Iowa. He was a diver on the swimming team oh, about being a senior when I was a freshman on the swimming team. And so I got to know him. And he was here for a number of years, and has a mural in the historical society fourth floor. McCloy was an exceedingly professional person, as that mural will testify to. And so there were a couple of other people on the staff who have a liberal turn of mind. And some of the things I sent them were covers from a magazine that featured Negroes. And I think some of them were persuaded by that that I would be somebody who would fit in with them. So I came here in the fall of 1947. And my wife Marjorie stayed in Washington, DC until I got a place to move to. When I first got here, I stayed at a place near the square called the Lorraine Hotel. It was one of the chief places to be. Not that that means anything, but it was near the square. So a day or so later, I went up into the Capitol building, and up into the top of it, and took a look at the town. I was astonished and couldn't quite make it out. Because there were lakes and water and streets running here and there. And I couldn't make any sense out of the town at all. I didn't know whether, what being on the east side meant, or what the contours of the lakes meant. I didn't know anything about it. DA: But later on, when my wife Marjorie came in with the movers, they took a wrong turn and went out Highway 14 for a while, corrected the mistake. And we were put into a barracks in, up near Baraboo. What do you call that place? BT: Badger Village. DA: It was called Badger Village. And the reason for it was there had been such a sudden influx of students coming back from the war, plus faculty to take care of them, that there wasn't any place in Madison to live. The places were full, everywhere. And so we were sent this--it must be way above--it's some miles above Sauk City, between Sauk City and Baraboo. It's a big, flat plain. But it's about forty miles from Madison. And in this place, it was like a barracks. There were two rooms in the place. And one was a kitchen, and the other one was a bedroom and a bathroom, the communal bathroom down the hall. And then it came on in the winter, and it turned out that to get to a 7:45 class, you had to get up at 5:00 in the morning and eat something and get ready to go, and go into Madison on an unheated bus. Which was bad enough. But the worst part was, if you had to go in early, the bus wasn't going to come back until something like 8:00 in the evening. And what the hell you were going to do with your time in between was beyond me. Anyway, it was the worst schedule in teaching history. And it was a very hard thing to do. And I thought to myself, here I had this easy job in Washington, DC, paying a lot more than what I'm getting, and I didn't have to go through this. I lived in a very decent apartment in Washington, DC. And I just wondered when it was going to come to an end. But in the spring, I met a girl on the street that I had known in Iowa. And she said, "There's a new apartment going up over here. Maybe you should go and get on the list." Which I did. And by accident, or some other reason, I got accepted. So that in the late spring of 1948, we actually got to move into an apartment on the East Side. It was quite a nice apartment, too. But of course if they paid you $3200 a year, the apartment was so expensive that it was imperative that my wife go to work again. Which she didn't mind, but that gives you an idea of what the situation was. If you lived in a decent apartment in town, you didn't get paid enough to do it. I should add that the experience of driving back to Badger Village was not quite as bad as it really was. One evening we were coming back from the university and the bus was fourteen below zero. And the bus stopped in Middleton and refused to run. So then we all got out and hitchhiked back to Baraboo. And I thought some more about how nice it would be to be back in Washington. I hadn't had that hard a time, even in the army. DA: But at any rate, the teaching began, and we began with secondhand rooms. And I'd always been brought up to believe that the University of Wisconsin was very special. And it seemed to me that when I got here, it was rather astonishing because the department of art was absolutely nothing. It was run by old people who had methods that went back to some former year, maybe even the Renaissance or before, and they were perfectly without talent. And this was a hard thing to accept, too, because it seemed to me then sometime there was no hope whatever until these old ladies who had been there for years and years hadn't the slightest idea what was going on in terms of the painting scene in Europe and America. And knew nothing about it, nothing about the sculpture that had been happening. And this was very dismal. But there were a few other young people there. So, perhaps, we were trying to get along as best we could. We didn't have a vote, because you can't vote in those years unless you're an associate professor. Although sometimes they skipped the rules and made it an assistant professor who could vote. DA: But anyway, the department turned out 00:01:00 to be a haven for sorority girls. And this was appalling to us. The sorority girls had no intention of going to class, ever. And it took a while to figure this out. And it was very systematic, it turned out. The sorority girls from Maple Bluff or some other place in town had no intention of going to class or learning anything. And maybe it was a toss up. If they went to some of the classes, they weren't going to learn anything, anyway. But they did not attend class. And at the end of the year they would approach the teacher and lay on them a very sad story which has some fictional elements. This and that had happened, and this was a sad tale they would lay on me, ladies, and naturally they got by with it until myself and Dean Meeker and a couple other people got there and 00:02:00 found out what was happening. And it was astonishing that at the end of this time, when they would put these sad tales on these teachers, that it turned out quite often that their mothers would come to the school and seek out the teacher and explain to them this sad tale. And Dean Meeker said that he had some very attractive offers from these matrons. [laughs] But then, I didn't get anything like that. But I think maybe it was because maybe Dean was a better looking guy. But he swore that these ladies would do anything to get their daughters off the hook. But we made short work of this because we began to stick the sorority girls with coming to class and performing like anybody else 00:03:00 should have. And it took some doing, but we did it. And in a year or two, there was no longer a haven for these people, a refuge, to get to university without doing any work. And so things worked out well for me except for this doings in Baraboo, what did you call it? BT: Badger Village. DA: Badger Village. And in that, there were two rooms, so I had to do watercolors on the kitchen table. But immediately I got very hot. DA: And in 1948, there was a centennial show in Milwaukee. And due to the fact this was a centennial; the stipend for winning something was greatly enlarged. Where normally it might be fifty dollars, there were three prizes for five hundred dollars apiece. And I 00:04:00 won one of them on a little watercolor. And John Wilde won another one. So we had our picture taken together with another young lady that neither of us knew. Well, one of the judges was Ben Shahn, a rather well known Eastern painter. And I met him later and he said, "You know, giving the five hundred dollar prize to a little watercolor like that took a lot of nerve," he said, "and I wanted to get out of town as quickly as I could." [laughs] But anyway, that was a really large piece of change 00:05:00 and good luck for me. And the same summer, I hit another big prize at the University of, in the state of Illinois, called the Midwestern Annual. And that was, I won a purchase price of two hundred and fifty dollars for a work that showed one of those hills, stone hills, north of Baraboo. And not only was that a live one to win, but it also was introduced in Art News, so that I had a fairly hot record right off the bat. And the most I got out of it was that later on it was assumed that since I was doing so well I was probably neglecting my class. DA: Anyway, during these early years, one of the, one of the older teachers was a nice lady by name of Helen Long Annen. She was married to a 00:06:00 guy named Petey Annen who was a vulgar character. One time we were at a party and Petey Annen, who was a professional landlord, was complaining about his plight as a landlord and his difficulties. Anyway, Petey was at this party complaining about his hardships as a landlord. And I thought that my hardships were caused by people just like Petey who had refused to let the university build housing units for new faculty. In fact in the party, I made the mistake of calling him a liar and it was a nice thing to do. But anyway, because of this, and perhaps for other reasons, I was up to be fired at the end 00:07:00 of my second year. And was sort of sad that I didn't think that my liberal friends in the faculty had done enough to stand by me. DA: And I was due to go. But for some reason or other, the dean, John Guy Fowlkes, wasn't quite convinced about this. And I think that he called in the person from the art history department named James Watrous, who was not only a historian, but also a practicing artist. And I think that John Guy Fowlkes asked Watrous for advice in the matter, and he said that it was happening all over the country that the new faculty were coming in, and you couldn't get rid of all of them, so they might as well get used, the old people 00:08:00 would have to get used to putting up with the new people. And I was saved, I think, by that gesture. But in my exit from the dean's office, he said, "Why do you have anything to do with Petey Annen, anyway?" He said, "I don't!" And I said, "I agree with you there." And we parted company for a while and didn't see one another again for quite a while, at least not on the business of having to exit the place. DA: And things went on and I began to design things for various parts of the department. And in the summer, it was 1952, I think we invited Ben Shahn, a, the New York artist, to spend a week on campus, which he did, and I got to know him, as others did, too. And he seemed to like my way of working. And there was one 00:09:00 interesting episode in that particular trip. And that was, on the steps of the Union, there was a guy set up to photograph a whole bunch of citizens. I don't know who they were. Probably thirty or forty, where each row, they were on three or four different steps. And when there was a photographer there underneath a cloth to get his stuff in focus and all, Ben Shahn got in the back of the group and stood there very quiet and still, hoping to get his picture in there. And all of a sudden, Santos Zingale 00:10:00 said to him, "Ben, you're in the wrong place." And the people turned around, looked at Shahn, and said, "Get out of here!" [laughs] So he was very angry with Santos for spoiling this thing. Shahn was good at making jokes. He liked to have his picture taken in front of streets named Shahn, if there were any. He liked that kind of a joke. But Santos had spoiled it for him. But as a result of his stay there for that week, he invited me to come to New York and spend a week with him. And during that time, he lived in a place called Roosevelt, Jersey, which was a housing development I suppose named for the president. And so he lived across the river in Jersey. But because of this visit, Shahn introduced me to a lot of important art directors. There was Bill Golden, for CBS. And I was astonished because he was a rather famous art director in New 00:11:00 York history, and yet very small quarters and only one or two guys working in there. The reason for it was that all the work he had to do, as far as I was concerned, was farmed out. That he had a file card and if he needed a certain kind of thing, he would just call the guy up. DA: And then I was actually sent to the editor, art editor of Fortune, which seems a little insane. But anyway, I spent a half an hour with this guy. I don't know why Shahn would have done this, because the chances of my obtaining work from anybody like that was fairly remote. And he also sent me to CBS Records, which did things in three colors, and I had no technique for that. And he sent me to 00:12:00 Harper's, and a guy named Russell Lynes, who doubled as a literary editor and an art editor, too. And we got along fine, and he appreciated the things that I showed him. And also, I was sent to see Bill Golden's wife, whose name was Sipi Pinelas who ran the art floor, Seventeen magazine was very popular at the time. I liked that, but I had nothing to show this lady. I just enjoyed talking to her. But I don't know what Shahn had in mind. I think he thought that I was sort of a primitive as somebody thought of him as a primitive, too, in a way. And so he thought maybe a country primitive would do something in New York that I didn't have the techniques for, to obtain employment in these things. But it was a very interesting experience, anyway. BT: I'm going to end the tape on this side and flip it over to the other side. [Tape 00:13:00 change] DA: I should add that one of my early colleagues in the University of Wisconsin was Santos Zingale. Alfred Sessler was another. Both of these people were of a somewhat liberal point of view politically. And Santos was accused of being a member of the Communist Party. And it so happened that he was. But one time the Milwaukee Police Department had a police wagon tipped over and they went and picked up Santos and arrested him. But he said, he sued them because he said he wasn't there. And he 00:14:00 proved it and won the case. In other words, he was guilty every time but that one. And they happened to catch him, and he sued them and won. Which is lovely. Alfred Sessler was also accused. Although he was a rather timid type of person in comparison to Santos. But anyway, he was accused of being a communist, also. And it turned out later that he had been for he said a month or two he was much too timid a person to have stuck with. He was too private a person to have submerged his personality into a group action thing. He didn't like it. And he didn't like anything like that, either. So if he had been a member, he shortly resigned and wasn't a part of it. DA: But in the early years, the president of the place was a person from ag school, a gentleman from Virginia. What was his name? BT: E.B. Fred. DA: It was E.B. Fred. And he was apparently, 00:15:00 I'd seen him a few times, and he gave me the impression that he didn't know anything about the art department and never would. And this is probably a good assessment. He didn't know the connection between the art department and the extension. And he said to me, "Who is this James Schwallbach in Extension, anyway?" So he really didn't know the intimate connections of the various parts of the university. But the interesting thing was, a lot of people were oppressing. There was newspapers and other radio commentators in Milwaukee who were constantly telling about the communists harbored by the university in the person of Santos Zingale and Al Sessler. I don't know why this came to a point, but apparently it did at one 00:16:00 time. And this old Virginia gentleman decided to bring this thing to a point and invited the newspaper commentators and radio commentators of Milwaukee into his office together with Zingale and heard them out. And at the end of the thing, he said, ''That is the end of it." And neither Zingale or Sessler were ever bothered again, which shows something about the person of E.B. Fred, good person. DA: On the other hand, he wasn't so liberal about any kind of suggestion of sexual doings because if he had found out, and I know I could name one or two cases where the faculty was involved with sexual conduct with students, they were fired right then. This happened with a student, 00:17:00 female student--that I knew. And the professor was simply fired. And that was that. So although E.B. Fred, I never thought, was a great president in terms of getting things done for the university, he was of the proper school for, in terms of integrity of thought and that sort of thing. DA: Well anyway, personally, in 1952, in the meanwhile, the Gimbels competition in Milwaukee began to give large sums of money to artists for doing their thing for Gimbels. And a man named Charles Zayda was the brains behind this. So they had several competitions, and there were thousands of dollars available. So this money was spread out among the artists of Wisconsin, and if we hit it once in a while, 00:18:00 it was a good payday. And in 1952, I guess, I got one of these prizes. We won something around here almost every year. And I certainly got my share, about three or four times. But in 1952, Life magazine did a story on Zayda and his artistic enterprises with the Wisconsin artists, and reproduced one of my paintings in the largest size I'd ever seen in Life magazine. It ran over both pages. And it was perfectly astonishing to see one's work that size reproduced in a great magazine. So on seeing this, I very carefully rehearsed something about my good fortune. I was sure that people, many people, would be asking me about it. So I rehearsed this modest proposal saying that 00:19:00 I'd got lucky, and this and that. And it turned out that in the subsequent week, not one person asked me about this thing at all. [laughs] And never even mentioned this. And I thought, well fame is fleeting, isn't it. It's practically nonexistent. And I'm sure more people in other towns noticed it, but nobody around here did. DA: And then about 1959, I think it was, Harper's was doing a story on the University of Wisconsin, written by a citizen named Boroff. I had never heard of him. I still don't know what his connections were. But he had a contract to do a story on the University of Wisconsin. And they needed somebody to do some sketches for the thing. And 00:20:00 they first asked Aaron Borad to do these drawings. And he said he was busy and recommended me. But it probably didn't hurt that I had met Russell Lynes, the editor of these things, before, in New York. And he may have remembered me from that. Anyway, I thought man, this is a tough, tough assignment. So I got up on a Sunday morning and I went down to the Union and took a brush and some ink with me and drew the 00:21:00 whole thing, the tableau of twenty or thirty desks, fifteen or twenty people, and fifteen or twenty windows, and all this stuff, just sketched off. I was kind of surprised that I could do that well off the cuff. I thought, wow, maybe I can draw after all. My teacher, my head of department at Iowa, when I left there, told me I couldn't draw. So I was sort of glad that I could do this piece. And I said to him I do a lot of other stuff around the campus, too, including a drawing of Science Hall with the Capitol, and Bascom Hall, which is quite famous in the university. And some other things around. But what I liked most was I did a drawing of the 602 Club, where the artists hung out. And I did this drawing and they actually, I sent about eight 00:22:00 drawings, of which they used four or five. And I was personally delighted because they printed the one about the 602 Club. I loved it. And subsequently, the proprietor of the 602 Club, Dudley Howe, said to me, "I hear you did this drawing here in Harper's." He said, "What happened to the original? And I said, "They sent it back to me. I've got it." He said, "Well, what do they pay for something like that." I said, "Seventy-five bucks." Which was a lie, because they got the whole bit for two hundred. And he said, "Gee," he 00:23:00 said, "that's a lot of money." And he went off to the other end of the bar to fool around, clean some glasses. And he came back and he said, "We've got to strike a bargain here. I'd like to have that drawing." And I said, "Well, Dudley, let's put it this way. Do you have a bottle of Jim Beam?" And he said, "Yes, I have one. And in fact," he said, "I have two." So he gave me the two bottles, and the drawing was his. And it's still up there, in 00:24:00 back of the bar. So it was kind of strange because I had an evening class. Took the two bottles to class and said, "Well, we're going to have a good time tonight, anyway." DA: Along about 1956, I was spending some time with K.U. Smith, Karl Smith of the psychology department. What he really had in mind was to do a book on psychology, and he wanted to employ an artist to do some of the artwork for it. And he was picking on me. I didn't know it yet, but because we were doing a lot of fishing in Lake Mendota, he was kind of getting ready to suggest it. And he finally did. And he had done some drawings of his own to suggest some of the problems of psychology to Holt, Rinehart & Winston, who were going to publish it. And they were absolutely undecipherable. 00:25:00 Crazy scribbles. I've still got them. And I don't know what Holt & Company thought about them. But they went ahead with it anyway, and signed him to do the book. Which he did with his brother in Princeton. And, I should add, with the aid of his wife, who really wrote the book. But anyway, K.U. got this contract and he said, "Take a semester off. I'll pay you your salary and you can work for me doing this thing." Well as a result of this, he had so much work to do that I never slaved for anybody as I did for K.U. Smith and his brother. I worked about fourteen hours a day on this stuff. And then hired some other workers to help with these illustrations. And among them was Nancy Ekholm Burkett who's now one of the renowned illustrators in the whole world. She can name her own project and her own price, for that matter. Still living in Milwaukee. And so I worked not only through the semester, the second semester, 00:26:00 about 1957 or so, but also through the summer. And it was a dreadful proposition to get all these plates done. And I did all the chapter headings. And a good many illustrations as well. And hired four or five artists to do the others, including Nancy, which was her first job, I think, out of college. Then she went on fast. But at the end of this time, I didn't realize it but K.U. was rather a controversial figure in the, in terms of psychology around the country. I didn't know this at the time. I was too ignorant to know this. But I didn't know, for example, that this thing was not going to last very long. As a generous [stint?] he cut me in for 5% of the royalties. And what this amounted to was a one spring check for five hundred dollars. And the thing didn't last more than a year and a half or so. It went straight downhill, and that's the 00:27:00 last I've seen of this so-called royalty. And I don't know, I never talked to Carl about it. And I didn't know why his views were not widely accepted. It seems he was a behavioral scientist and for some reason this book was simply not going to last. But the thing was, it taught me a lesson. And that was, if I was going to work for anybody, ever again that hard, it was going to be for me. And that is exactly what I did. DA: Meanwhile, I was trying to exhibit as widely as I could, which was a terrible 00:28:00 lot of work. If you wanted to send paintings somewhere, you first had to get them framed. Either to make the frames yourself, which I knew how to do, since I had done this as a student at Iowa and I could make frames of any sort. But it took time. And if you paid for them, the payment was out of this realm. You had to pay very heavily to get a thing framed. So that was a nuisance. But then, if you wanted to send a painting someplace, to Illinois or Denver or to Washington, DC, you had to make a crate for it. 00:29:00 And after you made the crate or had it made, then you had to take it to the freight depot and get it sent. And when it was returned, you had to go and get it from freight depot. And the chances were that the glass, if it was framed in glass, would be broken. And so this went on for years and years and years. And it was just a sheer drudgery of this thing made it impossible. I just hated it. And in spite of the fact that I had shows in Milwaukee and in Chicago, the whole thing, when you added it all up, was not exactly a financial success. You could work at a rate at full speed and full energy for 00:30:00 a whole year and win a lot of prizes here and there and send out all these pictures, and about all you would get out of it for this huge amount of work entailed was about the maximum of about two thousand dollars a year. And it simply wasn't worth it. And you know, since that time, I've learned that guys in New York spend half of their time selling their artwork, half the time working, and half the time looking around to get rid of it. And the prospect was appalling. It simply didn't seem to me to be any way to get ahead in the world. And I simply stopped doing it. And I started writing 00:31:00 instead. And began modestly with a book on design for the extension department. And then got signed up to do a book called Elements of Design for Holt, Rinehart & Winston in New York. One of their traveling salesmen, Dan Wheeler, had seen me here and he suggested that I sign a contract with them to do this book on design. And it took a long time to do it, several years of spending hours and hours in the basement of libraries, looking through old tomes that had been discarded. They've got a file down in the basement of Memorial Library which is full of this stuff. It was no place to be, because it was like being in the jail. And you could see, in spring you could see the blossoms 00:32:00 coming out. It was hard to go down there and spend hours looking through these old tomes for something you could use in this book. And it was really a hard thing to do. But I went through the thing, was kind of stubborn about it and determined that I would do it. And I was supported one day, you know, on the side of these files down in the basement of the Memorial Library, they had cards on the ends of their lines of books. And I finally one day I saw one that was just electrifying. It said on it Cutter Crap. And I thought my God, can this be true? Is there such a thing as that? So I just stopped what I was doing, grabbed the thing out of its folder and went upstairs to get it copied. So there I met a, in the library itself, in this room where I went to have this thing 00:33:00 reproduced, I found a very obese lady who was going to argue about it. And she said, "Well, that has got to be ten cents." I said, "It couldn't possibly be ten cents. It belongs to the library. I didn't bring it in here." "Nevertheless," she said, "it isn't a periodical." And this went on for some time. It's a wonder that I gave a damn about all the stuff it cost, because the thing was so funny that all I wanted to do was get out of there and go to the 602 Club where I might get a laugh out of it. So I finally said, "Well, all right, I'm going to pay you this sum. But tomorrow, Lou Kaplan is going to hear 00:34:00 about it." He was the head of the library. So I paid the thing and left and went over to this thing and showed it to a great number of people who enjoyed it very much. It turned out this obese sweating lady was knocking down this department in the Memorial Library for fifty thousand dollars a year. God knows how she got away with it. But she was presently arrested and put in jail. And I thought my God, this is weird, you know? Everybody around here is incompetent. The library hiring a person who is stealing this much money from them? And they don't even know it. But I was very happy considering her attitude towards me, I was very happy she ended up in jail. DA: But there's nothing else that was very funny about getting ready to do this book, which was just pure sweat for about two and a half or three years. But finally, about 1960, I got it 00:35:00 done. But as a result of all this labor, I finally got the manuscript and artwork to Holt, Rinehart & Winston. I never had so much trouble in my life as the editor, whose name is Charles Madison, we never seemed to get on the same page, as they say. He thought at the beginning that I was doing a book for home economics. And I'd never seen a home economics room or teacher or anything like it. And we never saw eye to eye on any subject. He seemed to me to be some leftover of the last century where you would do an agriculture book with two photographs of a sick cow. And I never got anything, any 00:36:00 favorable comment from him, whatever. It seemed to me he never understood anything about what design had gotten to up to that date. He was about one hundred years before the Bauhaus or anything like it. He knew nothing about art, and it was a hard go all the way. And the correspondence shows it. The constant quarrel or sub-quarrel between the two of us, trying to get the other one to understand what was talking about. I knew that there was a market for a design book because there wasn't any good ones. And he didn't seem to know anything about the bad ones, either. And this went on and on. And I just didn't pay any attention to Charles Madison, and went ahead with my own 00:37:00 idea. And they didn't have a great deal of confidence in the book, as a result of Charles Madison's efforts in that hierarchy of Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Anyway, the company reneged on almost every promise that they had made. They promised to do, to furnish some five or six illustrations with full color. And I was going to get them from Skira which plates cost five hundred bucks apiece. And they said "No, we're not going to pay that for these things. You may use five full color illustrations of books that we have already published." I said, "Hell, I'm not interested in the books you've published because they stink, anyway." And this was just 00:38:00 one of the things that I couldn't put up with. I decided that in the end that I would pay the five hundred bucks a crack for these colored illustrations. And they reneged in every other way possible. And in the editorial thing was already difficult [enough?]. To do the illustrations, of which there were about 225, they reneged on every possible way. So that in the end, they had promised in the contract to publish it in hard cover and then propose not to. They said they would do it in a paper cover. So I was fed up. DA: I went to a local lawyer named Dick Calloway, who has recently become appointed a judge. In these days, around 1960, he owned a bar. And when he was asked what he did, he said, "Drinking." Which was the truth. If I had, I think I picked the right guy. Because I didn't want anyone to go to someone who would have 00:39:00 the judgment to talk me out of that, which any sensible person would have, because Holt, Rinehart & Winston was owned by CBS. And what chance would a hick author be doing to stand up to CBS, a giant enterprise? I didn't give a damn. I said to Calloway, "Make out some paper to cease and desist publishing this document, this Elements of Design until they live up to their contract." Which he did. He signed up the papers, made the papers out, sent them to Holt, Rinehart & Winston. And I said to 00:40:00 Calloway, "Stay off the phone. I'm going to stay off the phone for two weeks. I'm not going to talk to any of these sons of bitches. And we'll just wait it out, see what happens." My wife was in tears. I said to her, "You're married to a mouse or a man." Anyway, we waited it out, and finally got a call from a vice president. And he said, "I'm so sorry to hear about this quarrel in our family of authors." [laughs] This guy was supposed to do the stuff and he had a little trouble, and he was supposed to get me to, he was to put oil on troubled waters, to use that phrase, "the family of authors." Was hardly the case. Was a family 00:41:00 of nothing. And so I said to this man, after staying off the phone, I got a letter from him, too, and he said, "Well, I hate to see this happen in this family of authors. We'll see if we can resolve this." And I said, "You read the contract, didn't you?" "Yeah," he said, "you've got us. But I want to tell you something. If you get it printed in hard cover, you'll see that the students use the same book for about ten years. But if you do the paper cover, they will buy the book every semester." I said, "Why the hell didn't you tell me that in the first place?" [laughs] And he said, "Well, I'm sorry that this happened. I guess we just had some miscommunication." And he said, "What can we do for you?" I said, "You can go and publish the thing and give me fifty copies in hard cover, and you can do the rest your own way." He said, 00:42:00 "Okay, we'll do it." So they published the thing, and then they did make fifty hard cover copies. They weren't done well, they were printed very badly, as I thought perhaps they would. So that was the end of that. But they had so little faith in the book that they printed it short. It was gone within a couple of months. And I was getting telephone calls and letters from people all over saying, "Where is this book? Where can I get this book?" And I was very irritated because I was mad at Holt all over again. I was boiling mad. But the fact was, it actually worked in favor of 00:43:00 the book because it built up a very considerable demand for it. So when they had to wait, the publisher has to wait their tum to get on a press that will do a lot of books. And it may take them a few months to get back in line. They can't just jump in because stuff they've got ahead of them. So when they finally got the book published, there was a big rush for it, and it immediately sold exceedingly well. And I found out about it on a trip back from Europe. We arrived there in the spring of 1961, I think it was. There were some guys in the department there, Italo Scanga and Warrington 00:44:00 Colescott and one or two others. So it was a marvelous time to have fun. We just got off the boat and ran into these guys. So I went up to Holt, Rinehart & Winston, met this same vice president, and he said to me, "It is time to figure out the spring sales. And if you like, I'll go downstairs and find out what the check will be." I said okay. We went downstairs and he said, "Well, this spring is five thousand dollars." I thought, holy mother! This is unheard of! And I thanked him and we 00:45:00 left. And then we really celebrated. BT: This is Barry Teicher. I'm at Professor Anderson's again. And it's September 30, 1991. DA: Well, when I came here, some of the Milwaukee people were already here. Alfred Sessler was one of them. He took over the print area and did that all alone, all media, but particularly skilled at lithography. That was what he did best was his own stuff. And he did an awful lot of prints and was extremely popular. He was also popular with students. I don't know how many people he kept in touch with, but they were very loyal to him and everybody 00:46:00 liked him. I couldn't see why, myself, because my talents didn't run in that direction. But the students were extremely loyal, and some of them, they kept on corresponding with him long after he had left school. And Santos Zingale was also a Milwaukee person. He was on the staff, too, I think. DA: And Dean Meeker came the year before I did. He said that he had gotten an offer from Michigan State, too, for the same sum of twenty-six hundred dollars. But that he, for some reason I can't remember, that he chose Wisconsin. He had a hard time with housing, too. And at one time he was in 00:47:00 the barracks at Truax Field. And he said one morning he asked a question and the person next door answered it. [laughs] So he was pointing out the transparent and very poor construction on these dwelling units. But so what. What does the government care about how soldiers live, anyway? They never have. DA: Then of course Fred Logan was also on the staff. And he came from Milwaukee and already had some experience in the schools 00:48:00 there. So he was the principal person in art education. And he was a very sound kind of individual. If you think of an artist as being slightly eccentric or nutty, he wasn't. Nor his wife, was a charming lady. Now let's see. I think that John Wilde when I came here was a graduate student. But presently joined the staff as an instructor. Then year by year people were added. I think perhaps when I came here that Bob Grilly was also an instructor. Then gradually people were added. Some of them, I remember one of them had been hired who hadn't graduated from college and it was a 00:49:00 slight oversight on the part of the old ladies. When the rest of the responsible faculty, probably meaning Fred Logan found out about it, the boy had to go back and get his degree. And one or two people left. I thought some of them under rather suspicious circumstances. DA: I remember a boy named Al Sherman got, was shown the door, told him to get out. I assume that was because he was Jewish. But there's no really way you can prove that that was the truth. I suspected it was. And to show how talented Al Sherman was, he promptly got a job with CBS in New York City and remained there, because he was a very skilled person. I cannot vouch for how he did his class, because I never went there. DA: And as people year by year gathered, it was really harder to keep track 00:50:00 of them when they came. Colescott came a couple of years after I came here. And he was teaching in a place called, oh, something beach state college in California. BT: Long Beach State? DA: I think it was Long Beach State. And he came here. People liked the things he sent. People liked them. Then after they came, they decided they had not made a mistake, and that he fitted in well here. Was a very interesting guy. Had an interesting wife whose maiden name had been Sedlov. In other wordsshe was a Russian. [laughs] And she told a lot of funny stories about his wife's mother. His 00:51:00 wife's mother suspected him of kidnapping, what the hell was her name? I should know quite well. Vera. Her mother suspected that Colescott had kidnapped her. She had been missing for a couple of days. You could imagine where she was. But one day he was going to class and saw Mrs. Sedlov peering behind some bushes. And she said to him, "Psst. Where is Vera?" [laughs] And that was the way of tracking down her daughter. She was a very spirited and funny person, although the marriage between the two of them did not last very long, for reasons that I have no idea about. She rather settled, when they separated, she went to New York and pursued a career there. And I think I covered most of the people that came in the early days. Some came and went and 00:52:00 did not make much of a mark here. DA: We return to the time after the Elements of Design came out. It was quite successful. And I remember in spite of what Holt, Rinehart & Winston thought about it, it really became successful. I knew it probably would, because I knew that there was a market for it. So it was in print for seventeen years, which is unusual for an art book, or any other. And one time I remember in a vulgar display I met Phillip Hamilton at the mailbox one evening, just when the spring checks from Holt came out. And I said to him, "Would you like to see something vulgar?" He said, 00:53:00 "I don't mind." So I tore the check open. And it was for eight thousand dollars. A lot more than we were getting paid in those days. So he was quite impressed. So I was I, as a matter of fact. But then, after that book was over, it had been such a hassle and been so long in preparation including a lot of gloomy days in the subbasements at libraries, which I hated, that I never liked, even to this day, really like to sit in libraries. I like to be out of doors, fishing or something. So there was a three-year interval in which I didn't do anything about books at all. This was after 1960, '61 or '62. And I spent all this time just drawing, mostly jazz 00:54:00 musicians. And that period was really a great deal of fun because it was a kind of release from this terrible life of scholarship. I was never meant to do anything like that anyway. So I had a lot of fun with that, and did a huge number of very bold things done on huge blotters with about a pint of India ink and some huge brushes. Very rough. If there was a slick brush among the lot of them, I cut them off with a scissors in a way that was very irregular so they couldn't possibly put a slick stroke on any piece of paper. They were all rough. And I simply liked this way of working. And I don't know, I thought I found one guy in New York who had some things in Fortune that had drawn and painted on blotters, but it was pretty rare. And there was probably a 00:55:00 reason for this. Because the substance that made the paper was not very sound. That is, it would tear easily. And this would not hold up under any kind of punishment. But I didn't care. It was just fun doing them. And I did that off and on for about three or four years, and collected a huge number of things, which I didn't do anything with at the time. I didn't even exhibit them. DA: And about at the end of that time, and I decided perhaps it was time to go and do another book. So I approached Holt, 00:56:00 Rinehart & Winston through a salesman named Dan Wheeler, or rather, Dan Wheeler had become the college editor of the place. He and I got along fine. And on the second book, The Art of Written Forms, we had absolutely no disagreement or quarrel whatsoever. He simply gave me my lead, said, "Do whatever you want." And he even offered in The Art of Written Forms, he said, "You want a signature with full color?" I said, "No, it's not about full color. It's just about writing." So I actually turned it down, although we had a signature or two with two colors. Sometimes it benefited to have a sort of tan color against the black, making some things look 00:57:00 pretty good. And so although it was tedious and very long process to get that book, there was no mental anguish about quarrels with Holt about anything. Except toward the last they had decided to make a short pitch to some part of the audience that he thought I was missing. And so I had to rewrite a chapter and apparently it wasn't satisfactory. And the subeditor, a lady, rewrote the chapter for me and used one word, "neophyte," the word was. She used this word "neophyte" about twelve 00:58:00 times in a row. And Ijust thought it was beyond anything that a smart editor should do. It was the kind of word use once in a whole chapter and never see it again. So I had to rewrite the thing again, taking all the "neophytes" out of it. And it was assumed then that me and the lady editor hated each other. Well, I never met her. So anyway, that book was published and was thought to be a kind of artistic success. Didn't make any money, because there are not many classes devoted to the subject, but it did get a lot of good reviews, including one in the London Times, which was pretty unusual, because it's pretty rare. Anyway, that part of the thing was over. 00:59:00 The book didn't stay in print very long because it simply didn't sell. And about 1978 or so, Holt decided to quit trying to sell it. And they sold the remainder of the book to the Pentallic Company in New York. It was a firm devoted to selling calligraphy supplies. And I asked the fellow there how many books he had. He said, "I'm not trying to sell them. I'm trying to make them last for two years." And I still didn't know how many he had. Didn't care very much. So that sort of ended that episode. DA: I must say, if l haven't gone into this 01:00:00 before, I must ask, did I go into the reason why I stopped exhibiting? BT: About how much hassle it was with the framing and everything like that. DA: Yes, well, I thought of a kind of unusual story in connection with trying to sell your artwork. It's been thought that many people in New York spend half of their time, the artists, spend half their time trying to sell their work. And you have to be a good salesman. I guy I met in the army, for example, he liked it. He was an excellent salesman. Told jokes and liked to meet people. So he didn't mind making the route once a week, he spent two days a week just going around seeing people. Liked to talk to them, so he got a lot of 01:01:00 work. But I was very poor at that sort of thing. And in connection with the business of selling, there was one lady from Milwaukee who tried to befriend me in the way of saying she wanted to handle my work. And she was fairly aggressive about this, which turned me off rather quickly. And I found out that she not only wanted to sell my work, but the duties would include jumping into bed with her. This was even more repulsive than I had thought, because I had heard of such hanky-panky in New York City, was a common gossip among artists. But I didn't think it was going to happen in Wisconsin. But anyway, 01:02:00 we held this conversation in Corcoran's Bar on Old University Avenue. And I remember saying I wasn't interested. And she in some disgust said, "Well, a person who won't be helped, can't be helped." So we parted, and I never saw her again. DA: Then later on, after a decent interval after The Art of Written Forms, I did do a book for University of Wisconsin Press. But it didn't involve years and years of work. It just was based on a Renaissance alphabet I had found, had not been reproduced ever. And one day Mr. Kaplan, the head of the library, was out here 01:03:00 talking. It seemed as though the people on the board of the university press was not impressed by the guy who was running it. And they were actually scouting for things to be published that they thought for sure that the person who directed the press should have been putting out phonograph records a long time ago, a long time from that. And they thought that his approach was not very aggressive. So they asked me what I was doing, and I told them I was working on a Renaissance alphabet. So they immediately rushed down and put this proposition to the director of the university press. And they 01:04:00 took it over and published the thing. It was a Renaissance alphabet by a Vatican scribe. The alphabet itself was extremely elegant. And it was the best alphabet ever done in the Renaissance period. And it hadn't been published for some strange reason. And I liked doing that, because the alphabet was so handsome. And it sort of set the record straight, too, as to who among the dozens of practitioners in the Renaissance had actually had the sensitivity to Roman capital. DA: And after that, I didn't do any books except some informal books with Phillip Hamilton, who had joined us from University of Indiana, who'd done his underclass work at University of Cincinnati. 01:05:00 And then had done his graduate work at University of Indiana, which was very impressive in some respects. One time, this involved a dean of Letters & Science. We were having a breakfast someplace and it was very hard to get the topic that this dean of the College of Letters & Science, we had a hard time conversing. I didn't know what the hell to talk to him about. And he wasn't interested in talking to me at all. 01:06:00 And finally for some reason the University of Indiana was known twenty or years or so ago by having accomplished a great deal in their music department, and hiring professionals at a great rate, and assuming sort of a nationwide reputation as an excellent reputation in music. And a lot of people knew about it. And I happened to mention this to this dean. And he was very glum about it. And he said, "It's still a fourth rate university." [laughs] That ended the conversation that day. I should mention that the name of this gentleman we're talking about was dean of Letters & Sciences, Mark Ingraham. I hadn't met him before, and I never met him again, either, for obvious reasons. Sometime after all these publications, of course, 01:07:00 Phillip Hamilton and myself did three or four books collaborating with each other that I would do, sometimes I would do the drawings and write some notes and he would print them. And we did several along this line. One of them was a book on wrenches. These were tools found in various trades, and the way they looked. And I sort of found them fascinating. Then when you take all the tools that various trades have, there are literally thousands of them, like a line man on telephone, he's got a whole belt full of them. Lawnmower people has hundreds of these things. And it was difficult to borrow some of these tools because if you went to a garage, people wouldn't let you 01:08:00 take them out, and you couldn't get a photograph of them. But Phillip solved this by putting in the back of a station wagon a camera on a vertical slide and two lights, one slanting in from each side, to put a light on the wrench that you would put below. Then he would slide the thing to get it into focus and take a picture right there in the garage, or outside. He got a lot of those. So he did a whole book on wrenches. I drew the pictures of the wrenches. And we didn't, I think we did three books together. 01:09:00 And we won awards for all three of them. And they were fairly prestigious, too. One of an important design society in New York. And several book competitions here and there. And so we did all these three books, and had a lot of fun together, but we won awards on all of them. That is not to say we sold any of them. DA: Anyway, after these books that we did together, which for me were a lot of fun, and for Phillip, a lot of work, because he printed them all on a letterpress--which he was supposed to be good at, and he was--then after a while, about 1975, we met a guy who was the artistic director for the University of Chicago Press. Hamilton and I were up in a place near the Dells where the 01:10:00 Chicago typographers were having a meeting. And we were up there together just to attend the conference. And a girl came up to me and said, "I'm Martha." I didn't know who she was. But it turned out she had been at my house in Madison many times with a nephew of mine. Now she was married to this director of the University of Chicago Press. Anyway, his name was Cameron Polter. He was a Scot, highlander Scot, tall guy, which made you suspect that he was, had some probably Norwegian blood in him from all the Norse invasions of northern Scotland. Anyway, he was a designer in London for a long time before he came to the University of Chicago Press. Well one time he was up 01:11:00 here and he said, "Well, why don't you print some of your calligraphy and see if it will sell?" And I thought, that's worth trying. So I did that. And I thought that it would be very difficult for me to find fifteen quotes to do this calligraphy about. They were hard to find. You didn't just run into them every day. But after a while, it got easier. So I started to, got some three folding tables and put the calligraphy that I had made under some transparent plastic so they could be seen easily. And I got some panels to lean on the tables and put them [into?]. And then got a 01:12:00 license to sell them in front of the bookstore downtown mall across, between the bookstore and the library where there's a good place to be because the people who went in there, either one of them, one would suppose that they knew how to read. So that kind of eliminated a lot of people. And that was true. Anyway, it was so much fun that I didn't mind doing it. It was something to do when you didn't want to go fishing anymore. I'd been fishing in Canada and Florida and California so many times that I was beginning to tire of it, and thought of something to do and perhaps to do when I retired. So I stayed on the mall altogether for about ten years. DA: One thing 01:13:00 that I sold was a piece by Stephen Vincent Benet, the poet, about Robert E. Lee. The first sixteen lines of the poem were devoted to Traveler, Lee's horse. And these are elegant. And I found a front view of a horse and a side view, these are old steel engravings, and they were simply marvelous. So I stuck one of them, I stuck them both in, and spaced the poetry around these two pictures. And what I dreamed of was that the horse lovers would flock to the place by the thousands and buy up these things. 01:14:00 Unfortunately, the people who loved horses never went in the bookstore. [laughs] And I was faced with the fact that hardly anyone liked this piece except, it turned out, that a lot of teenaged girls loved the piece, because a lot of teenaged girls love horses. I don't know why this is, but it happens, that's true. So that, but the trouble is that these kids were wild to get a hold of this piece, but they didn't have any money. So one or two of them were very anxious to get a hold of it. So I told them that after five o'clock, the thing sold for three dollars. And that's what they had. So I told them to get it up, so they did, and they departed skipping and singing happily. But this same piece of Benet was, resulted in another kind of funny incident. I saw out in front of the stand one day a group of four Africans. You suspected that they 01:15:00 were from Africa because they were quite dead black. And furthermore, they were talking with Oxford accents. And one suspected that they were from Africa, one of those people who had been educated in England. That turned out to be true, and after looking at this piece for a while, one of them said to me, "I say, do you have this same thing with a donkey?" I was astonished! I had never thought of any such thing, because in American history, it doesn't work that way. I couldn't believe my ears. So I 01:16:00 went out in front and talked to him, a foot away, or a foot and a half away. I said, "What did you say?" He said, "I say, do you have this same thing with a donkey?" I said, "No, I don't." And that appeared to be the end of it. But I was greatly puzzled by this very strange request. And I thought it was absurd. That there must be a parallel universe somewhere where Robert E. Lee appeared at Gettysburg on a donkey. [laughter] But I was really puzzled by this. I was totally incompetent to figure out why the guy had said that. A faculty member came by sometime later and he said, "Don't you understand?" He said, "There are no 01:17:00 horses in Africa." I couldn't believe him! You know, that didn't seem to fit. But he was pretty sure that this was true. But he must have known, or he wouldn't have said it. But that was just one of the joys of being on the mall, partly because I saw everybody that I'd ever known passing by there. And it was a wonderful part of a social life. You would see all these people and talk to them again, and just find out where they had been and all that. And then, concerning this same piece, a faculty member came by and said, "Well, you know that President E.B. Fred's father raised that horse, Traveler." I said, "Oh my gosh. What a coincidence." Of course, everybody knew that E.B. Fred was from Virginia. DA: Then there were lots of other pieces that attracted attention, too. One of them was about 01:18:00 Toto, "I have a feeling that we are not in Kansas anymore" This had been handed in by a student. And for some reason, I took a liking to it, also. And it was said to have been made popular by a disc jockey in the East. I don't know if that's true. But I tried the thing myself. But I could not make it compose well, and it never did compose well. I was never satisfied with it. The words were not enough in order to make the thing fit any kind of piece of paper. Nevertheless, I think one year was sold better than anything that I did that year. I must have sold five hundred of them. Some way, students seemed to at that moment, seemed to think it fit what they were thinking about. It's kind of a strange thing, but maybe it involve that 01:19:00 students have a feeling that they're also lost. Then later on, after some years, I found the thing that older people liked. That said was invented by a lawyer in one of the California colleges. He hadn't written it correctly, but what it said in the end, after I'd put the punch line on the end of it, said, "Youth and skill are no match for old age and treachery." And a lot of people liked that thing. And they would buy it. And the old people never bought anything from me. But the middle aged people bought a lot of those things in order to give to somebody they knew who was older and thought they'd be amused by it. So I think I gave the professor in California 01:20:00 credit for writing the thing. And I think one, well one of my, the best day I ever had on the mall sold 150 dollars. And it was kind of strange the way it happened. Because on that particular Saturday, there was a great influx of a drum and bugle corps from all over the country. They were the prize winners in various numbers of states that had come to Madison to do their stuff in the stadium. And they would get away with prizes of various sorts. And I could not figure out why on earth I should sell well on a day when the drum and bugle corps were in town. And it was really hard to figure out, except that finally it occurred to me that the escorts of these various drum and bugle corps were high school teachers. And there were a huge number of them escorting, or being chaperones, to bring these units into the university. And that's why these literate schoolteachers were in town by such large numbers. And that is how I happened to make that particular record of, well, that was the best day I ever had on the mall was on that occasion for that reason. DA: The other thing that was pleasant about the mall vending was that the knowledge of people, the mall vendors themselves, they were an interesting lot because they held together by uniform despise of regular hours. They didn't want to be shoe clerks or anything like this. They were all independent people, and they acted that way. And every year they would get together and have a picnic, which was a lot of fun, too. We would go to a park and just sit around and talk and drink for a while. And I still get calls from some of them. One jeweler just called up the other day from being in town. She had been selling in various country shows. And we hadn't met this summer. And she was calling up trying to make a date for lunch, which we didn't quite do, but always have before when she came up from Texas. DA: Which brings up another subject, and that is that there's something that shouldn't be told about certain kind of vendors. And that is that while they purport to do their own work, it's impossible to do that much work in one winter. When they go to art fairs, perhaps thirty of them during the summer, then have big sales, it's patently impossible for one person to do that much work. So some of the pieces, they just train people to do them. And you're not supposed to tell them that. But on the mall, it was run by people up in the square. And they had some peculiar rules, anyway. You were supposed to have made all this work yourself. And if you didn't make it all yourself, you were not supposed to get a license to do so. In spite of the fact that there was a jeweler there, a guy with a large red beard, that didn't even know which end of a torch was which. He knew nothing about making jewelry. He had been trained as a historian. And actually sold books for many, many years. I don't know how he got into this jewelry business. But he didn't know how to make anything. And he was a fabulous character anyway because he loved to gamble. Which he loudly proclaimed was better than sex. [laughs] Has a lot of interesting ways to put this. But he loved to gamble. And anyway, no matter that he didn't do any of this artwork, and he couldn't have, and sold a lot of junk that anybody could see was mass produced, nevertheless, he got a license to sell every year. And I'm not saying that the people who ran this program were crooked, I guess they just gave him a license, said, "Well, you're here the first year, so we'll just give him the license." But he was the source of many interesting tales, including one about people who sell jewelry are very susceptible to shoplifting. And once in a while, if they will catch one, they will set up a system to see, if they ever see that person come back, they know they're going to do it again. So they have a system of watching them. And sure enough, they caught one lady. And this red bearded gentleman immediately went around and took her pants down from waist to ankles where all this stuff came falling out. [laughs] It was funny the way it happened. I suppose it was very embarrassing for the lady, but he thought it was a lot of fun. BT: This is Barry Teicher. This concludes the interview with Professor Anderson.