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| Pianoforte made of papier-mache for 1867 Paris World's Fair |
I was amused by cousin Tom during my last visit there in the 1990s. He was taking me on a tour of Kansas City and I asked him about the politics. Is it liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, wealthy or working class? His answer: it depends on where you are. He said, "At this particular moment we are in liberal Democrat territory." A few seconds later he piped up again, "And now we are in conservative Republican territory." The difference? We had just crossed State Line Blvd, the border between Missouri and Kansas. (Yes, there are two Kansas Cities in two different states with two completely different cultures and governments. And, contrary to popular belief they are separated not by the Missouri River but by a simple boulevard. But don’t fret. Until last week, I too thought they were separated by the river.)
Kansas City Kansas is Republican, Kansas City Missouri Democrat. State Line Blvd is a five lane street of which the eastern two lanes are in Missouri and the western two are in Kansas. But nobody seemed to know who had jurisdiction over the middle left-turn lane. I wondered out-loud whether if you committed a crime in Kansas and then stood in that middle lane, would they be able to arrest you? Aunt Jeanne commented that only I would ask such a question. Yes, it does take the mind of a dramatist to speculate about such things. I’m sure there’s a script in there somewhere.
Arriving late Thursday after a very pleasant two-day drive, the festivities began first thing Friday morning when cousins Tom and Kathy, tour guides and docents at the Nelson-Atkins Kansas City art museum, took us on a customized tour of the special World’s Fair exhibit there, with samples of exhibits from every World’s Fair in history. The art work was fabulous. Even though most every piece was well over 100 years old, everything looked brand new. That’s because these were one-of-a-kind pieces made especially for that particular world’s fair and represented the very best of what that country had to offer. It was obvious all these pieces had been crated up after the fair and have been sitting in a warehouse ever since, so has not been touched in all these years before landing at this exhibition. What a thrill to look at 150 year old pieces of art that looked like they had just been finished that day.
The greatest find? The world’s most unique piano – the only piano in the world made out of paper and built for the 1867 World’s Fair. A beautiful instrument constructed entirely from papier-mache, it has to be the only one of its kind. Of course, they wouldn’t let anyone touch it, let alone play it. But since the World’s Fair represented the very best of offerings, I have to assume it was probably a decent sounding instrument, though I can’t imagine how you can get any kind of decent tones from paper. But who knows? You can compress wood so it’s as hard as iron, so maybe you can compress paper so it’s as hard as wood. If so, it could be possible. I’m going to make a project out of finding out who made this and if the plans are still available somewhere. It comes from the Pittsburgh museum so there may be someone who can tell me. If so, someday I can have my tuner, who is also a master restorer, build me one. There may be a whole new path of discovery in music that can be opened up here.
Kathy and Bob also are quite accomplished collectors and their home is a museum in itself, my personal favorite in their collection being a piece of wire mesh crumpled on a board. From a distance, it looks like a piece of abstract modern art. But when you shine a light on it in just the right way, it forms the shadow of a perfect and very detailed portrait of a nude on the board behind it. Could not imagine the talent it took to bend the mesh in just the exact way to produce that illusion.
It also turns out that the famous artist Thomas Hart Benton was resident to Kansas City for a number of decades, had his studio but a couple blocks from the museum and taught art there. Quite an extensive collection of his work. In the gift shop, I lucked out and found a beautiful painting he had done with a Hollywood theme. I will be framing a print over my mantle at the new house.
After the museum, the first big party was at Pat and Jane’s place in KCKS where, for the first time, I met most of my cousins’ now mostly grown children. I was stunned to discover that two of Tom’s three daughters had followed a path into film, and the third wasn’t too far behind in graphic design. Jessica has recently completed her degree in Film Studies and is working at an arts cinema which programs off-beat independent films. Suzanne took her degree in Documentaries & Humanities, focusing on using the documentary medium to advance social causes. And Katie, recently married, has gone back to school to acquire more expertise in graphic design.
Saturday was an all-day get-together at Jeanne’s condo punctuated by another museum tour and capped by a luxurious banquet at the Plaza. Lots of pics coming. After dinner, the party went back to Jeanne’s condo for much more munching and socializing, games of foos ball and Jenga, not to mention the at least 15 to 20 very thick photo albums that everyone was traipsing through down memory lane, a record of nearly a century of family history. Jane also put together a rather impressive family tree of just the Grogan side and I learned for the first time that we had quite an extensive lineage from Germany, much moreso than just the Schmitts and Doelles, and relatives who had fought in the Civil War. I not only photographed the chart to add to my own genealogy files but got an extra copy of the very large chart. As Jane continues to archive everything, I will be adding to the collection as I scan the 1200 plus photos in Grandpa Grogan’s five oversized albums, 30 of which I contributed to the reunion collection.
And while awaiting the big banquet Saturday night, I joined the young people on yet another excursion to the Nelson-Atkins, for I had to have one more look at that paper piano that was built special by an English pianoforte maker for the 1867 Word’s Fair exhibition in Paris. I’m told in the 19th century it was playable and sounded quite good. I recruited Jessica to pose next to the piano while I attempted to snap a photo of it but was promptly stopped by museum staff who very politely told me that photography of anything in the exhibit was prohibited. I know you can’t photograph oil paintings since the flash degrades the pigment, but there was nothing here that flash photography could hurt. No, they informed me that it was entirely due to copyright issues. The Nelson-Atkins brochures could not even show a full pictorial of the instrument. The only photo I was able to find I took from the web site of the Pittsburgh museum from whence it came. This is the photograph at the head of this posting, the only photograph of this one-of-a-kind work of art and music.
It was incredibly hot in Kansas City, high 90s with practically all humidity, so thankfully everyone’s AC was performing top notch. I was told we were catching them on a cool week. The week before it was 105 and was expected to be back there by the end of this week. So I was grateful for any little favors the gods could give us. Suzanne, being the starving artist, had an outstanding cheapie tip for beating the heat. For those of you who want to stay cool without running up huge energy bills, soak your bed sheets in cold water and hang them over your open windows. According to the resident expert, even a small breeze coming through that sheet has the same effect as air conditioning. And here’s another tip I got off AOL the other day. Fill a large mixing bowl with ice and put it in front of a fan. It will take hours to melt and will have the same effect as a wall unit, air conditioning for pennies a day. Thanks, Suzanne.
I have saved the bad news for last. The downside of the reunion were those who were absent. As everyone in the family is now well aware, our Uncle John was felled by a heart attack just days before the festivities which were nearly a year in the planning. The sad fact was that the funeral was the very day of the first big party in Leawood, Kansas. The entire Carolina and Ohio contingents of the family were unable to come, but we all shared many stories of Uncle John and toasted him on the final night. As we arrived in Leawood, Jane greeted us all with a goodies package in which Cyndie had already provided a DVD of the Celebration of Life that she had produced for the memorial service, to which many of us contributed. So we all left the reunion late Saturday night with a very special DVD, much memorabilia, a special personalized GroHo Reunion water bottle, and an impressive collection of photos taken that weekend.
Many of us left first thing Sunday morning and I was no exception, making a beeline to St. Louis to meet my new Hawaiian friend Nancy for the first time. She has been struggling with CFS since the mid-1990s, like me had to give up a lucrative professional career. Unlike me, she has been doing it alone. At least I had my parents. She has been scraping by all these years on her nest egg from her previous career as a psychologist and family therapist and the very meager benefits one gets from disability. She has it worse than I did, which is saying quite a lot since I had it pretty damned bad. But unlike me, she has managed to live on her own in Hawaii all these years and only ran out of her savings and forced to move to St. Louis and stay with her mother just two months ago. The transition has been rough and she is counting the days until she can return to the islands. I thought she could benefit from getting out of the house for a few hours so I stopped by Sunday afternoon and took her to lunch. She was putting on a happy face but I knew it was mostly adrenaline, that she would be going home after just this three hour visit and crashing for a couple days to recover. I know the feeling well. I went through it for seventeen years.
I departed St. Louis at 5:30 and arrived at the Red Roof Inn in Springfield at 7:30, plenty of time for a good night’s sleep and then hitting all the Lincoln sites 9 a.m. Monday morning. I had seen the law offices on the way in Thursday morning, and those were impressive, 80% of the original materials preserved since 1860. As the docent told us, we were not only in the same exact room in which Lincoln conducted his practice for 24 years, we were also walking on the same exact floorboards that Lincoln walked on. (Or to be more precise, we were allowed to look at the same floorboards. It was of course chained off. The adjacent floorboards that the public walked on had naturally been replaced multiple times since 1860.) There was even a precise replica of the federal court house that had been right next door in the 19th century and had now been reproduced 20 feet over and just a few feet from the actual law office. This was the court house in which Lincoln defended the famous "Almanac" murderer and saved an innocent man from hanging by cleverly pulling an obscure little fact from the Farmers Almanac to prove his client’s innocence. Anyone who cares for more details on this famous case can check out the classic John Ford film from 1939, "Young Mr. Lincoln," in which Henry Fonda played Lincoln.
On my return trip on Monday, I checked out Lincoln’s Tomb and his house. Lincoln had been buried several times due to fears of grave robbing and did not come to his final resting place in this tomb until 1875. His casket is encased under 25 feet of concrete so they’re pretty sure now it’s invulnerable to robbery. Mary Todd and the three children are in crypts in the wall directly opposite the President’s tomb.
The house was a real treat. In the early 1970s, the last of the residents of Li ncoln’s neighborhood left and the government then purchased the entire neighborhood and painstakingly restored it to the exact condition it would have been in when Lincoln left in 1860 to go to Washington. Of course, the materials had all been replaced several times and much of the furniture are period antiques that are simply as close to the actual furniture Lincoln would have used as the historians were able to find. Much of the furniture is still the real furniture but some had to be duplicated. But the houses and the streets are all real, all authentic, all the same streets and houses that Lincoln lived in and walked through. This was not a recreation as you see in so many other historical sites. Actually, Robert Todd Lincoln, who was still a practicing and enormously successful attorney in Chicago in 1900 (and could have been President for the asking; the party asked him many times to run and he was enormously popular so probably would have won without breaking a sweat) sold his parent’s house to the state of Illinois for one dollar on the condition that it be maintained as close as possible to its original condition in perpetuity and that the public never be charged to see the President’s house. And that’s the way it is to this day. Admission is free. 30 minute tours are held every ten minutes all day long, and each tour is filled two hours in advance.
The movie before the tour told the amusing story of how Lincoln walked to Springfield from Kentucky in 1837 with nothing but a bed roll and the clothes on his back. Completely penniless, the proprietor of the general store took pity on him and offered him a cot in the store’s backroom for pennies per week until he got on his feet. Quite an inauspicious beginning. He was almost immediately taken on as a clerk by the local lawyer and, within two years, had his law license and was a partner. During the next 23 years, he met and married Mary Todd, raised three boys, lived in three houses, became one of the most prosperous and popular residents of Springfield, served one term in the U.S. Congress and, with the slave issue, rocketed to national fame during the Lincoln-Douglas debates and, with a mere 40% of the vote in a three-party election with the newly formed Republican party, became President of a severely divided country on the brink of collapse.
And it’s all preserved in Springfield. For anyone who has studied Lincoln, this place is Disneyland. Though he had a fascinating life and an even more fascinating presidency, none of it can compare to the incredible drama that took place on his very first day in the Oval Office as the soldiers at Fort Sumter were being starved out under blockade and Lincoln, right out the gate, had to make the decision that would change the course of world history. Does he send a relief ship to Fort Sumter to save the soldiers from perishing, even though doing so will almost certainly start the war the last four presidents have painstakingly sought to avoid? Or does he follow the safe path, the politcally correct path, the path all of his advisers wanted him to take and were so forcefully pressuring him to take – sacrifice this handful of soldiers, but prevent a war? Yes, there is a powerful drama that took place during this first eight hours of Lincoln’s presidency, a day that would determine the course of the rest of the nation’s history. I’m going to make that drama someday.
And that is how I spent my summer vacation!
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