Monthly Archives: August 2015

Finger Lakes Art Show — Worth the Trip to Penn Yan

Well, we took too long, but we finally got up to Yates County Arts Center for the “Art in the Finger Lakes Exhibit.” It was worth the wait, and worth the trip.

Hang around long enough, and you get to ramble on about how things were in days gone by. I myself visited the Y.C.A.C. at two previous locations in Penn Yan, but the current Main Street gallery is the best. The location’s right for foot traffic and auto traffic, both local and tourist in each case. Art’s in the front window, waving you in.

I hadn’t taken more than three or four steps in when, whammo! There was my personal selection for Best of Show – “Keuka Leaf Dance,” a long horizontal watercolor by Bill Mowson. It’s an autumn view of the lake from Keuka Village in Wayne. While the lake is always lovely, what seized me in this painting were the late-fall leaves and trees in the foreground, and the overall pale cast to the colors. There were scarcely two days left of August when we went, and we’ve been commenting on the fact that despite the heat, we can see fall coming on. Maybe that increased the impact.

My second choice, and Joyce’s number one choice, was “Ducks in a Row,” print from original by Maddi Capuano. The mother merganser with her flotilla of ten little ones just makes you feel happy looking at it.

Number three for me was “The Gardener’s Workshop,” a large color photo by Sid Mann. I suppose equal credit here goes to the gardener, who packed this space with decades of license plates, wasp nests, deer antlers, tools, paint, a stove, and even a National Recovery Administration “blue eagle.”

Honorable Mention for me was shared by “The Serene Lake,” Catherine McBride’s spare autumn watercolor, and Judy Soprano’s watercolor winter scene, “Canandaigua Farm.”

Joyce liked many of the watercolors as well, but high on her list were several oils: “Van Etten Barnyard” by Curt Wright; Rendition of Iris Farm” by Judy Soprano; “The Glen,” also by Judy Soprano; and “Stone Point” by Bev Oben.

I’m curious as to why she favored oils while I favored water colors, and pale water colors at that. I wonder if it has to do with the fact that I have deficient color vision. I suspect that the darker shades of the oils slide together for me, preventing me from enjoying their full effect.

This exhibit, the heart of what you’ll find in the gallery just now, are paintings by Bill Mowson and sculpture by Don Sottile. But as you can see from my story there are plenty of other artists hanging as well, plus pottery and other art forms. Joyce was delighted with a sort of cheerful gargoyle egg separator by Sommerville Potters.

The space was originally built for a bank, and still includes the walk-in vault with its 17-ton door. I’m a strong proponent of the idea that good engineering is good art… indeed, of the idea that a thing is beautiful because it works, and it works because it’s beautiful. I always spend time before this door, with its constellation of interacting gears and rings and tongues. The interior metal work is even elaborately decorated! Admission to the gallery is free with a donation suggested, but really they could charge admission just to view this door.

“Art in the Finger Lakes” is a sale show, and it runs through September 5, so there’s still time to see and even to buy. Perhaps we should draw to a close with Bill Mowson’s five-panel giclee, “Bully Hill Nightfall,” a view of Keuka as the sun has just set, and lights come on around the lake. Very lovely. Very calm. Time to say good night.

We Finally Get Back to Rochester Museum and Science Center

We toured the Rochester Museum and Science Center last week. Apart from taking part in a Kwanzaa celebration there, we hadn’t visited in maybe twenty years. For a long time now, it’s been on our list of “places to get back to.”

As the name suggests, RMSC covers both science and the history of the Rochester area. But the science presentations are actually slanted toward the area, so each emphasis supports the other.

Just for instance, in the “Exhibition Earth” area a cast-bone mastodon skeleton faces a full-sized mastodon diorama. These large relatives of the elephant rumbled around our area something like 10,000 years ago. The presentation focuses on what “Rochester” was like at that time – how the climate, wildlife, vegetation, and human inhabitants differed from what we’d find today.

There’s also exhibitry showing significant mastodon finds locally, tying the whole thing together very nicely – AND an “archeology” pit where kids can dig for “fossils.” You can also wend your way through a “glacier,” suggesting those that covered our region during the last ice age.

If your museum hopes to be a really cool place, it needs a dinosaur skeleton. Apparently only one dinosaur type has been verified in New York state, thanks to tracks found down around Nyack – there’s been too much erosion of the appropriate strata to preserve many fossils. But by looking at the dinosaurs found in New England and Pennsylvania we can draw sensible conclusions, so when you visit look for the skeleton of probable resident Albertosaurus – small for a member of the tyrannosaur clan, but big enough to scare the dickens out of us.

In some ways even more exciting is a hall of life-size dioramas showing the flora and fauna of various habitats in our area today… in each case, the diorama is set at a particular location in the region, elevating it from the academic to the experiential. There’s also a set of small dioramas showing habitat and wildlife change over thousands of years, leading from the last ice age.

Another gallery focuses on weather and hydrology, including a slanted sand table where you (or your kids) can get hands dirty. Water flows continuously down, and you can restructure the lay of the land to see what changes it makes in the flow and direction of the water.

I loved maneuvering the underwater ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) with its television camera, and watching the screen as I went along. There’s also a large canal-and-lock layout that you (or your kids) can operate, with information tying in the Erie Canal’s significance for our area.

Up on the second floor is a good-sized gallery on Underground Railroad days in Rochester, focusing on several key escaped slaves, including Frederick Douglass. This held a special interest for us since one of the focus people is Austin Steward, who walked away from slavery in Bath and escaped first to Ontario County and then to Rochester. There he became a comrade of John Brown and Frederick Douglass, a key figure in the anti-slavery movement and the Underground Railroad, and a businessman of considerable wealth.

There’s also a gallery on Native American life, organized around such large geo-cultural groupings as Pacific Northwest, Southeastern Desert, Northeastern Woodlands, and so forth. I was about to step into a room dedicated to Seneca life when the P.A. system announced a third-floor presentation about Tesla coils on the third floor, so off we went, and were having a fine time indeed (who’s cooler than Tesla?) until the fire alarm went off.

The museum was evacuated safety and quickly, and actually it was a nice enough day that we could have just relaxed beneath the wide-spreading shade trees and considered it a fine afternoon… not to mention the fun of watching all the fire trucks. Word went around that they’d been working on the alarm system, and it had probably gone off by accident. Figuring that it would take a bit of time to properly check everything before reopening the museum, we decided to call it a day. Which means, of course, that we owe ourselves another trip to see the other half of the place. Which we don’t mind a bit.

One more thing I must mention. In Rochester Museum I had an experience I will probably never have anywhere else… encountering a flock of passenger pigeons. These many mounted birds suggest the time, almost within memory, when they covered our landscape in thousands… before we killed them off, in the joint names of sport and business… wiping out species far more quickly than the ice age did.

Try Out the One-Room School — at Steuben County Fair!

Leave a reply

One of the treats at Steuben County Fair is visiting the one-room school, operated by Steuben County Historical Society. This is one of almost 400 such schools that once were scattered across the county, and this particular one was moved from Babcock Hollow. Some folks renew old memories, while other (and younger) folks find out what school was like in days gone by.

Nobody had a car. Nobody had a bike. The five-year-olds walked, and the teacher walked, unless she got a ride in a horse-drawn buggy.

Nobody got a hot lunch, unless they lived close enough to run home at noon. Everybody else carried their cold lunch with them, or went without. The teacher couldn’t get any coffee, unless she heated it on the wood stove. There was no electricity, so they needed oil lamps on cloudy days. They used outhouses out back.

Everybody sat in one big room, and they all had the same teacher. She taught the five-year-olds to read, and she taught the teenagers to do algebra. But most teenagers quit to go to work, especially the boys, even before they finished eighth grade.

Sometimes parents dropped off kids too little for school, and the teacher had to baby-sit while she taught.

The teacher prepared all the lessons, and graded all the papers. She cleaned the school. She had to lay the fire in the heating stove, and maybe chop the wood. She probably had to board with the closest family, and if she got married, she usually had to quit!

There’s a lot of nostalgia about one-room schools, but like everything else they hd their good points and their bad points. State law let people teach in one-room schools even if they were still teenagers and didn’t have much training. Usually they didn’t get “promoted” to bigger schools.

Some teachers were great, and they have become the stuff of movies and legends and TV shows… an assertion that all was right in America, in those simple rural days before so many people lived in cities. Other teachers, though, were incompetent, appalling, predatory, or abusive.

Some students went on to become doctors and lawyers and generals and corporate presidents. But one-room schools were dead ends for many others. Even in the 1950s, scarcely half of the one-room students in the Corning area went on to high school.

The one-room schools seem like a piece of Americana, but it was mostly northern and western Americana. When unreconstructed Confederates seized the state governments of the south – often by force – one of the first things they did was close the public schools that had been opened by the postwar biracial governments. The white supremacists were determined to keep whites as well as blacks uneducated and economically desperate, so that the leaders could barter the labor of the poor. The one-room school wasn’t perfect, but it offered at least the HOPE of a chance to rise.

Anyhow – while you’re at the fair, stop in at the one-room school! Bring the kids! Try out the old games, look at the photos of hundreds of schools, and tell YOUR stories.

*****

We went to one-room schools in Steuben County!

Joe Paddock (Brundage [Cold Springs] School): veterinarian, president of Steuben County Historical Society

Tom Watson (Red School House): president of IBM

Benjamin Bennitt (Mount Washington School): lawyer, lieutenant colonel in the Civil War, Judge of Sessions

W.W. Averell (Gulf School): West Point graduate, Civil War general, diplomat

It’s Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s — Curtiss!

Leave a reply

So, if you were going to turn some Steuben County resident into a comic book hero, my votes would go for Glenn Curtiss and Charles Williamson, mostly because both of them in a lot of ways were bigger than life, and splashy along with it.

“Charles the Magnificent” has yet to make it into the primary-colored world of comic books, but Glenn Curtiss has. I collect comics, and a year or so back, hoping to find Mr. Curtiss, I took a chance on “The Illustrated Story of Flight,” published by Classics Illustrated in 1959. I was right, too. Glenn had been gone for 29 years by then, and he was far from forgotten.

The hero of Hammondsport gets half of a two-page story entitled “Pioneer Pilots.” Rather delightfully, the artist introduces Curtiss slouched way down in his easy chair, reading the paper. Here he learns of a $10,000 prize for a flight from Albany to New York (actually, you could go in either direction). That slouch or lounge, with shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows, wordlessly captures the down-home, off-the-cuff Curtiss.

Introduced as the man who built Charles Willard’s long-distance airplane, shown in three panels on the previous page (twelve miles! nineteen minutes!), Curtiss takes off from Albany on May 29, 1910, and soon runs into rough weather – depicted as a very impressive rain storm through which he forges ahead. Curtiss certainly had some trouble with turbulence, but not the storm shown here. In fact, he wouldn’t have dreamed of tackling it – he was a bear for safety.

The artist (possibly Ernie Hart) does a darned good, highly accurate job with Curtiss’s airplane. He obviously had some photo resources to work with. The panels describing Curtiss’s stop for service, and his successful landing, show Glenn in his “super hero” costume – suit, tie, high collar, and flat cap – a tiny circle even represents the cap badge that Curtiss always wore. In the final panel a smiling Curtiss sits in the pilot’s seat while the narration box enthuses, “Curtiss reached New York in only three hours!”, and a spectator shouts, “He did it!”

He did indeed. Glenn Curtiss was a huge hero in his day, the pre-World War I avatar of Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Yeager, Neal Armstrong, and Burt Rutan. His career might have been made for comic books, which didn’t exist yet, but he WAS a primary inspiration for the original Tom Swift books, largely written by a man from Binghamton.

So Curtiss gets a full page in “The Illustrated Story of Flight,” plus the not-quite half-page in which Willard flies a Curtiss airplane. The large final panel of Samuel P. Langley’s story notes that his aerodrome “was rebuilt and flown” many years later, with no mention of Curtiss, or the fact that that body of water in the picture is Keuka Lake. Two panels of “Between the Wars” show the NC-4 “first across” transatlantic flight in 1919, again without mentioning Glenn as the builder. All told, two pages of Curtiss stuff, out of 80. (The Wright brothers get eight, plus a few odd panels showing one of their airplanes.)

The Grand Comics Database (www.comics.org), which recently marked 222,222 issues documented from across the globe, lists Glenn Curtiss as a character in five fillers or text articles, all published (one of them in Sweden) between 1946 and 1969, plus this comic story, and a 1909 book of caricatures, both of which I documented myself for the database. So there’s plenty more room for a Glenn Curtiss comic – not to mention Charles Williamson. As Stan Lee would say, excelsior!

Hammondsport Historic Walking Tour — Please Join Us!

Leave a reply

On Friday, August 7, I’m going to be leading a historic walking tour of Hammondsport. We’d love to have you join us.

The Jewel of the Finger Lakes is a nice, compact little village, perfectly suited for a walk such as this. It’s got the spectacular scenery of the lake and the steep hillsides; its streets ooze history, and the village itself is a scenic treasure.

Early white land developers, basing themselves in Bath, immediately recognized the beauty and significance of what they already called (in the 1790s) Pleasant Valley. The water systems were vital transportation routes, and the vale of Pleasant Valley (including Hammondsport) made a key portage route between Keuka Lake and the Conhocton River. Judge Lazarus Hammond bought much of the village site (then called Peg Town) in the early 1800s, and Hammond’s Port took shape.

One of the really neat things about Hammondsport is that Glenn Curtiss or Alexander Graham Bell could step out onto the square today and still recognize most of it from 110 years ago… except, of course, that today the streets are paved. True, the Curtiss bike shop has been replaced by the post office parking lot. But the bandstand still highlights the grassy park. The Presbyterian church, with its town clock in the tall steeple, still presides over the square. Their town hall is still in public use (as the visitors center). Up the street the opera house still stands, and down by the lake the depot. One block over children go to Sunday School, just as Glenn did, at the Methodist church. At Lake and Main, Glenn would find his old school.

True, there are changes as well. Glenn’s house and factory are gone, along with his grandmother’s vineyards, replaced by the Curtiss Memorial School. The Civil War statue is now down the street, in Liberty Park. The streets are CHOKED with cars, but the steamboats are gone from the lake. The town has a fine new library. The hills are covered with trees.

Hammondsport, most of us probably know, has been officially declared the coolest small town in America. It’s been the center of Finger Lakes winemaking, and boatbuilding, and airplane manufacturing, and motorcycle making. Here are some items of interest, many of which we’ll be looking at on Friday.

*Hammondsport has four historic churches, two of which have Curtiss associations. St. Gabriel’s cheerfully proclaims itself the coolest Catholic church in the coolest small in America.
*In Hollywood tradition, a small town has a town square. Hammondsport is so traditional it has TWO… Pulteney Park, and Liberty Park.
*Parts of the old Academy building (now apartments) go back before the Civil War. Even the newest parts were built before we got into World War I.
*The Glenn H. Curtiss Memorial School was a New Deal construction, and served the community for 75 years.
*The Mercury Aircraft facilities on Davis Street were vastly expanded with army financing during World War II.
*The opera house was built in 1901, and almost burned down a week after it opened. They had all sorts of activities and performances in there, but as far as I can tell never an opera.
*The only “chain” businesses in Hammondsport are the convenience store and the Napa Auto Parts.
*Water Street, where the train met the steamboats, was the original business district, and a lot of the business was in saloons. Business migrated uphill after a series of fires.
*Hammondsport Glen was once an attraction to rival the one in Watkins.

So, Steuben County Historical Society is sponsoring the walk, which is free and open to the public – meet at 4 PM in the library parking lot (on William Street). In case of bad weather we’ll try to get any cancellation out via radio and our S.C.H.S. Facebook page, but otherwise… hope to see you there!