David Wiley and Sacramento and artist and Bill Long and Current Events

California Visit III, July 2004

Bill Long

An Artist's Past

On Sunday morning, July 18, I decided to opt out of attending church and visit, in its place, the Street Fair along Santa Cruz Avenue in Menlo Park, my mother's town. Santa Cruz Avenue is only a short walk from her home, and I basked in the 80 degree warmth as I walked there. Later in the day I would go up to the wine country for a friend's ordination.

It was your typical Street Fair, though with a decidely tony feel. Instead of vendors with loud spitting grills selling bratwurst were those peddling Thai delights or various kinds of dishes abounding in sprouts. The artists, too, had an upbeat character to them, as if showing up in Menlo Park not only obliged an artist to put out quality products but to do so in an optimistic mood. For example, one woman who worked in exquisite paper design incorporated, in her words, "upbeat" words or thoughts she ran across into the designs. She had no quotes, she told me when asked, on the Book of Job. Even the EMTs, whose number increased exponentially as the temperature soared into the low 80s, had genial smiles as they wandered through the crowd, attentive to the least sign that someone might be in danger of fainting. They already had an elderly woman on the pavement, and they were talking to her as one of their number sat back to back with the slightly overstressed senior. Art fairs are big business, I suppose, also for the medical establishment.

I stopped by the booth of a Sacramento artist, David Wiley, whose bold use of color arrested my attention. I read his resume, posted amid the paintings and discovered that he attended Kansas University from 1956-61. I lived in Kansas from 1990-96, but in a small town about 200 miles from Lawrence. Nevertheless, believing in my heart that Kansans have a kinship spanning decades and miles, I decided to strike up a conversation with him. After noting that he attended KU, I asked him where he was from. He told me he grew up in Hutchinson, KS. I told him I lived in Hutch, as the natives called it, in the 1990s. I then volunteered that I lived on West 20th, to which he responded that he grew up on West 20th. He said he grew up in the 100 Block and I told him I lived there too. Finally, we got down to it: he grew up at 106 W 20th and I lived at 101 W 20th. Two houses down, across the street.

All of a sudden, neither he nor I were in Menlo Park anymore. We were transported in the fulness of our mind's vision to a town in the crack of the Rand McNally national atlas 1700 miles away. Since he lived in the first generation of the Hyde Park neighborhood (where W. 20th Street was), the homes were known by the original owners: Wiley, Dunlap, Wolcott, Wagner, etc. I happened to live, he told me, in the Wagner house. I dimly remember others mentioning to me when I bought the house in the 1990s that it was the "Wagner" house in which I would be living. I told him that we moved to Hutch because my wife at the time was a pastor at First Presbyterian Church. He said that was his family's church, too, and that his aunt, whose name sounded vaguely familiar to me, still attended there.

We talked about Hutch then and now. I told him the town was dead when I lived in it in the 1990s; his memory of it was a bustling regional center in the 1940s and 1950s. And both memories were no doubt true. The 1960s brought the development of the Mall on the edge of town which siphoned business from downtown; the 1970s brought easy travel to larger cities, siphoning off the traffic from Western Kansas to Hutchinson and even turning parts of Hutchinson into bedroom communities of Wichita.

It seemed to me that Hutchinson was emblematic not simply of the development of mid-sized, non-freeway midwest towns in the latter half of the 20th century, but also might be instructive on the level of the psyche. The obvious point is that American mobility, cheaper goods through large cut-rate retailers and changing American living and work patterns has put a large segment of the Midwest at economic risk. For example, we bought our large and stately 1936 home on one of the finer streets of Hutchinson for $110,000 in 1993 and sold it for $107,000 three years later. The Midwest's inability to deal with the changing patterns of American life in the late 20th-early 21st centuries by developing alternative sources of business/income will probably not be corrected anytime soon. Only so many small towns can be tourist meccas, even if they boast the biggest ball of twine in the world, or the world's deepest hand-dug well.

But, on the level of the psyche, Hutchinson's decline mirrors what frequently happens to the mind and heart when change happens. It doesn't so much root out the caverns and buildings in the mind but replaces them, evades them, uses them partially. Our past is often nothing more than a series of old husks of buildings no longer used or still used and badly out-of-date. Just as these midsize towns struggle, sometimes unsuccessfully, to build off their past, so we often are evervated rather than energized by our own past. It is no less difficult to rebuild a bruised psyche than to rebuild a town that has seemingly grown obsolete.

All this from striking up a simple conversation with a sidewalk artist. I didn't buy anything of his, but I think we both left the conversation richer, by a long shot.