War & Johnny Carson's Shirt Size

Elle Smith Fagan  

a true story from the 1960's  dedicated to deployed military and their loved ones at home.

23 hrs · Edited · 

I was going to tell my happy  husband and Handsome Prince "when we're old" - a huge list of neat things couples  "keep in their hearts".   My handsome Prince got home from war just fine and to a fine successful life in work and love and fatherhood, but   I'll never get to tell him these things I saved.  He died  suddenly one morning,  well before retirement age.   But I can  share it with you:

He was an officer, with USACEngineers,  Black Diamonds special ops - showing Army Engineers how to NOT to use  the horribly carcinogenic Agent Orange  to clear foliage.   Just graduated with a degree in Chemistry, a healer - He loathed all  Chemical Warfare.   He enlisted before his draft notice arrived in July,  because, if he did so, he was promised that he could choose his job.

It was worthy , but it was war.  

The news shared a list of horrifying new war words daily, with "body bag" at the top!    I'd blanche and take a chair.   No Norman Rockwell and John Wayne easy patriotism - no.    Unable to sleep, the popular "Heeerrre's Johnnny!"  called my attention and tried to not be  "one tough audience" to get a laugh from -  though things for us were grim.  

Replying to audience comments and questions, he told us his shirt size !   What a guy won't say, to get a laugh!   But if you are Johhnnnnny, you can say ANYthing and bring down the house - even his shirt size won the moment.   OK, funny!

 But NOT for me;  Hypersensitive from love and fear, the mention of   "fourteen-and-a-half / thirty-two"  made me jump up -  Though my husband was taller, the shirt size was the same.  And suddenly for a moment I smiled in happy peace , remembering the first time I bought him a shirt, the first time I pressed one up for him for a fete, and the first time I trashed a worn out one that  he loved secretly and replaced it with a spotless twin.  Oh dear, I WAS missing him so much!

It was 1968 - there was no media - no internet  - no SKYPE - no email - nothing to bring reassuring live images of my deployed husband.   There was Silence, and often lost or delayed mail.  Food and other goodies I'd send were raided and never reached him.

I praised our baby, whose health made me NOT hold onto stress that would upset the infant in my arms.   Being a good mommy meant NOT hugging our son tighter than I should over it.  

But the silly moment worked and  after that night,  I'd watch Johnny Carson and fix on that shirt size, over and over - for the power of a factoid to generate connectivity.   It worked, somehow, till my husband's tour was done.   It was a way of poking fun at my own fears. 

My late husband's homecoming from war remains the  happiest day of my life - surpassing our wedding, our children's births, and even my art at the White House.   Till then Death was there constantly taunting me with promises to destroy all the work and love of my own birth and development to make a fine adult life.  Fear taunting constantly, no matter how cool and good and brave and busy I could be.  

But,  NO - you won't win this one....LIFE this time.   My Lieutenant USACE Black Diamonds - some months later,  walked through that door at LaGuardia - HOME - "all ten fingers, all ten toes",   and the love better than ever for the test!  

No Johnny Carson story for him - NOT that day.  Time - the gift of time was ours - no rush.   My husband had plenty of stories, as well, but one look at one another and we exulted :   "We'll talk about it when we're old!  We're not gonna have a problem ."  And we didn't!   Boundlessly grateful there was no PTS  for us!    Life - we won our right to a good life - with a  down-payment on the mortgage for it.  

   Even years later, with our babies half grown and softly sleeping in the next room , curled up safe and sound,  "watching Carson" with my husband - I'd sometimes remember the time of his deployment and that night when I was saved by "Johnny Carson's shirt size" on tv;  and I'd  feel  "moreso"  blessed for a moment,  by comparison to those late nights alone, with nothing but a fixation on a "shirtsize-in-common" to help me hold onto my mind.  Grateful praise !

Even widowed, years later I am fine and thriving for the goodness of the many years we made and enjoyed so well!

 To all who serve and to all who love them,   l send a good wish and a prayer that the Angels send at least a helpful bit of silliness, like "Johnny Carson's Shirt Size" to help any who need one.

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Thanksgiving Notes 2016

Such sneaky kitties!  Going from Halloween wild fun, straight on to Christmas - skipping the "Thank You" in-between.    If you know when this began, it would be good to comment on it here.   BECAUSE skipping the Thank Yous can be dangerous:  if we fail to appreciate it, we'll lose it .  

Fortunately there are no one-way streets in this world, actually - so we can fix the places where we veer off the winning path.    

To start, we should restore the Thanksgiving season among us as the GOLDEN - not BLACK - time of year it is supposed to be.   GOLDEN FRIDAY, and no longer Black Friday  is just so much better in every way!   Healthier and more cheerful and less rotten greedlust.    I have heard a dozen explanations of why they chosethen name,  "Black Friday" for a day of joyful gift shopping for the coming winter holidays.

 I don't believe any of it -  Black Friday is straight from Mordor and like the evil powers in the dark days of Middle Earth, in "Lord of the Rings".  Black Friday reeks -  its emanations are insidious and folk do not realize the evil till it dominates and it begins to hurt - really hurt - and then they wail and yell.  I plan to begin an online petiton on this topic and more.  Comment here if it interests you.

The stock market is up, and we can all do our part to "Make America Great Again"  and it is easier than you think.  There is probably a good talk at your home, church or wlrkplace to get people thinking winning thinking again and then most can do a small thing that helps and support those whe are doing the bigstuff.

We have a long list of thanks to share this year!    Most conditions have improved and we can ACT again and appreciae teh good in our lives, plain and fancy!    We jump up in the morning and run to do our day and often there is not time to stop and appreciate, they say. NOW there is time and we should not skip the Thank yous.   The day comes when we hang our heads in sorrow and acceptance of our failures, but it does not need to be that way, so much.  

Look in the mirror and thank yourself, for at least aiming to NOT fail YOU.  Then look around you - your warm home in cold weather and AC for the hot days; full fridge, and shops for the bit of delicious healthy things and sinful treats as well.   People to share with  - to wave hello and big farewll and friends to work with and play with, and maybe if you are realllly blessed a special someone who makes it all effortless - to celebrate with now and remember later!  

We are free and healthy or cared for if we are not fit for the road race!  We seen the new problems of the new millennium but we are ready to go at them and win!  IN fact, with interplanetary and space and astral things evolving so, peace on earth is likely to become closer to a reality than ever, since we are likely to be TEAM EARTH in all the real ways that used to be science fiction.  

Thank you for this day to see these miracles and may we be worthy and quick and full of fun while at it...and full of thanks afterward!  

Happy Thanksgiving!

Patriot pages

Patriot Pages  ~ May you find, here, patriotic  inspiration, refreshers and helpful links !      ~ elle 

THE VOTE FOR THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA  is a holy thing and Voting Day almost here - November 8th.    Many places have extended the registration options, in their desire to make it easier to vote, so if you forgot, there may still be time.  Check with your local government registrars or League of Women Voters or - "Voters Page"  some basics and links to Voting and Elections        IF you already feel fine about your own vote, get busy helping others - we are the family of Man and if we can, we should!     -elle

 

 

 

LINKS from this page :

- GALLERY OF PATRIOTIC IMAGES FOR PURCHASE

- "Patriots Primer" link to Basics for Americans

- "Veterans Page"  of helpful links and other contents

- "Voters Page"  some basics and links to Voting and Elections

- Elvis the Wrecker - an Mid-Century, All-American TRUE Story

American Flag by Elle Fagan Price on Request - contact artist.  These and other patriotic images and symbols are for sale here at the site and for your enjoyment at the Gallery of Patriotic Images link, above.    

Great Seal of the State of Connecticut, my Home State  - central to our State Flag,   the motto means  "They who tranasplanted sustain",  a reference to our success as transplants in the New World ,  symbolized by the grapevines,  whose transplanting has always been holy.

 

Love of Country,

Please do not skip these quotes from Great Men & Women

"...its soul, its climate, its equality, liberty laws, people, and manners.

My God!  how little do my countrymen know what precious blessing they are in possession of,

and which no other people on earth enjoy!"  -Thomas Jefferson

 

 

"All I can hope to teach my son is to tell the truth and fear no man. 

The only thing that counts is the right to know, to speak, to think...

that ,and the sanctity of the courts.

Otherwise it's not America" -Edward R. Morrow

 

"...when shall all men's good

Be each man's rule, 

And universal peace

Be like a shaft of light

Across the land"

-Alfred Lord Tennyson

 

"God grant, that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the Rights of Man,

 may pervade all the nations of Earth,  so that a philosopher may set his foot

anywhere on its surface, and say, "this is my country."  

-Benjamin Franklin

 

"He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide for many peoples;  

and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, 

and their spears into pruning hooks;  

nation shall not lift up sword against nation, 

neither shall they learn war any more.

-William Makepeace Thakeray, and the Bible

"The Constitution was not perfect when it was framed.  

It is not perfect today. 

Our Constitution, even our Bill of Rights,

Provides no set formula that fits all peoples around the world. 

But they do offer an inspiring example of ageless ideals realized and made to work,

with the eternal message that men and women everywhere

were intended to be free to shape their own destinies."  

...Warren Burger, Chief Justice of the United States (1969-1986) at 200th Anniversary of the Bill of Rights, from the Bowling Green, Kentucky  "Daily News"  January 27, 1991 

Click here for entire article

Patriot and the Arts
Grants for the Arts make the news . One headline stated that the President asked for much more than was granted, especially for a Major Project to help America become more familiar with its own Amazing American Artists . I think the project is important to America and the World;  the American Arts History.   ENJOY MY BLOG ENTRY:  "Art in America - a Timeline"  
 

            

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Photo Stories for my Soldier 1968

A friend shared her firstborn son's four-month  baby photo story at Facebook this morning and improved Monday measurably!  Thanksomuch, Jessica !   Mother and child are a gift to life itself!  It reminded me of our own son's baby days!   May this post help do my part for veterans and all loving parents.

The story:   My new husband and Corps of Engineers Lieutenant liked my Red Cross work  as he prepared for deployment with work as Assistant Brigade Adjutant at Fort Knox, Kentucky.  Partners in it all,  and now parenthood too!  Our new marriage was getting really good!   So he obtained an extension on his departure date so he could be there for the birth and the early christening, and then off to war, when our son was 22 days old.   But we had run along with our cameras as sweethearts and newlywed, and promised to let photos continue to help us stay close.  

I'd plan the photo shoot and get busy - back and forth as photographer and with a drafted helper, then, into the photo myself for my mommy role.  Then the editing:  I’d assemble the stories with captions and send them on to his Daddy in Viet Nam. 

With his degree in Chemistry and hatred for Chemical warfare,  he was proud to be with His USACE Special Ops group, "Black Diamonds",  bridge-building and getting rid of Agent Orange.   To be sure to get that job, my late husband took on Construction work as a summer job and was required to enlist before his draft notice arrived. They would be sent at birthdays, and his was in July, so not much graduate partying in June, but running to Army Recruiting to get in on time.    

I don't know what sort of mass hypnosis we use to make it bearable, but war is "like, dangerous" and they were not showing enough John Wayne movies!   His job was not especially combat of any sort, but they all took their turn at duties with guns.   I was twenty-one and in love;  I pretended it was just “post partum”   stuff when I swooned from horror at the dangers he faced...he and friends and neighbors' sons and soon, my Brother.   The wonderful new Playtex baby nurser with super safe  disposable bags was fun.   But an innovation called "body bags" was not.  I never stopped getting sick at the idea of bagging people. They needed a much more respectful term for it, and insistence use of that term. Both soldiers and newscasters were awful in their deliberate disrespect when they used the term. 

Unable to cry, desperate to do something to help, all I could do, was find the good perfumed stationery and send the photo stories and pray a lot, and " not make waves" .   There was no SKYPE and no digital imaging, but now the photo stories for my lieutenant got serious in their mission.   Keeping up morale when those who were supposed to do and say supportive things were NOT.    And what if my pathetic efforts got lost in the famously-horrible mail?  The popcorn and cookies I sent NEVER got there.  Once his letters did not get to me for weeks and once mine did not reach him and the letters back were full of his concern as were mine to him, by the time they arrived, it was frustration to read them, since the issue had passed.

Young and low-budget or not,  there was money for at least two copies of the photo essays.   Head and heart in the production to keep it light and helpful for all the best fun.   The christening and the bath time stories remain my favorite -  wiggly before, splashing during, full of delight.  And after?  One he'd love with  happy, sleepy, clean and dry baby and happily wet and messy Mommy.   His Father's letters in reply were full of love and praise  for the joy the stories brought in the middle of a war.   The highchair mealtimes, the fun in the stroller and  other photo stories - easy!     How good to know that they helped!  

And, thanks to the extension on the deployment, Daddy was home in time for his son's first haircut and baby's first Christmas  - Father and Son together "all ten fingers - all ten toes" - my favorite baby picture story of all!   

Art in America - a Timeline

ART IN AMERICA - A TIMELINE

March 2, 2016 SketchcrawlHartfordConnecticut USA 8-15 esf

SketchcrawlHartfordConnecticut USA 8-15 esf

ART IN AMERICA ~ HISTORICAL OUTLINE and a MYSTERY

I posted this timeline in 2003 at my first site. It made a good thing to share and handy reference for me.  

But in the loss of things from the old site hacking, is the loss of the SOURCE of this neat post.  

In trying to find it, I found ten newer ones but none so simple, elegant and easy to USE.  

Will continue the source search and will add a few links to other good sources.  Thanksomuch - Elle
  
 

Art in America of course begins with Indigenous Art - long before the 1600s, the land now called America 1000 BCE or Early Ancient Period already shares pottery and leather crafed goods, and it goes on from there - I am sharing this resource for a great overview I found, for you and for my own updates and reference. http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/ancient-art/american-indian.htm

Colonial Period: 1607-1788
    
  With survival uppermost in the minds of our earliest settlers, the arts were slow to take root, but there are always crafted items for practical use, made from materials in the New World - I think they sold well “back across the pond” immediately . The earliest painting, primarily portraiture, was accomplished by untrained artists called limners, whose main task was to record the likenesses of the stalwart colonials.
  
  The first artwork was, naturally, derivative and found its inspiration primarily through imported prints that reflected styles then prevalent in England, Holland, and Spain. Many artist/artisans divided their time between attempts at fine art and designing utilitarian objects, such as signs and carriage decoration. Our first glimmerings of serious sculpture, for instance, were done by gravestone carvers.
  
  The earliest trained painter to come to the colonies was John Smibert, whose hefty portrayals of landed gentry and merchants derive in style from the seventeenth-century Dutch realists. Our first native geniuses of the brush, Benjamin West of Philadelphia and John Singleton Copley of Boston, found it necessary to leave the colonies in order to fulfill their artistic visions, although Copley's highly illusionistic colonial work surely remains a monument to American ingenuity. West eventually became painter to King George III and opened his London studio to a continuous stream of emerging American artists.
  
  
  
  Early Republic to 1812: 1789-1812
  
   
  
  A new nation, the United States of America, continued its reliance on Old World artistic traditions, especially with few opportunities for training in this country. American artists John Vanderlyn, Washington Allston, John Trumbull, and others sought instruction in London (under our own Benjamin West) and in Paris but also sojourned in Italy, where they absorbed that country's rich classical style and subject matter.
  
  Upon their return, these artists and enlightened American citizens recognized the need for creating institutions where artists could be trained and where art could be exhibited. Trumbull was instrumental in the running of the New York Academy of the Fine Arts (founded 1802), with its imported casts of antique sculpture, which offered a definite teaching tool to eager students. Boston followed suit with a cast collection located at the Athenaeum (founded 1804) and exhibitions that began in 1827. Charles Willson Peale was a pioneer in creating Philadelphia's art circle, establishing the first art gallery in 1782 and the first American museum in 1786.
  
  An awareness of our history inspired the nation's leaders to recognize the need to capture images of leaders in significant portraits by Peale, Gilbert Stuart, Samuel F.B. Morse, and others, but history painting itself made little headway until later in the 1800s. When sculpture was needed for the neoclassically-inspired government buildings in Washington, D.C., Italian sculptors were hired to embellish them. Home grown sculpture, however, always flourished due to its ties to functional objects such as gravestones, ship's mastheads, and practical decorations.
  
  The first glimmerings of landscape painting surfaced at this time, thanks to trained artists who came from abroad (for example, Robert Salmon), who concentrated mostly on recording the emerging cities, harbors, picturesque places, and native inhabitants of a new world. The unique talents of John James Audubon elevated the recording of America's flora and fauna to unprecedented artistic levels.
  
  
  
    
  
  Jacksonian Era through Civil War: 1812-1865
  
   With the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828, an era of democratization and equality swept America and with it a period of vast expansion of creativity in the arts. Landscape artists Thomas Doughty, Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederic Church, and George Inness strove to document the untouched look of the "new Eden," blending their individual styles with the Old World romantic traditions of the sublime and the beautiful. It was the American landscapists who first captured the symbolic features of the new nation. Instead of ancient ruins, these painters found history in spectacular land and water formations and, especially, in the inclusion of Native Americans within their scenes. Unleashed waterfalls, soaring eagles, and other emblems of liberty came to represent the country's image.
  
  A narrative or genre tradition of depicting everyday experiences began in the Jacksonian era when artists like John Quidor matched imagery to Washington Irving's History of New York or when William Sidney Mount committed the rural life of Long Island to canvas or when Lilly Martin Spencer explored images of her own household. An expanded audience for landscape, genre, and another relatively new Jacksonian subject, the still life, came with the mid-century explosion of magazines, newspapers, and journals, and with prints produced from original artwork, distributed through organizations like the American Art Union. Lush beautiful still life paintings by Severin Roesen, John Francis, and others celebrated the American harvest, offering little indication of a major civil war on the horizon.
  
  The 1820s and 1830s saw the first cluster of American sculptors working in Italy, where marble was readily available and trained artisans could carry their designs to fruition. By mid-century the colony, which also included painters, was larger than ever and included Horatio Greenough, Hiram Powers, and Thomas Crawford.
  
  
  
  
  Civil War to End of the 19th Century: 1866-1899
  
   The 1860s brought to American landscape painting several options. Artists could concentrate on the tiny details of nature in close-up studies recommended by the American followers of Ruskin such as Aaron Draper Shattuck or William Trost Richards. They could expand their subjects to include highly dramatic views of the West, such as those portrayed by Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, or scenes of the arctic by William Bradford and others. Or they could concentrate on quieter views that explored the full potential of light, a style known as luminism. Gradually the extreme detail of Ruskin's adherents and the dramatic subjects of late Hudson River landscape painters turned inward, capturing the spirit rather that the topography of America's natural views. Inness's conversion to Swedenborgianism, William Morris Hunt's adherence to Barbizon influences, Albert Pinkham Ryder's and Ralph Albert Blakelock's choice of dream-like subjects--all reflected the nation's somber mood at the end of a devastating internal war.
  
  
  
  
  
  Beginning of 20th Century to World War II: 1900-1940<br><br>
  
   The twentieth century has been one of continued emulation of European styles, exploitation of those styles into unique American trends, and, beginning in the 1950s, leadership in the contemporary art world. A group of Philadelphia journalist/artists later known as the Ash Can painters--Robert Henri, John Sloan, William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn--began the century with a new brand of realism, their subjects drawn from the street life of New York, where they ultimately settled. The first decade also saw the initial glimmerings of European modernism in American art in the work of Alfred Maurer, Max Weber, John Marin, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley-all members of the New York circle around the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. A groundbreaking event was New York's 1913 Armory Show, where Americans saw in huge numbers the work of Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky, and Duchamp.
  
  Between the world wars, however, American art took a more conservative bent, echoing the nation's isolationist posture. Pride in our industrial architecture-skyscrapers, grain elevators, barns, machines-found a visual counterpart in the work of the American Precisionists Charles Demuth, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Charles Sheeler. Other realist movements between the wars were Studio Realism in the work of Kenneth Hayes Miller, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Eugene Speicher, Leon Kroll, and the Soyer brothers. American Scene painters Charles Burchfield and Edward Hopper explored the sometimes lonely existence of town and rural living. Regionalists Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood celebrated agrarian life and culture as no one had done before them. Social Realism flowered in the Depression era in the scenes of heavy labor, shopgirls, and the unemployed as shown in the work of William Gropper, Ben Shahn, Philip Evergood, and, later, Jacob Lawrence, who, like many American artists, received his first incentive as an artist through the Federal government's Works Progress Administration (WPA), organized in 1935 for artists on relief.
  
  Abstract art was kept alive in this country during the 1930s through groups like the American Abstract Artists association. A huge explosion within the American art world came in the 1940s and 1950s with Abstract Expressionism, a New York movement concerned with the process of painting itself. Painters Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko, and sculptor David Smith were all pioneers in this new instinctual method of working.
  
  A reaction to abstraction came with the precise geometric imagery of Josef Albers, Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland, and Richard Anuszkiewicz in painting and Donald Judd in sculpture. The 1960s brought Pop Art, suggesting in its title a celebration of the commercial world; practitioners were Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, George Segal, Roy Lichtenstein, among others. Sol LeWitt's conceptual art and Robert Smithson's earthworks also evolved in the 1960s, focusing on the idea and less so on the product, if one were produced at all.
  
  The Post Modernist era has capitalized on the art movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Abstract Expressionism in all its manifestations, pure geometric styles, the art of the absurd--have all opened up a new artistic exploration of our world. The human body, long the basis for representation, has now been fragmented and super-analyzed from both within and without. Our gender roles in society have become grist for the artists' mill; private worlds have been exposed for all to see and imagine. Democratization is key to the understanding of the new art, whether created by the professional, the untutored, or other "outsider" artists. It is important today to understand how the viewer thinks and how people learn in order to form a more engaging dialogue among the artist, the onlooker, and the art itself. A healthy questioning of the past, quoting from it with skepticism at times, has also created an atmosphere out of which new art can develop for the future

In Art, writing, patriotic, American Art, ConnecticutTags Elle Smith Fagan, Patriotic Art, Patriot, Writing, Connecticut

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