Here's a Poem I Wrote About It . . .

Follow my facile ruminations for a minute here. I'm gonna start out with a quick description of some of the small books & other deteriorata that my father left behind, among which are a couple books from the Roycrofters. Now if you know not about the Roycrofters, join the club. Basically it was an artist commune sort of deal in East Aurora, NY, sometime about mid-nineteenth century through the first three or four decades of the twentieth. Started by a guy named Elbert Hubbard, not to be confused in time or space with L. Ron Hubbard, the quack psychology guy who started what is today the Church $cientology cult thingie.
     Ol' Elbert Hubbard was influenced by William Morris, a British guy who is considered the founder of the so-called "arts & crafts movement." If you ain't hip to the A&C movement, it's basically based on the philosophy that what comes from the hand is better than what comes from a machine and that what comes from the hand should be designed for utility & not show. That this sounds a lot like Amish meets Hollywood, well, that's 'cause it does by today's understanding of the form over function argument.
     See, ol' Elbert was a soap salesman who gave up the lucrative bit of selling soap to establish, at first, a private press/little magazine publishing business so he could have his writings & ruminations available for people to read. This is based on the concept that what ol' Elbert wrote was stuff that folks would want to read.
     In addition, after some work getting himself recognized as a great thinker, the Roycrofters' press began publication of what would today be called "little magazines." Either of the two I know off -- Fra and Philistine -- became part of the arts & crafts proliferation of similar "little magazines" focused on, well, arts & crafts issues.
     And there is some contention that Elbert Hubbard – anti-superstitionist that he claims to have been – was somewhere along the line tied to the Rosicrucians.

What a tangled web . . . & all that.

Now into this fray we pitch all the stuff my father left behind. Like two boxes of stuff that I can remember having processed. Yeah, the books by the Roycrofters. That and a copy of Philistine and some other stuff.
     So here's my father, on record as having never graduated from high school, extremely intelligent, self-educated maybe, a painter and a writer and a printer. I have a handful of linoleum blocks that he carved himself to print with, one of which ended up as the background on the labels he printed for my maternal grandfather's honey, the product of the bees my grandfather kept.
     And then, somewhere along the time I was still in high school and halfway to serious doubts – as opposed to unspoken little doubts that anybody's subconscious sends out over the course of days of paradoxes and non-sequitous religious prattle – my father decided he wanted to find out about the Rosicrucians.

So there we stand with two pieces of subjective as hell evidence for nada. But we need to add that my mother's family home was in Kersey, PA, outside of St. Mary's PA, just south a couple hours drive from Buffalo, NY, which is near East Aurora, NY, where the Roycrofters had their ashram. Er . . . collective.
     I can add my Uncle Ted's visit to our house in suburbia, if I want to wonder what brought Uncle Ted all the way from Shirleysburg, PA to Dayton, ostensibly to buy a copy of A Message to Garcia, written by Elbert Hubbard.
     So while I'm standing in the middle of a perfectly good day trying to metaphorically create a windstorm from which I want to pluck pieces of straw, I might even wonder if, among other follies, my father had not had some previous interaction with the Roycrofters, by way of artisanship or involvement in their printing press operations – both Dad and Hubbard's shop had a Pearl – which might have led to Dad's desire to start his own "little magazine" focusing on arts & crafts issues.
     Now it would be one thing if this were a once-and-gone thing. But, after leaving Amarillo, TX for Indianapolis, IN, Dad tried to set up a crafts magazine again in the garage printery. The little magazine he tried to run then, entitled Craftsales and ostensibly under Mom's editorial guidance, suffered two or three issues before it subliminated into a hobby publication for the American Amateur Press Association, to which Dad belonged on and off again for a while.
     And then there were the bits and pieces of half-finished or never-started projects that Dad seemed to collect from various arts & crafts kit sales outfits. And his own projects, paintings, printings, art carvings &c.

All of this adds to my quite obviously subjective assay of my father as a human being who, for all the organization and discipline that he demanded of himself (and other) in life, was just another guy with too many good ideas and marvelous talents stuck in a job that he endured only to have enough money to live in reasonable comfort.
     Maybe it was that – and his mother's suicide when he was eleven – that drove him to drink. Or maybe it was his own muse demanding inebriation in exchange for a painting or a project.
     One way or the other, my father probably spent as much time trying to be a solid citizen as he did trying to satisfy that crying urge to just go off and be an artist. Such an internal conflict and ongoing internal conversation were obvious in all the little bits and pieces of his life that he left behind on paper or in ink or on canvas.
     At the same time I have to admit that, if Dad were associated with the Roycrofters or if he had been involved deeply with the arts & crafts movement so as to know about them, it was not such a bad deal for me. Little else would explain why I also enjoy painting and building and fiddling with stuff and recycling my world so a miserly sort of spendthrift trash picker leaves crap all around the house. In the end, then, I have to admit, as I have many times before, that my parents made me what I am today.
     I'd bet they'd be satisfied.
     I am.
     Here's a little painting I did about it.

At which point I can get back to something inherent in this entire diatribe, that being the fact that my father had to balance in his life that space where his creative skills sat waiting for someone to open a window and the space where he knew from his experience as a nominal orphan the need – absolute & overpowering – to have a job.
     Thus he went into printing, probably 'cause he was headed that way by one of whoever many uncles & relatives helped him survive his mother's suicide and the madman drunk, my grandfather, with whom my father & his brother were thereafter shackled. Printing gave him a skill which, once it moved into journalism & writing, provided a pretty fair hedge against economic collapse.
     Now, it don't go unnoticed by me that my father managed to live a life of an artist one way or the other. He was a recognized and respected print and radio journalist all his life. All his life. People knew him, trusted him and expected every time they spoke with him that they would not look like idiots on the front page of the next day's paper. They knew that he would quote them fairly and that he was open to at least hear their views and ideas and plans.
     In that he used his talent to keep people happy, a bizarre form of quasi-prostitution to which all of us at some time or the other must attend.
     At the same time he had his painting and his linoleum block engraving and his printing and his own writing to keep him from going completely over to outright drunkenness and despair.
     If my father was involved with the Roycrofters – which I consider an outside remote but possible case – it at least somehow kept him going. If he was not and yet found some of their stuff to be interesting enough to collect and keep, that too is a sign of his survival.
     In many ways I can see the common thread of a man making himself into some image or the other: Elbert Hubbard wanting to be recognized as a polymath and genius (upon which the jury will likely forever be out) and my father wanting to be recognized as a creative individual whose abilities could keep him & his family well enough off without taking every ounce of his energy for somebody else's cause.
     It's a game we all play, for sure.
     And by the way, here's a poem I wrote about it . . .