Happy Birthday, Wally-Dad!

Today is the birthday of my beloved father, Wallace Kennedy, pictured here in two treasured photos from the past year: in the chair (by Joyce Kennedy), and with binoculars (by Cheryl Walsh Bellville).

My dad has always had scary-accurate recall, a great memory for names, dates and anecdotes that served him well as an educator, in a profession where he met hundreds (if not thousands) of people. He respected and admired his students, realizing that each of them was a complete person who would go on beyond the classroom in unexpected ways. I never heard him take a condescending attitude towards students; instead, he enjoys talking about the things he learned from them, or about their responses to a learning experience.

With his friend and fellow educator, Sy Yesner, Dad came up with the brilliant idea of the Urban Arts program, forging links between professional artists and the Minneapolis Schools. Unfortunately, the program later lost its funding in Minneapolis, after replication in many other cities. For a time Dad had the wildest job title: he was disseminator of arts education for the National Diffusion Network. I think that is something Obama would be wise to bring back. Wally is writing now about Urban Arts, thinking there are contemporary lessons to be gained from its history – if you have memories of involvement with the program, please contact me and I'll put you in touch with him.

A few years ago Wally wrote a memoir of his early years, called Who Do You Think You Are? What I love about this book is that it gives such a vivid glimpse of him as a child and young man, growing up during the Great Depression (–I must say, I always get a bizarre kick out of capitalizing those words), from a boyhood base in Cando, North Dakota. It's valuable beyond words to have a record of his memories captured in narrative form, along with some great early photos that I would post here, if I had them (maybe I can remedy that later). There's a quote at the beginning of the book by John Lukacs: "What happens is not separable from what people think happens."

I asked Dad for some words about the writing process, and he had this to say:

Writing my boyhood memoir was easier than I expected. Once I began recalling the earliest memories, such as my third birthday, the sights and sounds of daily life just flooded in. The "hard work" was cutting out memories that seemed unkind to anyone, but keeping the truth about experiences that shaped my growing years. Instead of writing to please a reader, I worked to avoid offending a reader. Hope that makes some sense.

Dad directed theater, taught speech, debate, literature, writing, poetry: he has a capacious interest in all subjects, and helped create the first humanities curriculum for high school in the United States. It's thanks to my dad (and mother and siblings) that there is such a wide range of topics in this blog: it was impossible to grow up with my parents and not find the world to be filled with potential and fascination. With my mom, he is one half of an entity we call "Joywal."

Even today, I envy my father's cultural life: he takes the time to attend countless theater, dance, music and writing events, and then to think about them in relation to other topics. I believe this helps explain his remarkable health and mental alertness. Oh, (and here is where we differ) – he loves to watch sports, too, even those often-exasperating Vikings and Gophers games! He is what we call (in Papua New Guinea-speak) "the bush tucker man": the one in the family who patiently hunts and gathers the groceries. He's a great cook, and makes Wally's Wonderful Waffles (which preceded the World Wide Web). He gardened for years, planting trees for all his grandchildren, and is a handyman, drawing on the skills of his own father, Noah Kennedy, who was that rare and remarkable thing, a Jack-of-all-trades. His mother, Hadie, was a nurse, gardener and midwife.

Much love, admiration, and gratitude to you today, Dad, on your birthday!

Photographer Cheryl Walsh Bellville

My friend Cheryl Walsh Bellville, who took the photos of my family that I posted yesterday, is someone I've known since I was 18 years old, living on the West Bank of the University of Minnesota, in the Cedar Riverside community there. I was just a kid working at the New Riverside Café, an "anarchist collective" offering vegetarian food and music.

Cheryl was a bit older, a college graduate living in her own little rough-and-tumble rental house, with an immaculate 8-foot square fenced garden next to the front curb. Her kitchen had homemade shelves (which she probably built), lined with jars of beans and grains. Simplicity and beauty, an incredible eye. Before I had ever heard of someone like Martha Stewart, I knew Cheryl: naturalist, gardener, horsewoman, photographer, independent thinker, and endlessly energetic archivist of the anarchist world we inhabited. I was always reassured – and a bit mystified – by the fact that our quasi-chaotic little village-within-the big-city (where everyone knew everyone else, from the drug addicts to the musicians to the political activists who brought Jane Fonda to speak at Augsburg college) could also be home to someone so practical, down to earth, aesthetically sophisticated, and self-disciplined.

Later we spent some time together on a collectively-owned farm in western Wisconsin, where Cheryl planted gardens and orchards, canned pickles, cared for animals, and developed her vision of a rural-urban life. She raised two wonderful kids, Luke and Katey, and I had the honor of designing Luke's birth announcement. For many years they lived across from Riverside Park in Minneapolis, in a little white bungalow, while also spending time in the country in Wisconsin. Cheryl took photos throughout all those years: of peace protesters, local musicians, hippie farmers, real farmers (not to be confused with the former in those days), and other people who made up the dynamic, emerging world of food co-ops and arts organizations in the Twin Cities.

Cheryl does a better job than almost anyone I know of cultivating a personal-meets-professional life that allows her to have the things that matter most: time, access to the natural world, lifelong learning, and the luxury (necessity) of interesting work. When she creates children's books, for Carolrhoda Publications, they are on topics she knows something about: airplanes (I believe she has a pilot's license), farmers' markets, hot air balloons, bison, Native Americans, maple sugaring, farming with horses. I think it's unfortunate that so many of these books – still relevant today – have gone out of print. (You can find them for ridiculously low prices on the web.)

Here are a few more wonderful images from Cheryl. She has docmented some of Garrison Keillor's work over the years; that's Studs Terkel reading for A Prairie Home Companion. I love the hand-tinted photos of the fishing shacks, too. That's Katey with the crab apples. If you look closely at these images, you'll see the subtle colors throughout: a beautiful quality of light.

The Outer Reaches of New Mexico...and Outer Space

My brother John and his family finished the Santa Fe New Music production of The Language of Birds, to standing ovations (here is a pre-show report from the Santa Fe Reporter's John Stege). Then they traveled to one of the more remote parts of New Mexico, near Datil, on the edge of the Cibola National Forest, near the Very Large Array.

Before I looked that up, I was imagining a very large array of rock formations: instead, this is a radio astronomy observatory that studies radio galaxies, hydrogen gas, quasars, pulsars, supernova remnants, gamma ray bursts, radio-emitting stars, the sun and planets, astrophysical masers, and black holes. Oh.

Our friends Cheryl Walsh Bellville and Don Hastings are building a house there. Cheryl is a photographer with a studio in nearby Magdalena. For years they've lived in western Wisconsin, where Don still maintains a business hauling hay and Cheryl documents life in the midwest and beyond (from a studio in St. Paul), often creating remarkable photographic children's books.

Cheryl just send me these wonderful photos of my family. She says "Your dad is looking through binoculars at the small mountain that rises behind our house. John and his girls have climbed to the top. They'd just walked out of range when I took this picture."