Leland Payton Paintings and Photographs

STILL LIFE WITH HORSE SKULL, 1958: Pre-Cross Hatch Watercolor

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Still Life with Horse Skull, March 1958, Leland Payton, Watercolor, 17 by 23

In 1958, I was a senior at Smith-Cotton High School in Sedalia, Missouri. One Sunday afternoon, I commandeered the dining room table and arranged some artifacts from my found-object collection and a few household items and painted this in one sitting.

Later Edwin Dickinson questioned my use of crosshatching in the Lookdown picture I sold him for a quarter and the other Florida watercolors. I did this still life before I started using a finishing overlay of pen lines to define and control the tone and texture of spaces.

Early in December 2011, I got a phone call about this painting, which, like the Lookdown, I had lost track of. It was from a man who once lived in Sedalia. After discussing what was in the picture (which I thought was pretty evident), I asked him to send me a photo of it. This is his email of December 10, 2011:

Leland,

I`m sorry it took so long to send you the pictures of your painting. I spent last week in Oklahoma with my 2 boys. I am not the greatest at this computer stuff, If your mom would of only had a computer coarse when I was in her class, but since they were not invented yet then I am on my own.

I guess my main questions are, is this one of your paintings? did you go to art school with Sharon? and did you paint it while you were at art school or before. From her paintings it looks like one of you had some artistic influence on the other. I received this painting from my sister after Sharon passed away and just about anyone that stops by always comments on it. They all like it of coarse. They always ask who the artist is so I googled your name and got your number. The info on the internet mentioned books with other artwork in them but I have looked in several bookstores and not located them. My next stop will be Amazon.com.

When we talked I think I said that my parents still live in the house next to Mr. Hall`s old house and when we were growing up it was the neighborhood hang out. I appreciate You Taking the time to talk with me on the phone and any info on your artwork would be great.

The objects in the still life are an inventory of my interests as a teenager. (1) Horse skull—picked up on a fishing trip to Spring Fork Creek. (2) Balsa wood rack to mount butterflies and insects. (3) Swallowtail butterfly on an insect pin. (4) Salad oil jar. (5) Two bottles of Pelican ink. (6) Box turtle shell. (7) Chunk of hematite. Pieces of this red iron-rich mineral were scattered through Indian sites around Sedalia. May have been used as a paint source? (8) Two bottles of Armagnac brandy. My father made friends with a French hotelier during World War II. For a decade after the war, we exchanged Christmas gifts. They usually sent a local liqueur. And yes, my parents let me sample it.

I replied, December 11, 2011:

The central figure in the painting is a horse skull. On the left are two wine bottles. On the upper right is a balsa wood board I mounted butterflies with. Below that is a bottle. Below that are two Pelican Ink bottles. Below them is a turtle shell. Pretty typical still life.

The wife likes the pictures and would be happy to buy it from you if you would be interested. We don’t have very many pictures from my high school days.

He responded on December 17:

I wanted to thank you for taking the time to talk with me a couple of weeks ago. I remember your mothers classes in grade school and she talked about you often. That`s how I made the conection between you and your mother. I can`t remember what I ate yesterday, but I remember your mom`s classes in grade school, go figure. My intention for calling you was to find out a little bit about the painting and you. I wasn’t even thinking of selling the painting. It goes with my decore, and as I said before anyone that see`s it always admires it. I know the painting probably means more to you and your wife than it does to me, but after having it for several years I am somewhat attatched to it.

If you are interested in buying the painting please let me know what you have in mind. The painting is dated and sighned  March 1958 and I was born in August 1958, that makes us both 54 years old this coming year (ouch). I took 15 pictures with my camera but had trouble sending them, I think this computer stuff is just a fad.

While researching Leland on the internet I saw some of your artwork and I discovered you are an author, and photographer, you are very talented. Maybe you would consider trading the painting for other artwork or photographs, we can certainly talk about that if that`s even an option.

Again I want to say thank you for taking the time to talk with me and that I did not call you with the intention of finding out what the painting is worth, or to even to sell it. You are more than welcome to call … and we can talk about it. If you get up this way sometime (Warransburg) we could meet and you could see your art work. If you have trouble reaching me on my cell you can also call me at Westlake Hardware.

We agreed on a combination of my photographs and cash and I got my still life back. Sharon Patten’s mother, Lucy, bought the painting from me during the several years Sharon and I dated. Sharon didn’t take up art until she was out of college I learned from the internet. Her canvases were huge, thickly painted abstractions which were well received by the art world. In 1988 she got a Guggenheim Fellowship. Sedalia’s Daum Museum has eleven and the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City owns five. Our influence on each other was minimal esthetically (and any other way) to answer the man’s question. Smoking two packs a day proved fatal. She died, I learned, in 1995 at age 52.

 

Lover's Leap

“Legends and Scenery”: Hannibal’s Lover’s Leap

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Leland Payton pondering jumping into a book project while at Hannibal, Missouri’s Lover’s Leap.

Our last two books were on Ozark rivers – the James and the Osage (although it heads in the prairie plains of Kansas). Both streams have folklore about cliffs where Indian princesses jumped to their deaths over parental interference in their love life. These struck us as bizarre and aroused our curiosity. Researching these tragic stories that didn’t jive with our impressions of Native American culture we ran across Mark Twain’s satire on Lover’s Leaps. In Chapter 59 “Legends and Scenery” in Life on the Mississippi (1883) Twain wrote of encountering a garrulous passenger on the upper river who tells a story of a broken-hearted Indian maiden who leaps from a bluff. In a departure from other such tales she doesn’t die but lands on her cruel, controlling parents, killing them. Then she is free to marry the brave her parents opposed and lives “happily ever after.” Of course, Twain’s telling is marvelously arch – and it reminds us how much he imitated Mel Brooks.

So Crystal and I, in late March 2017, drove to Hannibal, Missouri to decide if there might be a book in these tear jerking tales. That leap in Twain’s spoof is off Maiden Rock, Wisconsin – too far for a casual drive. Hannibal, on the other hand, does have a quite well-known Lover’s Leap. Mark Twain loved Hannibal and Hannibal loves Mark Twain. Perhaps there the spirit of the writer would whisper “go or no” in our ear.

Crystal Payton took the cover photograph of Lover’s Leap Legends and ended up with more interior shots with a much smaller camera than husband Leland.

Cardiff Hill, another Hannibal bluff, is prominently featured in several Twain books. He published nothing about Hannibal’s Lover’s Leap, though he knew about it – the legend saw print before the Civil War. Today the overlook is a city park. A short version of its legend is cast in a small bronze plaque. While we were taking pictures, cars arrived and people strolled along the protective fence gazing out over the river and town.

 

In Life on the Mississippi, geography including cliffs are sharply realized. Norman Mailer thought Twain, a pretty promising writer but was critical of him for stealing so much of his stylistic delineations of landscape from Ernest Hemmingway. Twain’s setup for his leap satire was a passage on “the majestic bluffs that overlook the river.” That and the public’s attraction to the Lover’s Leap geography, along with the promise we could like Twain make fun of Romanticism suggested we should proceed. We dedicated the book to the godfather of American realism:

FOR MARK TWAIN

Who diagnosed America’s sentimental romantic infection.

Alas, his injection of realism was not a cure.

That moment Crystal took my picture with my elbow on the fence at Hannibal’s Lover’s Leap may not be the exact second all this jelled, but then it could be. Mark Twain proved you could get by with mocking sentimentality and get paid for it, a good trick.

A folio by Crystal and Leland Payton of Hannibal, Missouri’s Lover’s Leap and Mark Twain’s visible imprint on the town. Twain’s linkage of geography with folklore (which he thought unreliable but intriguing) was a guide to us in writing a book on Lover’s Leaps. Lover’s Leap Legend will be published February 2020.

Click on any image to start slide show.

Leland Payton Paintings and Photographs

Lookdown on Ice

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Leland Payton, Lookdown on Ice, 1963, watercolor on paper, 18 x 24

On Feb. 25, 2018 I received the following email:

Hello, I have this beautiful piece by you that I just discovered going through my work and collection. Once upon a time I was Director and Curator at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (1976-78) and curated a show of Edwin Dickinson’s work. I may have gotten this from his widow. She gave me some things including Dickinson’s easel. Otherwise, I can’t recall! Anyway, if you can tell me about it I appreciate it. It is exquisite! Thanks, Sheila Miles (Santa Fe, NM)

A few days later I replied:

Thanks for sending me a picture of my watercolor from long ago. I studied for a few months with Dickinson at the Art Students League in the early ’60s. I ran out of money and had to retreat to Missouri. Before I left I showed Dickinson some watercolors I did in Florida and he seemed generally approving except that he thought I was wasting too much time with the cross-hatching. He liked the picture of the lookdown. I caught two one night on the docks of Marathon; I ate one and painted one. I offered to give it to him in appreciation for how much his paintings inspired me. He said, “an artist never gives anything away.”  I said, “how about a quarter?” He smiled and gave me a quarter, which I used on the subway.

If you look up our websites, for a long time I’ve produced pictures with a camera, mostly of the Ozarks. My wife Crystal and I have produced a number of books, mostly on rivers and the effect of culture on landscape.

If you ever get tired of it, I’d be happy to buy it back from you — for more than a quarter! We’ve got two sons and I probably will leave some of my artwork with them. They’re both scuba divers and just got back from a dive in the Philippines.  So they are appreciative of tropical fish.

Regards,

Leland

P.S. A friend of ours who died a few years ago lived down in Santa Fe… Ted Coe.  Before I fell from grace for suing the Corps of Engineers in Missouri over a ridiculous reservoir, I did environmental photographs, one show of which was at the Nelson Gallery in Kansas City, where we met Ted.

BTW – I’m really delighted to know Mr. Dickinson took it home with him and held on to it all these years. It hasn’t been thrown away. I’ve often wondered about it.

Sheila filled me in on her background, which is impressive and extensive in the arts and explained in a March 1, 2018 email how she acquired the watercolor that I assumed had vanished.

What a great story! (Everything comes around again).

It’s a beautiful piece. But a quarter!  Those were the times.

(I lived in NYC in the late 70’s and did busking in SoHo with my then husband. I remember getting a dollar and we could get a bagel. Another 50 cents, ride the subway home to our apartment at Tiemann Place (near 125 subway by Harlem). Maybe you knew my friend Arthur Cohen. He built my printing press from an old Chinese laundry press.

I can’t imagine what it was like to be at the Art Student’s league in those times. So many great artists came out of it. I knew Raphael Soyer in Provincetown; I think he was also there.

I love Dickinson’s work and was thrilled to put together his show.

And I worked with Victor Candell and Leo Manso at the Hans Hoffman School of Art.. for just a bit. I quit even though I had a full scholarship because I didn’t want to do small ocean scenes. My professor from Purdue, Tony Vevers who owned a house in Ptown sent me there as I wanted to leave IN.

I fell in love with the owner of the White Horse Inn, Frank Schaefer, and stayed 5 years. Was the Director at the PAAM for almost 3 years.

You have had an exciting career too.

If you would like to buy your piece please let me know what you might pay; it is a beautiful piece. It is so great to pass it to your sons. It is really remarkable. I love the cross-hatching. I posted it on FB and it got some nice complements. It is a great example of that style that was very popular at that time. It reminds me of some of those RISD expert artists who make beautiful art supported by strong technique.

Thanks for answering me and sharing the story,

Sheila

We agreed on a price and it now hangs on the wall of our spare bedroom/office in a duplex in Springfield,Missouri.

Branding the Ozarks, Small Towns

“MIX AND MINGLE” AT ASH GROVE’S MAIN STREET HERITAGE FESTIVAL

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Although I arrived at the Ash Grove festival late in the afternoon there were still a few folks milling around on Main Street. There were, like many country trade centers, empty buildings, but none looked like they were about to fall in. Some had going businesses. Others displayed relics of the town’s past in their windows. Overall, the scene did not fulfill the stereotype of villages on the verge of economic and cultural collapse. Writers like Edgar Lee Masters and Sinclair Lewis may have erred when, a century ago, they located all that is dysfunctional and antiquated about America exclusively in small towns. Could it be that cultural stagnation and backwardness may manifest itself in urban and suburban environments as well? A place like Ash Grove that takes civic pride in former residents Nathan Boone (Daniel’s son) and notorious gangster Ma Barker displays up-to-date diversity. It mixes historical eras with wild abandon. The place fits our HYPERCOMMON slogan – ordinary isn’t.

Although I arrived at the Ash Grove festival late in the afternoon there were still a few folks milling around on Main Street. There were, like many country trade centers, empty buildings, but none looked like they were about to fall in. Some had going businesses. Others displayed relics of the town’s past in their windows. Overall, the scene did not fulfill the stereotype of villages on the verge of economic and cultural collapse. Writers like Edgar Lee Masters and Sinclair Lewis may have erred when, a century ago, they located all that is dysfunctional and antiquated about America exclusively in small towns. Could it be that cultural stagnation and backwardness may manifest itself in urban and suburban environments as well? A place like Ash Grove that takes civic pride in former residents Nathan Boone (Daniel’s son) and notorious gangster Ma Barker displays up-to-date diversity. It mixes historical eras with wild abandon. The place fits our HYPERCOMMON slogan – ordinary isn’t.

“Is this Ash Grove?” asked the woman in a red dress behind the wheel of a small car that pulled off on the shoulder beside me. “This is Halltown,” I told her. She didn’t understand my directions until a young girl produced a Missouri road map from the glove compartment and I showed her the way to Ash Grove. “I’m performing at some kind of festival there. Come see me.” She did a U turn and headed back east following my directions.

bl454When I finished taking pictures of Halltown I went on to Paris Spring Junction. (Click on the links to see those posts). Later that afternoon I did end up in Ash Grove, and I did see a picture of the lost woman in red propped up by the door of a café. There was no Sing-a-Long Sweet Memories of Silent Movie Music coming from inside, so I did not hear Teresa Arth sing and play the piano. There was a strolling harmonica player, though.

The light was perfect, but it would not last. Things were definitely winding down at the Ash Grove Main Street Heritage Festival. Attendance was sparse, but the old buildings looked good through my viewfinder. The century old structures were an intriguing combination of decay, restoration, and unfinished restoration, many enhanced with stylistic choices not yet categorized by architectural historians. Such esthetic chaos may disturb purists, but American development has been wildly eclectic from the beginning. Bricolage, an arty French word, describes the practice of incorporating readily available materials or styles into an object or work. Unfamiliarity with the theory hasn’t stopped the citizens of this small town from bricolaging the hell out of their buildings, the collections of artifacts in those buildings, and culture.

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Esthetically as well as socially, Ash Grove’s festival was indeed “mix and mingle” as 105.9 KGBX’s press release said of the event. I pulled it up on the web after getting home:

Back Roads to Main Street Heritage Festival
October 18  – 9:00 am to 5:00 pm.
Main Street – Ash Grove

CELEBRATING AND SHARING A FASCINATING HERITAGE

Notable Missourian Nathan Boone, son of Daniel Boone, early settler – here…. Birthplace of notorious 1930’s gangster Ma Barker, on FBI’s Most Wanted List – here……Civil War bushwhackers’ terrorizing raids – here……Main Street shoot out between horse thieves – here.…..Murder over missing foxhound said to be basis of book and movie, “The Voice of Bugle Ann” – here.……Enterprises that distinguished our area nationwide, Ash Grove Portland Cement and Phenix Marble Quarry – here.

Celebration of this fascinating heritage begins on Historic Main Street. It is a mix and mingle of Civil War to 20’s and 30’s eras in fashion, buggies and vintage vehicles, live music – fiddle — ragtime piano -Irish folk songs, plus foods from the days of biscuits always on the table, sarsaparilla a favored drink, and nothing was better than catfish fried up in a pan.

Come in historic full attire…enter the 10:00 am costume contest (for all ages and gender)… and a free order of biscuits and gravy is yours. Costume up your whole family and not only is your breakfast covered but so are the Halloween costumes.

No costume? Get in the spirit of the day with a flapper headband or gangster hat from the Headband and Hat shop. Don’t forget your camera to get a photo of your new look with flapper, Sara Vega, professional model.

Listen to the story telling and watch the re-enactments of stories from our heritage….join in the games and competitions….see artisans demonstrate their skills…make and take a painted gourd… make a planter from Ash Grove cement and paper… AND keep an eye out for Ma Barker’s boys – they’re usually up to no good.

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As well as the display of a log cabin quilt that was being raffled off for a good cause, there was a photo exhibit on Main Street. Clothes pinned to clothes lines were photographs taken by the citizenry. Voting was underway to select the best images for a community calendar. Sunsets were the most popular subject.

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Even if I had missed the opening act, the coda of the celebration was a provocative visual display of old, new, in between and outside the boundaries of time. It certainly wasn’t one of the laid-out-on-a-slab villages I’d photographed for Ozark Prairie Border. Ash Grove has a pulse.

Googling Ash Grove, I pulled up a dissenting opinion. “Agricultural commerce has abandoned Ash Grove. It isn’t a sleepy community. It’s in a coma,” wrote freelance reviewer of live music, Bill Glahn. He pronounced the town of 1,500 a victim of corporate greed that has killed the family farm and sent factory jobs overseas. Glahn is active in Occupy Springfield, a franchise of Occupy Wall Street, so it’s not difficult to discern his political leanings.

He motored up to Ash Grove from Springfield on Labor Day of 2010, “to make some kind of photographic record that this place actually existed before it crumbled into dust.” The anti capitalist protest group didn’t begin until September 2011. So he wouldn’t have been able to start a subchapter – Occupy Ash Grove – to protest the pernicious influence of big business on small towns. After my brief sojourn I don’t get the feeling the place was or is ripe for revolution.

Mural proclaiming Ash Grove’s debt to the coming of the railroad. Although the homestead of Daniel Boone’s son Nathan has become a popular state park just north of the town it was the arrival of the Missouri Pacific railroad in the late 1800s that spurred an era of prosperity, and is embedded in local memory. As well as a decent farming resource (which blogger Glahn prematurely dismissed) a nearby vein of excellent limestone was mined for building stone and crushed as aggregate. During the Depression construction virtually ceased in America and farm commodities suffered a price collapse. Ash Grove has more than survived. Though the train no longer stops and the quarry has closed, it has highway access to Springfield, a small city with a surfeit of shopping and gobs of jobs.

Mural proclaiming Ash Grove’s debt to the coming of the railroad. Although the homestead of Daniel Boone’s son Nathan has become a popular state park just north of the town it was the arrival of the Missouri Pacific railroad in the late 1800s that spurred an era of prosperity, and is embedded in local memory. As well as a decent farming resource (which blogger Glahn prematurely dismissed) a nearby vein of excellent limestone was mined for building stone and crushed as aggregate. During the Depression construction virtually ceased in America and farm commodities suffered a price collapse. Ash Grove has more than survived. Though the train no longer stops and the quarry has closed, it has highway access to Springfield, a small city with a surfeit of shopping and gobs of jobs.

Branding the Ozarks, Small Towns

THE OLD MILL IS GONE, BUT HURLEY YET DISPLAYS RELICS OF OBSOLESCENCE

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Had the son of the owner of the water mill at Hurley Missouri been more careful with his brush fire I could have photographed an earlier and more conventionally nostalgic relic of technology. The rambling three-story, crudely built, added-on, and deteriorating structure built in 1892 burned to ashes on April 3, 2005. Don Christenson had purchased the property in 1997 and embarked on an ambitious restoration when it was ignited by his boy’s careless cleanup effort. A newspaper article at the time said the heartbroken son was going to earn money to rebuild it for his dad. Obviously that didn’t happen. The site today consists of a few fire-scorched and rusty pieces of machinery set among some foundation stones. Invasive weeds and sumac are already being replaced by trees. In another decade, finding any evidence there was ever a historic mill here will require archaeology.

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In the lot next to the overgrown watermill ruins is a neat small stone filling station with an old green car in front and a faded orange visible gas pump. A rusted iron-wheeled saw completes the exhibit of dated objects but not so ancient as the medieval technology of watermills. Other obsolete machines and implements are scattered about the grounds. The walnut buying operation is closed, but has a sign that indicates when it will reopen. A machine that holds the nuts deposits the shells into an old two-ton baby blue Ford truck with a yellow hood and faded red bed. Gathering food from the woods is even more ancient than the utilization of waterpower to grind grain.

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bl501Across the road is a café, and behind it the Spring Creek Farm and Home business, which is in the early stages of ruination. Its milling machinery did not grind wheat for baking bread. It processed trucked-in grain for cattle feed. After the Missouri-Pacific Railroad came through Hurley in 1905, bringing flour that was grown and milled in Kansas with more efficiency than the small Stone County farms and watermill. The old watermill began primarily producing animal food. What outside competition doomed the Spring Creek Farm and Home enterprise, we haven’t learned.

Even if this recently deceased business has plastic, concrete block, and tin building materials instead of the more venerable stone and wood of classic ruins, time is lashing the remains. The untreated wounds of neglect are evident. But there are enough scarred and weathered wood components to wish for an 8 x 10 view camera and slow film.

At the back of the defunct agricultural service a muddy road plunges into a young forest. On the hills are steps, foundations and collapsed frame houses. There was a time in the Twenties and Thirties when the railroad brought some opportunities for these frugal subsistence farmers. Hurley then had twice its current population of 170. A 1927 Stone County booklet pronounced with only a little puffery:

Hurley is said to be the most mutual, cooperative and moral town in Stone County. It is a small town on the Missouri Pacific Railroad, between Crane and Springfield and surrounded with very fertile productive land, and it claims, in proportion to size, the largest trade of any town in the county. A stream of clear spring water runs through the center of the town sufficient to grind out the best flour, meal and feed; and the pretty homes and streets are all clean and the inhabitants healthy. Of course such a town and community has a good school and religious services and the business firms listed below carry a complete stock of merchandise, machinery, lumber, feed, etc., to supply the surrounding country.

A recollection of Hurley 1920-1990 by Ray Gold on www.rootsweb.ancestry.com tells of this hardscrabble but not demoralizing Ozark existence:

No two people will remember the same things just alike, and there is good reasons for that. We were all real close to our families, because of poor roads, poor transportation, very few telephones, no electricity, no TV, no money, and many other reasons. We really didn’t miss any of this stuff, because we didn’t know anything about it. Everyone lived about the same way as their neighbor. We all had out houses and no running water in our homes. If we were lucky we had a cellar full of canned fruit and vegetables, an old cow for our milk, and a smoke-house full of hog meat and lard. That is a few of the reasons we never got very far from home. When we were real young, everything was strange to us if we were ten miles from home. So we just rememberd things that happened in our small world.

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There is a larger than average quantity of such recollections from this part of the Ozarks. Mary Scott Hair, aka “Samanthy,” wrote a paid column beginning in 1948 in the Crane Chronicle that recorded the life and times of Hurleyites. Her father had once owned the Spring Creek Mill, and she and her husband and daughter worked a small farm nearby. In a 1982 interview printed in Bittersweet she summed up her life:

I have lived in Hurley all my life and I probably won’t live anywhere else. I am rooted and grounded in Hurley. My younger days were Hurley’s best days. Sometime I wonder whether or not it was all make believe.

Such rural experiences related by Stone County old timers were not unique to the Ozarks. As Hurley was on the fringe of the Shepherd of the Hills country whose mythos idealized plain folk, these natives may have been incentivized and more confident writing down the minutia of their bucolic existence than small farmers in regions not celebrated in books and promoted by Arcadian tourism.

Branding the Ozarks, Tourism

DEWEY JACKSON SHORT: FROM DONKEY CART ENTREPRENEUR TO U.S. CONGRESSMAN

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We have discovered that the young man standing up in this real photo postcard by famed photographer George P. Hall is in all likelihood the celebrated “Orator of the Ozarks,” oft re-elected Congressman Dewey Jackson Short. It’s likely young Dewey picked up many of his pithy Ozark sayings consorting with the float fishermen he serviced with his donkey cart business. Catering to tourism had been his first paying job. Throughout his political career he remained an advocate of bringing vacationers to the Ozarks. This promotion culminated in securing the funds to build Table Rock Dam whose waters would back up nearly to Galena, ending the famous float trips Dewey once serviced.

We have discovered that the young man standing up in this real photo postcard by famed photographer George E. Hall is in all likelihood the celebrated “Orator of the Ozarks,” oft re-elected Congressman Dewey Jackson Short. It’s likely young Dewey picked up many of his pithy Ozark sayings consorting with the float fishermen he serviced with his donkey cart business. Catering to tourism had been his first paying job. Throughout his political career he remained an advocate of bringing vacationers to the Ozarks. This promotion culminated in securing the funds to build Table Rock Dam whose waters would back up nearly to Galena, ending the famous float trips Dewey once serviced.

In our post on the remarkable Y Bridge that brought tourists across the James River into Galena, Missouri, we mentioned that Dewey Short spoke at the dedication in 1927. The year after he was elected to the United States House of Representatives. During his twenty-four years in Congress Short became nationally known for his colorful speeches, which drew inspiration equally from Shakespeare, the Bible, and vernacular hill speak.

Dewey Short: Orator of the Ozarks, Vol. 1 by Robert S. Wiley. Very interesting account of political and cultural life in the Ozarks between World War I and World War II. Out of print but available used on amazon.com

Dewey Short: Orator of the Ozarks, Vol. 1 by Robert S. Wiley. It is a very interesting account of political and cultural life in the Ozarks between World War I and World War II. Out of print but available used on amazon.com. Click on image of book cover to go to book listing on Amazon.

Though Short had degrees from American colleges and had studied at Oxford and Heidelberg universities he mixed his quotes from the classics with down home witticisms. In Dewey Short: Orator of the Ozarks, Vol. 1 Robert S. Wiley quotes an example of Short’s folky injections given at a Republican banquet and reported in a 1928 Sedalia Capital :

He compared the g.o.p. elephant with the Democratic mule, which he termed a jackass.

“Compare the two,” he said. “The elephant is really an intelligent animal. It can perform in circuses and has been used as a domestic animal – but on the other hand the jackass, can do nothing but bray and kick. It is without ancestry, or posterity.”

Looking through this very readable account of the first half of Congressman Short’s career, when researching the Y Bridge, we came upon the following passage:

Often in later speeches he would reminisce about driving his team of jennies (female donkeys) as a youngster. He would meet salesmen at the train and help them haul their wares and eh would make long hauls of ice from the ice house on James River where winter ice from the James had been packed in sawdust to await summer’s demand for that rare commodity.

By 1911, when he was 12 years of age, Dewey had established a checking account with the bank of Galena. His diary of 1912 discloses that he was busy that summer catering to tourists making float fishing trips on the James River and buying and selling ice.

We remembered the stellar Hall photograph we used in our book on the development of Ozark tourism. Could the nice looking young man driving the donkey cart be young Dewey Short? How many donkey cart operations could one Ozark village support?

See the Ozarks: The Touristic Image by Leland and Crystal Payton. There are hundreds of old images of recreation from the 1800s to the present day in the “Land of a Million Smiles.” Available at a discounted price, postage paid from Lens & Pen Press.

See the Ozarks: The Touristic Image by Leland and Crystal Payton. There are hundreds of old images of recreation from the 1800s to the present day in the “Land of a Million Smiles.” Available at a discounted price, postage paid from Lens & Pen Press. Click on image of book cover to buy a copy.

Short authority, Robert S. Wiley, still practices law in Crane, Missouri. We sent him a copy of See the Ozarks and asked his opinion. He wrote back:

Thanks for the beautiful book, well written and informative. Thanks for directing my attention to the Hall photo on page 7. From other photos in my collection, I believe your photo is one of Dewey with his wagon and team of donkeys.

Wiley explained in a phone conversation that he has a photo of young Short driving a four-wheel, two-donkey cart, the rig he likely used when hawking ice. The enterprising youngster, Wiley noted, saved his money for college. He was not only a fiscal conservative at an early age, in high school he gave a hawkish speech on “Our National Defense” delivered on the eve of World War I. His picture was on a tourist postcard when he was twelve and at seventeen his oratory was printed on the front page of the Stone County Oracle.

The crisp image by Hall was one of our favorites already. But that it is an image of the renowned Orator of the Ozarks Dewey Short was a pleasant surprise.