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Jennifer Dolde with Lorraine Goodman
and Jack Lewis at his home in Bridgeville. JL:What is the aim of the AG? It's to preserve...? LG:Perserve the rural..... JL:The way they used to be? LG:Uh huh to preserve the rural agricultural... JL:It's pretty historical then? LG:Yeah, that's it. Of the whole Delmarva Peninsula. JL:Well that sort of fits in with me because I'm historical. JD:Let's me just say a couple of words here so we know who we are on the tape. This is Jennifer Dolde with Lorraine Goodman and Jack Lewis at his home in Bridgeville. It's August 13, 1996. LG:That was good. JD:I have to do that. That's what the curator is supposed to do. Does that sound like a place to start? Well, we're very interested in the work that you did as part of the CCC in conjunction with our exhibit on the Depression. JL:Now I did mention to you on the phone that I had some prints in a book didn't I? JD:You did mention that. JL:Did you want to see these? JD:We can look at those. Maybe we can talk a bit and look at those. JL:You want to talk about them as you see them? JD:Well I think I'd like to just listen to you first and then we can talk about the pictures. JL:Oh alright. Well as you know it was part of the Depression in 1936 and boys were on the streets and they didn't seem to care much about the girls. I don't know what they did. But in those days they were worried about these boys that were on the streets with nothing to do. And although I had just graduated from college at Rutgers I was very keen about a situation that opened up here in Delaware. Mr. W. S. Corcoran and his wife, who she later started the Art League, but he was the State Engineer in charge of the CCC which meant Civilian Conservation Corps. And his problem was to ditch the marshes, the salt water marshes, and get rid of the mosquitos, salt water mosquitos. So he wanted to have it recorded, what the work they were doing, and I was assigned to the four camps and went around and made paintings of the work crews out on the marsh, in the woods. Wherever there was any sluggish swamp water they tried to get it moving to get rid of the mosquitos. And the boys really flourished. We all gained weight and we were stronger and healthier and got into work habits again. And think a lot of them when they got out of the CCC, it lasted about three years, became successes. Which sort of goes to prove that you can get out of a work habit or you can get into a work habit. If you can find what you can do and get going on it you can make a success. I think that's a lesson that I think young people will need now again. As I said I'm not into computers. I'm more in to the old fashioned kind of Delaware. That is the old time villages and to me I know malls are very convenient but they all seem the same to me. I go into them out in the West and they're just the same as they are in Delaware. But in a country, a State out in the country, that is different. That is the way people are. They differ from one part of the country to the other. And so I'm a little bit old fashioned. JD:Where were the boys from that were in the camps? JL:Well, they were from all around and they were being shipped all around. I think the majority of those from these camps came from New York. JD:Were there any Delaware men though? JL:Yes. And I can back up a little on that because there were a number of Delaware fellows. JD:What kind of..... Had they been farmers or had they been.... What had they done before? Were they young men? JL:I think the Delaware ones usually came from rural areas or from farms. I don't know that the farmers were hurting as much as city people. LG:That's what I was wondering, like... JL:Well the farmers were doing.... They were able to succeed. At least they could eat. LG:To survive. JD:Well that's a theory that we have that the farmers were, at least in this area, were doing okay. Did you find that to be true in Lewes? JL:I think that a town like this was doing peaches and strawberries and so on. And they were shipping them out. They were doing pretty well. The ag people were doing a lot better than.... LG:Like up in Wilmington? Like in cities? JL:I don't know that ??????, you know they call it apple..... New York was the apple. JD:Oh the Big Apple. JL:The Big Apple and that was literally true because they would take apples up there and sell them for a nickel. And that's about what they would find for food a lot of times. I was a boy before that when the Depression was just starting and went to do sketches in New York. LG:Right. JL:And I was very impressed when the tramps, the people out of work, lined up in the battery. There were about ten thousand of them to get soup. And they just walked on. They didn't have very good clothes or anything. And they just were dreadful. And they had to be taken care of because it was a pretty rough time. JD:And you didn't see any people like that when you came down to Delaware? People without homes or migrant workers? JL:Of course I didn't get..... I was in the camps. I was in the camps. LG:Did you ever get to leave the camp and go into town? Did you do that? JL:Oh yes, yes. The four camps, I visited the four camps. The first one was in Magnolia, near Dover. I remember walking into Dover. This is before the Air Base was there. And we would walk into Dover from Leipsic. The camp was at Leipsic. And then there was one at Magnolia. There's some great big marshes there that they were doing. And Dover didn't look as bad as some of those Jersey towns that I had seen before I came here. See I came up from Jersey. To me I don't think Delaware looked as bad off as some of the other places. That's just my thoughts. Mr. Corcoran, the Director of the Corps, sent a truck around. And sometimes he'd put the artist in the truck. I was the camp artist and I would go around and help with the display. We went to usually schools. I remember one time he wanted to do a little publicity for the CCC and I was working in clay, some mud that I had found, I believe it was not far from my school there. JD:Near the Air Base. JL:It was near there. Some boys had found this blue clay and I made a great big head out of it. And Mr. Corcoran, the Director, came and saw this big head and he said, "Can you make that head so you can put it over a boy, put it on a boy?" And I said, "Yeah." He said, "Well now I'll you what. I want you to make the indian, the candlestick maker, the baker and so on." There were ten of them. "And I'm going to put CCC boys in those and we're going to walk around the Fair with these on and advertise the CCC." Those boys, they hated my guts. I'll tell you under the thing it would be in a ferment or a hot day anything and these poor fellows were staggering around the whole Fair, the whole thing of it. And they wanted to know if I were the one that did it. If I were the one that made those things. LG:And what did you tell them? JL:Well I was trying to change the subject real fast. JD:Were they saying some about the Corps as they walked around or they just were present? JL:It was an ad. It was an ad to tell Delaware what the Corps was doing. I think there might have been some kind of a speil along with it that followed the boys that were hiking around with these. And they held up banners too. JD:Did people pay attention? JL:I don't know whether I had one on or not. I don't recall.... I don't think I was even there. I was staying away from it. But it was good advertising. And this Corcoran was a real humdinger. He really moved things along. He would go to Washington and get surplus anything at all that they needed. Oh, as I said, they invented some of the tools. They invented some. They had a long spade that went down into the mud. And then they had a knife that cut a line and the spade cut a segment out. And then they had a hook that pulled the sod out. And then when they got this ditch clear the tidewater would go through there. JD:What did they do with the sod? JL:They stacked them up in little neat piles and they would stay that way. They were pretty solid. JD:So they had banks for the ditches. JL:You would see a pile of sods neatly stacked up here and then maybe
another hundred yards would be another one all along the ditches. And
some of the people that lived in the marsh didn't like the idea because
this caused fish and crabs and things not to come in. It disrupted the
muskrats and some of them lived by the muskrat. They had the muskrat
marshes. JL:Yes it was. And it also had oyster boats. They would go down there and that was how I got into the art of Delaware. Because you couldn't find a more picturesque town than Leipsic in those days. It's still quite a lovely town, but it's not the way it was. JD:What did you think about the people that were maybe a little upset about what the CCC was doing, the watermen and the muskrat trappers? How did they treat you? JL:I don't think they were so mad at the CCC boys as they were at the political vote that put them in there. I think they just had a limited interest in what they were doing and they didn't see what it was doing for the boys. LG:It was their livelihood, right? JL:Yes, it was their livelihood and now they don't have that livelihood because there are not many muskrats. There are no oysters at all. JD:Were they struggling back then or were they doing well with the trapping? JL:They oyster business paid pretty good because there were about six oyster boats there in Leipsic. And they had scrapers or dredges and they were dredging out oysters all along there. I don't know whether the oysters gave out or pollution caused the State to stop it. Because there at Port Mahon they had a big processing plant for oysters. But CCC was all over the country and they did some great jobs. I think the Skyline Drive was CCC. This forest, Redden Forest, had a pretty nice forest that they planted. They planted the trees in that forest, conservation. And they have done bridges. I really think not too far down the road they'll have to bring it back. JD:There were other camps other than the mosquito control. Weren't there some other camps working in the State? JL:Yes, the forestry. But ours were no forestry. I think there's a forestry camp up near Wyoming. JD:Was anyone painting or documenting what went on there? JL:No, I was about the only painter that I know of. I think there may have been one out in the West somewhere. But there were WPA artists that were doing postoffice. But that was a different branch. JD:Did you know any of those people because I've read about a couple of them? JL:Yes, I knew of a group that was.... Well, Ed Loper was one of the black artists up at Wilmington. And he was eh.... They were doing a kind of dictionary of old things and an encyclopedia of old things. I forget. I think they called it American...... JD:I think it's The Index of American Design. We talked with him briefly. JL:You talked to him? JD:Yeah. We will talk to him again. JL:Yeah, well Ed was in that. And there was man from Milford. Gordon Salter was the one in charge of it. And his, I don't know whether it was his wife or his girlfriend, at least she was an artist as well. And Corcoran, my boss, wanted me to know other artists so he took me over to meet the artist. LG:That's pretty neat. JL:Yeah. And I..... We were very congenial. We were doing very similar things and it was nice. JD:But those two were the only ones you really ever got to meet? JL:They were the two down here. But Gordon went on up further when he got really busy with The Index of American Design. And then I met some of the writers too, Tony Higgins and so on. They were in the WPA writing project. So it was a pretty wonderful thing. A wonderful concept. Later on after I got out of the Army I had my book on Delaware and Mrs. Roosevelt saw it and she wanted to know if I could do one on the Hudson River. So she invited me up there and I stayed in the Valcoe? Cottage ????? And I saw how her hand was into this thing because she was very strong for guilds. She wanted to have things constructed and she had a lot going on around the manor home there at Hyde Park. She had a lot. She had one group was constructing a replica of the mansion and it was about as big as this room, but it was a replica. Like a big doll's house. And it was so strong you could get up on it. But it had every single brick, every single thing that was in that manor was in that replica, that small replica. LG:What was it like meeting Mrs. Roosevelt? JL:Well I thought that she was one of the most impressive people that I ever met. I made some fauxpaws with her. I didn't know that Hyde Park was fo far away and I didn'thave the money and hardly enough to get there. And I couldn't get back off the train either and so I didn't have enough money to pay the taxi out to where she lived. I had to take back fifteen cents so I could get across the river again. But she forgave me. She was wonderful. She was wonderful. And later on when I was teaching here the teachers asked the DSEA I guess it was asked Mrs. Roosevelt to be the main speaker and I went up and she still remembered me. JD:She did? JL:I was teaching then. JD:Right. JL:I was teaching art then. That's where I taught you. LG:And how did she see your book? JL:Why she was in charge of the Red Cross and one of the Red Cross hostesses, she saw one of my pictures first. There was a big exhibit of soldier's art and she saw it and she said "I like that painting. Can you tell me a little bit more about that solider?" And so the Red Cross told me about the book I had done on the Delaware. And she said, "Tell that young man I want him to come off and see me after the War so I can see if we can do the same thing of the Hudson River." And that Hudson River it..... I'm sorry she died before I could finish it. But it was eh.... The binder spoiled it because he put the boards on wrong. JD:Did she ever see any of your CCC work? Was it exhibited anywhere? JL:No, this is before I went in the Army. JD:Okay. JL:She saw work that I did..... I don't think that I talked to her much about the CCC work. I know she would have been interested because it was a project that Franklin Roosevelt was..... Hawkins was in charge ???? and he wrote us letters. And I went over to a couple of the warehouses with Mr. Corcoran into Washington and saw some of the artwork. JD:I know there were also some black camps in Delaware? JL:I don't know about them. I don't think that there were any that I know of in Delaware. But I...... There were. There were some black camps here. JD:I think one of the things that Lorraine and I were interested in is sort of what was everyday life like in the camps? I mean how did you day start? You know what did you do? I know there was a lot of work that the other men did. JL:Well I wasn't excluded from the work day. When they had work call with a bugle it was before daylight. It was about five I guess. We all dragged ourselves out to be counted. Just like they were in the Army. We had to make up our beds just as you would in the Army. We went into chow hall and had good food. It was certainly good food. And then they had work trucks and crews. Each truck, it was Chevrolet truck, held about a crew of about eight. And these trucks had foreman. And they would be assigned certain marshes where they would be ditching. And it was the same in the winter as in the summer. They didn't slow down in the winter. Bad weather was the same as good weather. Your clothes were Army clothes and they were great. LG:They were warm. JD:When did the day end? JL:I think about five, four-thirty or five when they came in. And they had a wash place where everybody could wash off the mud. And they had a.... Later on they had a person in charge of school training, teaching. I don't know what they called this person and he would give the boys.... Some of them couldn't read. LG:Like a tutor? JL:He would give them.... An Education Advisor, that's what he was called. And they would go in there. They had a library where they had some books. And they had a rec, what they called a rec hall. But these were all like Army barracks. They called them barracks. And as I said it was healthy. None of them got sick. They did have one medical man. He was an officer and they had an infirmary. JD:Did they have electricity? JL:Oh yeah. Weekends there the boys were off and they could do what they like. I usually walked into Dover and painted on my free time. And then Leipsic I would paint there. But I was in Magnolia Camp, Leipsic Camp and Lewes Camp. Lewes was the headquarters. And the work that I did was taken to Lewes where the headquarters were. And up in a kind of corridor above the postoffice was the display. All of my materials were provided by .... JD:Were any of the paintings displayed for the people in the area or did they just go into storage? Did anybody see them? It seems a shame that.... JL:Mr. Corcoran donated the paintings to me after the CCC work closed and therefore I have them. JD:You've shared them we know. JL:I have shown them around. Not a great deal. I don't know yet, I'm thinking about making up a will, whether to turn them over to my girls or to the CCC or what. I haven't really figured it out. I'm going to show you what some of the.... they look. It's a little awkward to try to dig them out of the loft so I'm not going to do that. JD:Okay. JL:I should have gotten these out earlier so we could have seen them. All of these things that you see here are paintings.... ????? according to national types. I call them Polish and Irish and Scotch and Italian and so on. JD:These were the city boys? JL:And it was America because it was a cross-section of all America. LG:Did they like being in Delaware as much as you did? JL:Yeah, I think they were homesick. You know, they were just kids and they were homesick but there was nothing at home for them. LG:Right. JL:Starvation, that's all there was. And so this is the way the barracks looked. They kept them pretty neat. I made these up when I first came down to show the Rec Hall and the Work Hall. This is the way they were out in the marsh. These were the oyster boats and some of them put flowers all around front of them. This is the main painting. The one showing the way the State is and the way the.... JD:And that's the standard uniform there? JL:Right. And this is beginning to fade here, but here you can see some CCC boys rescueing a family from a roof in a flood. And here is... You can see how strong and muscular they became working in the marsh. JD:Where was flood? JL:It was in Ohio. Cincinnati. That was it. I just thought maybe you would like to see that. JD:Yeah, wonderful. LG:Mr. Lewis when I was looking at your Delaware paintings book you have some paintings in there like a blacksmith and tinsmith. Were there a lot of in the '30s people like that still in the little towns where there was still a village blacksmith? JL:I want you to tell me your name. LG:Lorraine. JL:Well you know they got the blacksmith out of the towns. They must have found them somewhere because every camp had a blacksmith. So they must have still being doing horses around. And I suppose about every farm had cattle where they had a blacksmith. Because it was still very rural. I liked those little villages. And I liked the fact that you could go to a little village and talk and laugh and meet people and be friendly. JD:Were people happy though? You get this image of the Depression that everybody was so burdened by their life. And was that true? JL:Well naturally those that were without food were in a big problem. The Okies, for instance, where the dustbowl they had no way of saving the soil and they tried to go to California and they were in sad shape. As I said Delaware was in the better shape, I think, than many of the states. North Jersey and New York were in real problems. JD:I also noticed, I was reading through the Delaware Scene too, a lot of farming paintings that you did in that era. One, I know, was of threshing and just various farms in the area. JL:You saw the exhibit then? LG:Right. JD:Yes, I did see that. JL:Was it at the State Museum last year? Well I had that.... A friend of mine bought that later. That was not done on the CCC time. I did that on my own because I was just interested in the idea of threshing. But a lot of the work was very similar because the CCC enabled me to see this rural side of Delaware. I wouldn't have seen it otherwise which got me very interested in the Delaware scene and doing the book later on. LG:You might not even have known that Delaware was here. JL:No I would not have. JD:Is that what you think is maybe the greatest reward you maybe got from being part of the CCC? How do you.... I mean do you think it was good for artists or good for everybody? JL:I think the best thing for me was to get a work habit. Mr. Corcoran was a slavedriver. He didn't fool around and he meant work. And there was no such thing as getting a free ride. We didn't..... After awhile we realized that was what we wanted to do anyway. We wanted to work. We didn't want to slough around. It was more healthy to work and we weren't homesick when we worked. And we were growing up. We were becoming adults. Because before then we were just kids homesick. Wanting to run away and go home. LG:You didn't need any idle time. You needed to work. JL:No that was the good part. And I think the same is true now. It may be different circumstances but kids that aren't finding themselves, they're not going to be happy if they can't find out what they can do and do well. They don't want to goof-off and be unsuccessful. But these boys found out that they began to get stronger and stronger. They could use those tools pretty well. And then when they left the C's they were ready to pitch in and become garage mechanics or anything. They were equipped to get out on the farms and really do a job. They didn't even know what a farm was those city boys. JD:Did any of the others stay in the area that you know of? JL:One of the CCC boys just wrote me. He wants to see the movie. And he is..... I say boy, he's about eighty years old now. But he's coming down to Bridgeville to see it. And he's living in Dover. His name is Charles Mast. You might want to go and talk to him. I think he does a little art work. He's a nice fellow. I think the people from the State Museum visited him. Have you met him? JD:No I haven't. LG:What the guys in the CCC think about having an artist there? JL:No, I was one of them and I went out on the trucks with them and carried my junk with me, made sketches. Of course, they provided me a little place next to the shop, the place where we were just talking about. JD:The blacksmith shop? JL:The blacksmith shop. And I had to keep it clean. I remember one time I got some mud in there and the superintendent made me come down and clean it up. LG:Like in the Army. Inspection. JL:Oh absolutely. Oh he was upset. It would have been his neck if I hadn't gone down and cleaned it up. And they weren't fooling around. So that was good for me because I was a little bit on the spoiled side. JD:Did you have any of the physical labor? JL:Oh I did. I remember I wanted to go out with the boys to save the people from the flood and I ran away from the camp to join Mr. Corcoran's select group so I could go up. And the Education Director caught me on the road and brought me back to the camp. And when the Captain, he was an Army Captain, was giving out the discipline heard about it he put me down in the hole and made me dig a ditch just like the rest of them. And I complained about it but it didn't do any good. Mr. Corcoran said, "Look you're nowhere different from any of the others. You get in there and do it." They just had that show. It was a big show for me. ?????? JD:You know I've been doing my own research and I've read about Mr. Corcoran. Who decided from day to day what you would paint? I mean was it all up to you or did somebody direct you? JL:No it was up to me. JD:That's a lot of freedom.. JL:Yeah. Well that was sort of creative in a way. I'm glad it was up to me because it gave me a chance to search out things which I would have been for to be passed to me. I had to search out and create a program for my work. And I stayed busy. I was awfully busy. On the side I was an entertainer and made marionettes with these guys and we put on some shows. And later on Mr. Corcoran tried to get this show on the road. Not my show but a show he wanted to do to advertise the CCC. But it fell on its face because the man he chose was too arty. LG:An artiste? JL:Yeah he wanted to do the green god or something, an Irish mystic play, and we had to show it around to these Delaware towns and they didn't know what in the world it was all about. They didn't like it at all. LG:Wasn't down to earth for them. JL:No it wasn't anything they wanted. JD:Did they see your puppet shows? JL:I did those mostly for the guys in the camp and they participated. But in Lewes some ladies heard about it. And they said, "Look we will sew the costumes for the marionettes if you will do the Christmas Carol". Dickens Christmas Carol. We did that at the airbase. And the school helped. These ladies were really workers. And I don't know that too many of the boys helped. And I was very keen on this one, but it wasn't the one that the boys did. Then when Mr. Corcoran heard about it, Mrs. Corcoran was helping with the costumes. He heard about it he said, "Gee maybe this is something we can use to publicize the CCC". So he set up a company and then is when he got this fellow that was way out and just beyond anybody. They couldn't understand what he was talking about. He spoiled it all because nobody wanted to come and see the green god walking perhaps. JD:Did you make up any of your own sort of plays or were you doing sort of standard dramas? JL:We did eh..... Let's see we did.... I can't think of some of them now. We did make up one. It was the DeBraak. The ??? sank ???? And there were two girls from Rehoboth I know that were interested in marionettes, the Horn girls. Now they're as old as I am. Then they designed their puppets out of the Debraak and the idea of raising.... Well they didn't try to raise the Debraak but they were showing it was carrying money and ???? when it got in a storm. And it was pretty interesting. LG:The guys that worked the marionettes, did you teach them to do that or what did they...? JL:Oh yeah. There was fellow in the CCCs that kept reciting these ballads. The Shooting of Dan McGrew was one of them. The boys didn't like him because he acted sort of strange. All he did was walk around reciting these poems and they got tired of it. And I thought well, you know, if he recited them and somebody made a puppet of what he was reciting it might work and they might like it. LD:They may not think he was so strange. JL:Right. That's exactly what happened and they began to like him after that, after we did the show. But when he just walked around pretending like he was some kind of a poet they didn't like him. LG:Did you do it on a stage or how did they do this? JL:Yeah we had a stage. That was what they called the rec hall. We made a stage and we had a great time with it. And it went around to the different camps. We even had our show taken off to Wilmington to the radio show up there. I remember I was playing the accordian. I play the accordian a little bit. And I was beating with my foot to keep time and the director of the show came over and stood on my foot because it was making a noise and he didn't want that. Well when he stood on my foot I lost the time of the play. The playing I mean. JD:Did they listen to radio in camp? I mean did people listen to radio for entertainment like when they got back from the camp group? Did they know anything like the old time radio shows? JL:Yeah they were listening to radio. It was very prevalent at that time. There was no TV. LG:Right. JL:But I think they listened and they had record players that you could wind up and that sort of thing. I wish I could find one because ?????? I have a wire statue my nephew made for me, a wire mesh, and I want to get a wheel that would go around so that I can show colored lights against the screen and have the grid shine up at some scene. And I'm eh.... If you ever hear of an old phonograph that's going to be thrown away and you don't want it for the Ag Museum then... JD:Okay. They're pretty collectible these days I think. JL:I think so, a mechanical one. I might be able to use my old bicycle to rig it out. This is made by a prison group, you see I volunteer in the jail, and they can't use any iron stuff. Now these figures have all melted over the time and there's nothing to hold them up. But the one that made the head which is the best part, the dragon's head, it's a Chinese warship, he cut his girl up in little pieces, and he was really a fargone criminal. And I don't know what happened to him but he got very, very keen on art when I was going over there to the jail. JD:Do you still go over there? JL:I got a letter today from the warden, or the state admin.... the county administrator. If I can figure it out I think I will. LG:Did you do that when you were a teacher? When did you start going to the prisons? Were you teaching like public school then? JL:Well I just did this after I got out of school, after I retired. When did you graduate? LG:'71. I just had my 25th highschool reunion. JL:Well, I didn't go too many years beyond that. I guess about '74 I retired. LG:I was lucky. JL:Were you in elementary with me? LG:Yes, I was sixth, seventh and eighth grades I had you. JL:Yeah, I remember that. We had some good times. LG:Kite day. We had kite day then. JL:I remember that. And I remember about a thousand little kids all running up to me wanting me to untear their knots all at the same time. LG:When did you decide..... I know this probably isn't part of the CCC stuff, but I want to know it, when did you decide you wanted to teach? JD:Well that's what I was going to ask. Did you teach the boys in the CCC Camp? Did any of them want to know how to paint and did you teach any of that? JL:The nearest of that I did was doing the shows. No, I wasn't a teacher. I wasn't meant to be a teacher in the Cs. LG:Well when did you decide to...? JL:They had an educational director. LG:When did you yourself decide you wanted to teach? JL:After the Army and I wanted to get married and I got good support. My wife wanted the kind of money I made. I'm doing a little better now, but in those days I couldn't sell a picture if I threw it at somebody. But later on I began to do the books and they helped sell pictures. LG:I'm sure they did. JL:Girls I'd just love to be with you forever, but I promised to take my girl to.... JD:Well I understand. LG:You have to go shopping. JL:She wants to get a Magnavox or a kind of TV thing to take up to our place up there and they have reserved one for her and we have to go. I didn't do you much good though did I? JD:Yeah you did us a whole of good you told us.... JL:Did I really? JD:Yes, I think so. I hope that there's something that you've never..... That you would like to add that maybe we haven't asked. Is there anything that you can think of? I guess maybe what would say was your most memorable experience? JL:There is something if I may get serious for a moment. I am very, very sad about the fact that they're taking the arts out of the schools. Music and art. And I feel, as my ??? here can vouch, that kids are being sold short if they can't have art and music. That they will not have as much joy in their life. And when we hear the Senate rampaging that they don't have enough money for arts and so forth in school I can have bad name for it, but I'm not going to use it. LG:It makes you wonder where these men and women came from. JL:I hope, I don't know how we can get it over, but when the movie comes I'm going to.... If they give me an opportunity to get up on my feet I'm going to say that to them. JD:We try to do that at the Museum. We try to incorporate art into what we do. Not just history, but art too and do our part. JL:Yeah. Well if you have little children coming to see the Museum the best way to get to them is to give them a pencil and a piece of paper and ask them to make a picture about it. JD:That's right. JL:They will get a lot of mileage and it will mean a lot to them if you did that. If you had some crayons..... Why don't you do that? Get some crayons and have some paper at the Museum and when children come have them make some pictures of the various kind of charities. They'd love to do that. It would mean a lot. JD:At our last exhibit we had blocks out for them to make quilt designs. JL:That's a great idea. Oh that is meaningful. At the State Museum where my work is now children are coming in there and they are drawing and it means a lot more to them. They remember it a lot better when they draw it. LG:That figures, like at my age, I'm 43, and I still remember all the art and everything I had from when I was a little child. JL:Do you really? LG:Oh Mr. Lewis you wouldn't believe how much it has influenced my life and I bring my daughter up the same way. JL:How old is your daughter? LG:She'll be twelve in December. JL:And you have here there in Dover? Is that where you live? LG:Yeah she lives with me. JD:I wonder if maybe you feel they way you do, I mean of course you're an artist, but also well the New Deal, Franklin, FDR, that was one of the things he wanted. He wanted people to experience art, literature. You think it's the time when you first started painting? JL:I don't like to put a stamp on the situation. I wish we were all humans and were out for the better of the country, but it's come to be that you have one camp of people called Republicans over here, another camp of people called Democrats over here, and they feel that they're got to pitch in to eachother and not think about this makes our country better. Let's just discredit the other people. And these people say let's discredit these people and they forget about the country. LG:They all have their agenda. JL:In this country we have we have a lot to do. I was just talking to some people about these roads that are coming over from Washington and Baltimore to the beach how it would be so nice if they could go underground. And it they could that would be a job for a big CCC push. A new camp. Put that down. JD:That's a good idea. Well, we won't hold you any longer. We know
you need to go, but thank you very much. We enjoyed it and I'm sure
we will be in touch again when the time comes closer. And we hope to
see you at the premiere of you movie too because we're going to be coming
to see it. |
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