Pages from the past

"Comanche vs. Grandfield--a Minute to Play"--8 by 10 by Terrence Miller Clark

Dad was the starting guard on the Comanche Indian football team, "Iron Guard Clark" they called him. You didn't get by him, and since you played both offense and defense in those days, and with little leather helmets and no face masks, you saw lots of hard action. Comanche had a solid football team, and so did its arch rivals Marlow and Grandfield. Today, Grandfield is a ghost of itself, the cotton gin gone, wide streets and stores vacant. Comanche is withering too, has been surpassed by Duncan, 10 miles north. The Sun Refinery is closed at Meridian, and it can no longer compete with more prosperous Marlow, 10 miles north of Duncan, on US 81, paralleling the Rock Island tracks and the old Chisholm Trail.

But not in the '20s and '30s. Dad caught the action. I wonder if he is Number 13? I wonder what  year? I hope my dad's last uncle, Mike, can tell me his number.

Dad played his last football game in the fall of 1931, and graduated in spring of 1932. I have his senior ring. That summer in the Depression, he and a friend Carl Price, rode box cars on the Rock Island line and other trains to Juarez, Mexico to celebrate.

Coming home, they "changed trains" in Tucumcari, N.M., waiting on a Rock Island freight back to Oklahoma. Early one morning, as they were getting ready to jump into an open box car, a railroad employee started talking to Dad. They talked too long, and the train sped up. Dad tried to jump on, slipped, fell under the steel wheels, and lost his right leg below the knee and his left pinkie finger as he pushed himself away.

Iron Guard Clark was no more. But he could still draw, and always did. But not inside the lines or by anyone's rules.

More violent art

Gangsters and trains, and even the Civil War caught my Dad's imagination. I was more enamored with the Civil war than he....this is the only one I know that he did. But imagine, going back to my first post, not being allowed to draw this! It is a record of a time, and an artist and of a family.

They look like Yankees. Mine would have been Confederates.

Oh how I wish I could sit down and talk with Dad about these. Is your father still alive?

Ask them about their lives. don't rely on old photos or drawings.

Forbidden, yellowing war art--part 2

"Seven bullets"--8" by 10" by Terrence Miller Clark, Comanche, Oklahoma, sometime in the 1920s or very early 1930s.

Art reflects the times. Growing up in red-dirt poor Comanche, Oklahoma, Terrence Miller Clark, born in 1914--when Oklahoma was only seven years old as a state. He was the first of five brothers, and could draw before he could walk. He usually got in trouble for his art, but his talent was obvious to everyone in town. Yes, I have some talent, but not the talent of my father. I labor over my work, and for Dad, it was just who he was.

All of these are on thin, yellowing paper, 8" by 10".

Forbidden art from long ago

Death--8" by 10" pencil sketch by Terrence Miller Clark, probably in early high school years at Comanche, Oklahoma

I recently found this collection of my Dad's artwork. But there's more here than a high school student's artist work, probably done in class when he should have been studying. His main topic was WWI., which was fresh in everyone's memory when he was growing up in the 1920s  and early 30s in red dirt Oklahoma.

I learned recently that my dad would not have been able to draw like this in current public schools.   Why?

We were recently having a kitchen sink installed, and I was talking to the 30-something fellow doing the work. I expect that he was conservative, perhaps an evangelical, but we were having a great conversation and he had definite, well-defined opinions on lots of stuff. He told me that he and his wife were home-schooling their children. They live in the Putnam City district. He said they sent their son to first grade, and then pulled him out, for a number of reasons. One reason was that the boy was not allowed to draw pictures, in art class, of any weapons. "Boys draw pictures of swords, knights, fighting," he said. "Nothing wrong with that."

I thought of these pictures of my Dad's. I related this story to a professor colleague of mine who also home-schools her children. She wasn't surprised. She said in Edmond, art classes forced the children to "color inside the lines."

My Dad never colored inside the lines. when I was in first grade, I never did either, and got graded down in later grades for wasting my time drawing pictures of U-boats, and dogfights between Mustangs and Me-109s from WWII. Too often, mine showed the Germans winning, and that didn't sit well in the 1950s.

My Dad and I would never have graduated. All my children got good educations in public schools, in Waurika and Stillwater. But creativity was allowed.
And it still should be. Not politically correct test-oriented rote learning. Oklahoma and America need creativity more than ever, and that means letting students explore, and try, and fail, and if they want to draw pictures of people fighting, let them.We don't need cookie cutter; we need individuals.

So these photos, and the ones following, all 8 x 10 on fragile, yellowing paper and Big-Chief tablet paper, are forbidden today.

Pete Seeger

Turned 91 this week, and he's still busy writing music, answering letters, and chopping wood on Sundays. Great article in the NY Times.


ihttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/nyregion/03routine.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

And here's my favorite, the Malvena Reynolds song, sung by Pete.