The Ringling Museum Years

The previous writing was about working for the Mount Dora Center for the Arts and how that led me to the Ringling Museum Job because the gallery was going to close after just being opened for a few months, and I had to find something else to do. The museum job came just in time.

Tommy’s mom, Connie, saw a small ad in the Orlando Sentinel advertising for a position at the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota. In any case, I called the next morning and talked to the Art Director. A really nice man. I loved him from day one. We set an appointment for just a few days later, can’t remember if it was that Friday or the next Monday. I got my friend Michael to go with me and he was delighted.

 

About

I couldn’t believe the museum and the property. It was love at first site. The properties were out of this world and don’t get me started on the collections. I thought it was probably a job way above me since it was such a huge deal. But, that wasn’t the case. I was just at home there.

John Ringling was the main of the Ringling Brothers from the Ringling Brothers Circus. The one that dealt with the money, promotion, etc. He and his artsy wife Mable moved to this part of Florida then decided it would be a great thing to bring the Circus down for the winters to this area.

The couple bought 20 acres of waterfront property in Sarasota in 1905. By 1926 the 56 room mansion was completed. Built to impress, the mansion not only was enormous, but it also held a hidden floor that held a gambling and entertaining floor with amazing murals all over, including the ceilings. You had to know that it was there and then know how to stop the elevator to get there. I didn’t even know about it the first year I worked there. It wasn’t talked about much. It was prohibition time when they built the house and he was a showman and gambler, so this hidden floor was totally necessary. The bar on the first floor was completely clean of alcohol. Little did anyone know the kind of debauchery going on in the hidden floor.

I believe the collection got started from the need of art for Ca’ d’Zan. Then he realized that a lot of great European estates had gotten hit by World War I or the depression after and there was a lot of art to be bought. Since he was a Circus guy, he bought the art most of the time because it was the largest, not necessarily the greatest of the specific artist. He had a thing about big works of art. Circus! So, he ended with the largest Rubens, Ghirlandaio, Della Robbia, Veronese, etc. In any case, he put together an impressive collection of a bout 600 pieces of art.

That mentions nothing about the collections that are housed under the museum of people’s art collections that had been donated to the museum through the years, the amount of Cyprian Art, sculpture heads, furniture, and all sorts of art pieces that no one ever got to see. People studying this kinds of Ancient art would be able to go in and study the pieces, but regular visitors didn’t get to see these things. I spent a lot of time downstairs just because I was curious and I became a friend of the downstairs curator. At one point, I saw this beautiful table made of marble and asked if I could use it for a desk and I was given the OK. I loved it!. The property ended up having the Mansion, Ca’ d’Zan, the Art Museum, the Circus Museum and the Asolo Theater which had been bought and never assembled until 1952. I understand that there are now new wings that have been added. I will have to go on an expedition one of these days.

 

The Interview

I had a wonderful interview with the Museum’s Art Director. Unfortunately, I can’t remember his name anymore. It was very obvious that the Art Director liked my work from the beginning. He had been at the museum for several years and I believed he really was needing a break. We must have talked for a couple of hours and then said good bye. He told me he would talk to the museum director and let me know. Michael and I headed sight seeing in Downtown Sarasota.

I had gone to Sarasota in the 1970s because that is where a couple of surfer friend were from and had invited us to come and visit. One of them, Lance Trout, was a photographer for Surfing Magazine. Anyhow, that time we were all about surfing and beach. So, I didn’t go to the museum or even downtown.

I was enamored with the downtown right away. I thought it was a wonderful town. Sarasota exploded later on, but in those days, it was a beautiful, small fishing and boat tourist town with many boutiques and gift shops. It already had some quite wonderful theaters and many productions came through. And, of course, was the house of the Ringling School of Art, which by then, was on its way back up. (It had a few rough years before that.)

Michael and I saw a few things, had lunch and headed home. When I got home that evening, I had a message from the Ringling Art Director that I had the job and could I start on Monday? There was no way I could move there by Monday, but was thrilled. I called him and left him a message that I couldn’t start Monday because I would have to look for a place to live and move there with my daughter before I could start work. But that I would do that as fast as I could. So, I started looking for a place to rent in Sarasota and that weekend I went to start looking. I spoke with him the next week and set up a starting date.

 

The Disaster Friend

The next week became frantic and crazy. I had a friend Kathy York, hat had opened the Apple Barrel Restaurant in downtown Mount Dora. She was also my neighbor downtown when I lived in the Mount Dora downtown alley, across from the bakery. We became good friends. She had a boyfriend who was the chef at the restaurant and part owner. It did very well for a while and then it started going down, I guess when hers and the chef’s relationship also started going kaput. They closed the restaurant and he disappeared with a car that my boyfriend Harlow had bought for me. I didn’t know this until he took off with the car and was never seen or heard from again.

So, Kathy convinced me to let her go with me to Sarasota to look at properties to rent. I didn’t realize what was going on with the restaurant and the boyfriend, yet, and that this was time to work on me to convince me to let her share the place with me and convince me to rent a larger place so she could bring her crap too. I had envisioned a two bedroom apartment in one of the islands just for Avaryl and Me. And we ended up renting this 3 bedroom house a couple of blocks from the beach in Holmes Beach, Anna Maria Island, which is in one of the islands along the West Coast of Sarasota. Way larger and more expensive than I had thought of. Unfortunately, unbeknown to us, the house had gotten flooded a few months before and we didn’t realize that there was all this mildew in the house. But, we rented the house. The museum had said they would pay for my move. The truck came to pick up my stuff. Kathy asked if she could add a couple of furniture pieces to my move and I had no problem with that. Next thing I know she keeps bringing stuff: beds, furniture, dressers, etc. I didn’t even know because she was giving them to the movers downstairs.

I get to the Holmes Beach house with my daughter Avaryl, there is Kathy with a guy, a new boyfriend she never mentioned who now was going to also be with us at the house, another surprise. We have not even gotten the electric or anything turned on and we have lights. Well, they hard-wired it. Next the movers truck arrive and I couldn’t believe all the crap Kathy had put in the truck. I didn’t even know she had. Well, we moved in. I start work in a couple of days and the museum business administrator calls me into his office because I owe the museum around $1,200 for my friend’s move. The movers had complained about the huge move and passed the charge to the museum. On my first day at work!!!!! I was so embarrassed! I went home and told Kathy she owed me $1,200. Well, she was about to owe me a heck of a lot more. Oh, and I paid for the house deposit which she was going to pay me back. Of course, she never paid me back for that either.

She got a job as a waitress in one of the restaurants by the shore, close to the house. The guy came and went. I can’t even remember his name. All I remember was that he dyed and curled his hair and she later married him. A couple of weeks went by. The house was full of cigarette smoke all the time. Oh yes, she was a smoker. Then, she burnt something on the stove that wouldn’t come off. And then, my allergies started. The house and the flooded rugs, and I guess the cigarette smoke. It was killing me. In those days we still only had Benadryl for allergies and it was quite a huge problem. If I took it I was out of it all day. If I didn’t take it, I had a horrible allergy all day. Well, I had to take it.

A few days into this, and Kathy comes and says she is leaving. She and her boyfriend X are moving to Michigan, I think, and she is taking all her stuff. I looked at her and asked how could she do that? I couldn’t afford this house and she had made me get it. I had paid all the stuff and she still owed me half. She said she would send it when she got home to Michigan. That’s apparently where her family was from. The house was way too big and I couldn’t afford it. Well, I came home from work the next day and she had left and taken all her stuff with her. I never saw her again. A few years later she called me and I wouldn’t talk to her. I think Tommy did. I had absolutely nothing to say to her.

So, there I was. I didn’t know what I was going to do. As luck had it, there was a little duplex diagonally, right across the street that put a for rent sign the next day. The rent was only $200 a month and it was a 2 bed/1 bath, with a huge porch and a yard. I went to the present house owners and told them what happened, that my friend had take off and that I couldn’t stay there. They were very angry (I didn’t blame them), but they started saying I had to pay for this and that. And I told them I wasn’t doing that. They had my first and last and they could do whatever they wanted and that their rug was killing me because it, obviously, had gotten wet and they had not disclosed that. So, at the end, I had to figure out how to get into the little duplex. I knew no one, I had no money, I had a 5 year old daughter with me, and I didn’t know what to do. Then I found out there was a Credit Union and that, if I opened an account there, I could borrow $2,000 at a very low %. I went directly there and did that. Those $2,000 went a long way: Deposit, first and last, electric, water, etc. It ended up being that the owner of the duplex was this wonderful lady. She loved me because I always paid on time, I painted the house, fixed everything that needed to be fixed without a problem, and I had a garden. Then we adopted a cat, or he adopted us. A huge black and white cat. We were a family.

Now that all the craziness was behind me, I realized that I lived in beautiful Holmes Beach a couple of blocks from the most amazing beaches in that area. That I had a new job I had to concentrate on. That I had a kid to raise, and it was time to start the next act. Homes Beach ended up being the best place we could have ever ended up in. The beaches were just a blessing. The fishing also. I used to go fishing most Saturday mornings and catch Mackerel, and red snappers, and a few other kinds of fish. I would clean them right there and give all those parts to the pelicans that would be hanging around begging. I had fish for the week. At some point I had to stop fishing because I had too many in the freezer.

The next part of this was the amazing restaurants up and down the beach. We couldn’t get enough. And all the things that there were to do there and in Tampa and St. Pete which were just over the bridge. We had a blast.

 

The Museum Job

The first week I found out I worked for a totally amazing department of the museum. We were the people that designed and built all the exhibits. The entire downstairs group were the only artists employed by the museum, and also the lowest paid (of course). Some of these artists had been there a long time. and loved their jobs. I was just always impressed at the work they did, from painting the galleries for every exhibit to framing all the art, taking down the collection to make room for a new exhibit, to hanging every new exhibit, to rehabbing traveling exhibitions (the Museum had a lot of these that you could borrow for free if you were a Public School. All you had to do was pay for the transportation. You would not believe what the exhibits looked like when they got back to the Museum.)

The museum had 13 galleries in those days and the big addition of the modern wing. The museum collection usually hung in those galleries until the there would be new exhibit that they created, or a traveling exhibit we were bringing in. It was my job, as I found out, to design the exhibits with the curators, design all the promotional work, the exhibit catalog, posters, banners, invitations, anything and everything that the exhibit was going to need to promote it. Then there was the museum shop which would need me to design products for them to sell like shopping bags, collector big shopping Bags, Teddy bears, and all sorts of other products. The museum also needed a new brochure with a good map, new garbage cans, signage, labels, etc. So, my work was cut out for me. And I should have been paid twice for what I did, but since, I took the job and didn’t finagle the paycheck, that’s what I got, and, it was a government job. In any case, I thought it was a great job and a learning opportunity. What I consider my first “real” job. I came in and set off running.

 

The Medieval Fair

The first thing we worked on was the 1986 Medieval Fair. These were a huge deal because, unlike many of the others around, this one was educational and had all sorts of things the others didn’t. The Fairs happened every year. I had to design and produce a poster, a program, tickets, invitations, newspaper ads, and everything you can imagine that they would need for something like this. I must say I learned very fast how to do all these kinds of things and how fast we had to do them so they would be ready on time. The catalog had to be specked and sent to be typeset. The poster had to be done and color separated to send to print. That first Fair was magical to me. I had never been to one and had no idea what to expect. Well they had musicians playing Medieval instruments, people selling Medieval clothing and jewelry, everything you can imagine Medieval, and then there were the jousting matches in full gear. It was all very exciting and I had designed everything for it!

 

The Annual Gala

The next project was the Annual Gala Exhibit. Every year there would be a gala and the Florida Governor would attend. After all, he was our boss. The Sarasota Mayor would receive the Governor with the Museum Director and they would be given a tour of the museum. This was a formal affair in full Gala and a big deal for the Museum. Then, the next day was the one for the people. The plebes. That’s the one I would be able to go to. 🙂 The food was always pretty good though, and a lot of the people I worked with would be there so it was always a blast. The museum had memberships and that is most of the people that went to this Plebe Gala. For both gala affairs, there were formal invitations, regular invitations, programs, etc.

 

On My Own

It was around this time that my boss, the Art Director came to me to let me know he was leaving. That he had just been waiting to see if I was going to work out and I was so impressed with my work that he had no problems with moving on. He had a job waiting for him as the Art Director for the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. He was gone by the next week. So, there I was, the Assistant Art Director, doing all of the work of two people for the next two years and getting paid as the Assistant all that time. But, I look back to it as a great school that I got to go to while getting paid also. The projects that I got to work on, the things I got to learn, the print shops and other amazing people I got to work with, color separators, photographers, typesetters, curators, and on and on until the moment that I got in front of my first Apple computer, none was a waste of time.

 

Worcestershire Porcelain: The Klepser Collection

The next project was a Worcestershire Porcelain or Royal Porcelain Exhibition. An entire exhibit was sent to the Museum from the Klepser Collection, Britain. In any case, we had to build about 15-18 showcases that would display the porcelain but wouldn’t let you touch them. The pieces were extremely valuable, some, one-of-a-kind. We had a Crafts Curator who was a divine pleasure to work with. We hit it off. She liked all my ideas and we built these cases, painted them in some of the colors of the porcelain, created posters, invitations, etc. The exhibit was just beautiful. The porcelain was protected but people could get really close to each piece. The curator was just thrilled. She retired very soon after though because she had been there forever and the new director , Dr. Laurence J. Ruggiero, (Larry), started getting rid of the oldies. He had gotten hired to get the museum back to snuff and make it visible. It had been forgotten and in decay for quite a while before his arrival. I must say that I was a bit scared of him the whole time I was there. But, I learned that he was really doing what he needed to do to get this museum to the level it needed to be. The next Crafts Curator was also a delight to work with. I believe his name was Michael McDonald, or something like that. Just like the singer.

NOTE: Larry Ruggiero went on to the Morse Museum in Winter Park to do the same. He rehabbed and made it a happening place. I ended up doing a bit of design work for him while he was there. 

 

Next: The Museum

The next big job was re-designing all of the museum brochures, programs, little and big shopping bags, big collectors shopping bags with some of the museum art, tickets, Asolo Theater function programs, and on and on. The new Museum program was the first. I came up with a look for the brochures that could be adapted to everything else. Slanted Text on a blue-green background. The whole thing was a two-color print job so it wasn’t extremely expensive. It contained a 3-D map of the grounds showing you the Museum, Ca’ d’Zan, the Circus Galleries, Asolo Theater, and the Museum Restaurant. There were black and white photos of some of the Museum’s more famous art pieces, a page letting you know where all the facilities were and what each one had, etc. This piece was all done by hand. No computer, yet.

Then I designed the Museum Shop’s sale bags in three different sizes. Then I had to find new garbage cans for the entire Museum. Big ones. Luckily, they bought me something I have never seen again. I guess it exists online as one huge Website. In those days it was a vendor encyclopedia for the United States. There were around 20 books with vendors’ names and information all over the USA. I needed garbage cans that could be made with the Museum logo. A big R. So I started calling places all over the USA until I found the perfect vendor for the perfect garbage can. The director liked them and we ordered a bunch of them for the entire Museum.

 

Children’s Art Festival

Next was the Children’s Art Festival. We needed posters, programs, newspaper ads, etc. This was always tons of fun. They would even bring an elephant from the Tampa Zoo, I believe. There were also clowns from the Circus, if I remember correctly. It was a huge deal for the kids in the area.

 

Annual Crafts Fair

No sooner I finished the Children’s Art Festival, it was time to start on all the parts of the Annual Crafts Festival which happened in November. We had a few months to put together all the pieces. This was a huge Fest and it was their 15th year. This needed posters, a brochure, sales sheets, programs, artist instruction sheets, maps, signage, banners, and on and on. I started by changing the entire design and making it a very simple line design. Again, all done by hand. No computers, yet. Every piece was hand designed. I got to be very good friends with one of the print shops in town and they in turn treated me to some extra perks. They taught me a lot about papers and print. We used a new speckled paper made from recycled materials. All new concept and product in those days. I thought I was in heaven. Even the feel off the pieces was very different from what people had always had. It was very organic.

 

My Boss

I will try to remember her name. Elizabeth (Can’t remember her last name.) She had been with the Museum for years and I don’t know why they couldn’t fire her or she wouldn’t leave, but she was way old. Regardless, Elizabeth and I hit it off. She recognized my fortes and what I brought to the table. Every project was perfection. We never had to reprint anything. We never had a typo in anything that went out of my department. So, she never had to worry about me. The main thing about her though, was that she was an alcoholic, and she kept her booze in her office. Around 3 o’clock in the afternoon, I could hear the fridge in the hallway outside my office open and Elizabeth getting ice for her whiskey. She would have a few before the end of the day and time to go home. On Fridays, we would stop working around 2 and start our weekly meeting. Elizabeth would send one of the guys to get a few packs of beer. The guy’s arrival with the beer marked the beginning of the meeting. At some point the Museum Director came down one Friday afternoon, saw us all drinking beer in the meeting, turned around and left. Never said a word about it. This was a department he never had to worry about. If this is what we needed, oh well! After the meeting we would continue at a bar and she would get the first round.

Elizabeth’s assistant secretary was a woman probably in her 40s, can’t remember her name, that could be very hard at times, was pretty much the Museum’s token redneck. One day I was in there and the Contemporary Art Curator, Joseph came in to meet with them about an upcoming exhibit he was going to have. He was Jewish. I had never really been around many Jewish people in my life, or maybe I did, just didn’t know they were Jewish because I couldn’t care less, and had absolutely no understanding about the relationship between rednecks and them. There wasn’t one. So, he walked out and that secretary started spouting horrible things about the F-n Jew, etc. I had to ask because I didn’t even know he was Jewish, that’s how much it meant to me. So she went into all this rant. I couldn’t believe it. I learned. I kept him away from them as much as possible while working on his exhibit. One of the best the museum had: This is not a Photograph.

 

The Bitch Art Director

One day, this woman came down with one of the curators and introduced herself. She was looking at the museum. I didn’t know at the time, she was looking at the museum because, instead of promoting me to the Full Art Director, the museum had found the Art Director for the Tampa Museum of Science & Innovations (I think), I can’t remember her name, (maybe I blocked it), and was offering her the job. Just like that. The woman accepted and started a week or so later. She was a square peg in a round box? The woman never fit in and it didn’t take us very long to figure out that she wasn’t qualified to be there. She didn’t know anything about art, art periods, the collection, and fonts! She tried to do the L’Art Nouveau Bing Exhibit invitation using Park Avenue Font. (If you don’t know, the font was designed around 1933 and was celebrated for its vintage charm and had nothing to do with L’Art Nouveau). The curator couldn’t believe it and came to me. The Bing Exhibit was one of the most wonderful traveling exhibits we ever did. I can’t remember where it came from, but, we had strict rules about how to set it up and it became a big deal because this Art Director obviously didn’t know everything you needed to know to do an exhibit like this, about the person who started Art Nouveau. I was always totally in love with this period and knew just about everything about Bing and the Japanese influence before it ever came to the Museum.

One day I walked into Elizabeth’s office and she was practically yelling about how difficult it was to work with the woman and what an idiot she was. We started laughing about the fact that I had a voodoo doll we could stick pins into. Well, I brought it in the next day and we had a huge laugh sticking pins into her. I don’t know if it was Voodoo, but a week later she said she was pregnant, that she didn’t mean to ever have a child, but she and her husband had decided they were going to try to have it, and she was having to leave the job because she was already in her early 40s and it was very dangerous. Elizabeth took us all drinking after that to celebrate. So, I ended up fixing everything she was doing wrong for Bing with the curator, re-designing the invitations to match the real ones he had used once in the late 1800s, and everything after that went on smoothly. I believe that after that, if I had stayed a lot longer I may have been promoted. By then I was back with Harlow and he was in Florida Leadership with the Director of the Museum when he told him he was my boyfriend. They started treating me differently. The world is a strange place.

 

This is Not a Photograph – Joseph Jacobs
(Twenty years of Large Scale Photography 1966-1986)

This exhibit was different from anything I had ever worked with before. Amazing. The whole theme was artists using photography to create huge art pieces, but at the end it wasn’t about the photographs, it was about the art pieces. The exhibit included some very famous people like Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, The Starn Twins (Doug and Mike Starn were the New York art scene dandies at that time), and many other famous artists. The large modern gallery was used for this. We designed a huge poster, two versions of the catalog (a regular offset printed cover and a limited edition version that had a special fabric cover), programs, invitations, a banner, flags, signage, and on and on. It was great working with the Joseph Jacobs curator again. At the end, it was one of the best exhibits at the museum. This became a traveling exhibit and the museum did very well showing that it could handle producing this kind of top level exhibit. I used one of the Stern’s pieces for the invitation and they were very thankful. They found my office and hung out there the rest of the time instead of upstairs with the administration. They couldn’t deal. They’d rather be with the poor artists downstairs than the people upstairs:)

 

A Taste For Angels Exhibition – Anthony Janson

This was the last big Exhibit I worked on. It took us months to produce everything because there was even a 38 foot banner that had to be designed and produced to be hung in front of the museum. It took me weeks to find a vendor in Minnesota, I believe, that could produce this thing. Then there were posters, invitations, labels, signage, and on and on. All the printed materials had to be produced first since they had to all go out to print. I went through several designs with the curator until we reached the simplest and most beautiful of the designs. A simple gold angel.

Then, the exhibit was going to use all the Museum’s original galleries, so we needed to figure out each gallery color. The signage and label then had to match the color of the gallery, and such. It just went on and on, but we did it. However, two days before the opening, the Museum Director went through and didn’t like one or two of the galleries colors and wanted them re-painted. The guys in my department went nuts. The big Gala with the governor was the next day and the director was changing the color. Well, they got the paints, they mixed the color he wanted, they painted the gallery. They touched up and were walking out of the galleries as the Florida Governor was walking in at the other end, praying his wife with the gown worth thousands would not lean on the wall they had just painted. We had a kick about this for a while.

NOTE: Anthony Janson’s father, H. D. Janson, wrote the History of Art book that we all had to have in Art School. Unfortunately, he, apparently, didn’t think much about women artists and left them out. So, while I knew Tony, he was not only curating for the Ringling Museum, but he was also re-writing his father’s book adding all the women he left out and bringing it up to date in his time. It was a huge deal at the time and an amazing step to correct this art gap, specially in the 1980’s.

 

The Apple Revolution

In 1987 I took a computer graphics class at Ringling School of Art Night Classes. I didn’t learn much because it was still light years away from the first Macs. But, I got the feel of what it was like to use a computer, have a hard drive, and keyboard. In Christmas of 1979 I had played with one of the first Apple computers that Tommy’s brother had bought. I had gotten a feel for what a computer was, but, that was very different from the one I was playing with in the class.

A few months later, I got a notice that Ringling School of Art was having a Mac workshop where they were going to introduce us to their new computer, printer and scanner. I was there! The morning started with a guy showing us how you had all these fonts included in your Mac. They had FONTS!!! Then he showed us how you entered the information just by typing it in. Then you could flow the type around photos or objects and if you added by copying and pasting or took some paragraph out it all flowed into place. You didn’t have to cut it by hand and paste it with glue!!! Then we went to lunch. When we came back, the exhibit was the scanner and the printer. They had started when we went to lunch. In those days those scans sometimes took 30 minutes. Mine did later. Anyhow, then he brought the scanned image into the Mac to the page he had all the type in. He placed the photo in the place he wanted and all the text flowed around it, just like that! Next, he took the piece and sent it to print in the NT printer. Voilá! There was the finished piece and it looked exactly like what we had seen on the screen. It was a miracle!!! No glue, no typesetting, no X-Acto knives, nothing but the Mac. I was sold.

I left there and went to, I believe Anthony Janson, and told him what had just happened. And how, if we had this it would make it a lot easier for me to do all the design of his up coming exhibits. He talked to the Museum Director Larry Ruggiero and I don’t know what he said to him, but the next week we had an SE 30 Mac computer, a scanner and an NT printer. At the beginning we were supposed to share the computer between three departments. OK. So, I got to play with it first. In a couple of days I had it down. I was producing labels and things that I would send out to be produced without having to do them by hand. Then, exhibit labels. I didn’t have to have them typeset since the printing from the NT printer was good enough for the labels. Well, we saved so much money on typesetting that the next month they bought us two more computers. And that is how I went from having to use press type, hand cut typeset, and all that to having a Mac in my office and never looking back. I will always be thankful to the Ringling Museum for all the opportunities that they presented me with. I played with so many things and learned much more than if I had gone back to school. I haven’t even mention all the silk screening I did for many of the exhibits, the murals, the signage, and on, and on.

A few months later Harlow asked me to please move in with him in Mount Dora and I accepted. I moved there in 1988. We were together in Mount Dora for the next two wonderful and exciting years. I will write about them at some point. Harlow had started working for Ken Mazik and the job was very stressful but he loved it so much he spent the rest of his life working there until a few years ago when he finally retired before Ken’s passing. He was also drinking too much. His job included having to drink and dine big dignitaries like Mayors, Senators, etc. going to Democratic parties, traveling to Tallahassee and wining and dining government officials there, all to get them to pass things Ken needed for the school or his business. It became a thing where I was going to go crazy between having my kid in school and dealing with that, having to go to all these places with Harlow (at least the ones around us not Tallahassee) and all the people who came to our house on a regular basis to wine and dine, it never ended. At some point I realized I couldn’t go on this way. His wife Michelle later on did it just right. She put a stop to all that. There was no way she could raise her kid in the middle of all that. I wish I had had the strength to do that way back. It might have worked for us.

I moved to Alabama in 1990. By then Avaryl was also getting to one of those ages where I thought she needed her father. He was in Alabama working for NASA by then and I thought that would give her some stability. I will write about that at some point.

NOTE: Other Exhibits I was involved with:

• The Photography of Dora Kallmus
• Joel Shappiro Sculpture and Drawings
• Photographs by David Hockney
• Projects I: Mike & Doug Starn, The Christ Series