As an early teenager, like almost everyone I knew, I tried smoking and did a little of that in the eighth and ninth grades until one day, on a self imposed dare, a friend and I decided to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes each on our walk home from High School. I got very sick. Nasty sick. I turned green. Really. By the time I got home I was so dizzy and sick to my stomach that I just barely got my face over the toilet bowl before doing the inverted volcano thing where you try to bring everything up from inside of you through that little tube in back of your throat. That was the first and last time I experienced the dry heaves, the last time I allowed myself to throw up, period, and the end of smoking for me.

Tom and Lynne

After graduation, I knew college would be a waste of time and money, so I started looking for a job. I wanted a hard physical job thinking I might convince myself to appreciate school. I took a job laying track for the C&NW Rail Road. That was back breaking work but I stuck with for over a year. Though the idea of going back to school still held no allure. In the mean time Lynne had taken a job in Hawaii and earned enough money to come back to Chicago. We got engaged and I continued to work for the railroad.

I took one of those “Draw Me” tests that you could find in the back of most comic books and some magazines. I did very well. I know that because the note I received from the school informing me of my test results said so. The note said, “you did very well”. They were nice. They said that whether I joined their school or not, I should continue with some sort of art training. It worked. I enrolled in their school, though I did not turn in one single assignment, ever. It was too much like homework. The school would send me encouraging notes, I even received a couple from Norman Rockwell, or at least someone wielding his signature stamp, telling me that correspondence schools were difficult but I could do it if I tried. What was difficult was having the self discipline to sit down and give myself the time to do the work. I had precious little of that discipline stuff. However I wasn’t to be left sitting and worrying about it for too long. It was after all, 1967 and I was told there was a war going on in Southeast Asia, wherever that was.

Basic Training

Soooo … I volunteered for the draft. I couldn’t stand the idea of not knowing if or when I would get called, so I took the initiative and put my name down for a certain induction date into the Army.               At the time, I really couldn’t tell you where SE Asia was. (It never made sense to me how, when looking at as Atlas or a globe of the earth, that the one land mass over there could be Asia and Europe, as well as Russia and the Soviet Union, and how did we know if China was in Asia and not Europe? I found it all very confusing. I thought I was stupid or something. I simply could not get my mind around it. No one really took the time to point out that it was no different than our continent being divided between Canada and Mexico and the United States as well as all the little provinces and states within those separate countries.) Nonetheless, I soon found myself taking that all expense paid trip to visit the pearl of Southeast Asia, beautiful, sunny, Vietnam and what an experience that was. I went over there with the end of the Tet Offensive, February, 1968. Again, such stories I could tell.

In fact I will tell some of them. To read more about Vietnam experiences click below on the link to that page. I will mention a couple of things here that have to do with Vietnam because they kind of relate to me and the arts. 

 Click here for more Vietnam stories.

After six months or so in country I contracted a case of jungle rot, on my butt. It got pretty bad and I was sent to the rear to get it taken care of. While in the rear I heard about a job called Combat Artist! After six months of combat a G.I. could apply for this position, so I did. I was doing a lot of drawing, much like the times back in high school, for my buddies. I was drawing editorial kinds of cartoons as well as other things. I even did a large satire of a Re-Up (re-enlistment) poster for our company office. I showed some of this work to the officers who decided who the new Combat Artist would be. They seemed impressed, but before anything could come of it I put myself back in the field and ended up getting wounded rather seriously so instead of getting Combat Artist, I got to come home.

          

The Art Institute wasn’t the kind of school that taught you how to draw or paint. In fact it wasn’t until a few years later when I was starting to teach on my own out in the world that I discovered just what it was that I learned during my four years there. It was during my forth year at the Institute that I decided to take on the courses that would offer me a teaching degree. I guess I was trying to be practical, what would I do if the painting for a living thing didn’t work out? For example, I always thought I was pretty good draftsman but what an eye opener it was to be in an environment where everyone was as good as I thought I was! A humbling time of awakening to say the least. Obviously, not all of us are going to go on and “make it”, much less to become famous. So, I picked up the teaching certificate. One of the classes I was taking to get my teaching certificate concerned itself with art therapy. This was a concept new to me, but was popular at the time. It was while studying about the ins and outs of art therapy and administering different kinds of tests for different kinds of problems  that I bumped right smack into all the kinds of tests that were given to me when I was in the fifth grade! Aaggh! I was very excited because now I could see why it was I did so well on those tests. Every one of them was a right brain sort of test. Intuitive stuff. Questions that didn't have a real right or wrong answer but asked you opinion, as in: What do you think this means? How would you solve this problem? There was no memorizing of facts or “this is the answer” kinds of situations, and no such thing as study chapter six for the test on Friday. These tests allowed you to use your own creativity.  A student was not only allowed, but encouraged to use his or her own brain to find a solution. As I always suspected, I wasn’t a genius, I was an artist. A young person struggling with the idea of being a free thinker but not realizing it. What an epiphany for me. I found something that allowed me to put some of the scrambled pieces of my past in their proper place and move on. Suddenly I was very excited about teaching. I graduated in 1973. My graduation present was a trip out west where Lynne and I went to visit a friend I had met while in the hospital in Vietnam, and his wife. My friend, Jack, and I both had open heart surgery, one day apart, in Saigon. We were sort of like celebrities back then. The Bobsey Twins of the hospital. We were the only two heart surgery patients at the time to make it. Jack and  his wife and his parents had a ranch out west somewhere, in Oregon. I remember at the time I was under the impression that Oregon was one huge forest, all trees. Not hardly so. We visited them at their ranch in an area called the High Desert. I had never even heard of such a thing. But after being in it a few days, I loved it. Based on that vacation my friend offered and we accepted a job on the ranch. So as soon as we went home we began packing to move back to Oregon. One afternoon as I was showing our suburban apartment to a young teacher who was interested in renting it, I received a phone call offering me a position as assistant art instructor in one of the suburban school systems. At the time it was rated as one of the top school systems in the entire nation. There were two hundred applicants ahead of me applying for a any art related position in any one of their three schools. The woman interviewing for the apartment couldn’t believe I was even considering passing that up. She had friends whose names had been on the list for a couple of years. What a wonderful opportunity was presenting itself, but I talked it over with Lynne, and we decided that Oregon was where we wanted to be. So, we packed up our goodies and moved out west. Forget about teaching. Forget the arts. How many opportunities does a big city couple get to move out west and be real cowboys? We moved from a metropolis of what must have been close to four or five million people back then, to a place in the High Desert where our closest neighbor was a mile and a half away. At night standing on the back porch of our shanty while being serenaded by coyotes you could see the faint glow of lights from the grocery store in a place called Christmas Valley, straight out across the desert, eleven miles away! And talk about stars filling the night time sky ... Wow.  Ranching is hard work. The days are long, some of them last twenty six hours, I don’t know how they do that, but it happens. I fixed more fence than I thought could exist on one ranch and I did things I never but never could have imagined I would be doing … like, on several occasions wallowing around up to my armpits in the backside of a first calf heifer trying to turn around a breach loaded calf so it could come out into the world the way it was supposed to.   It was a good year, but one year was enough. I missed my art and so we quit the ranch and I took a job with the US Forest Service fighting forest fires, there wasn’t much else to do out there. Fighting fire was another one of those jobs you might hear about as a kid back in the big city but never thought you would ever be … I also did some substitute teaching in the local grammar/high school and I taught a little for Central Oregon Community College in one their out in the community art programs.    I also answered an ad in a newspaper, an ad for someone to illustrate a children’s book. I had to laugh, here we were out in the middle of nowhere and in the Bend paper there is this add calling for an artist to illustrate a children’s book. I was pretty excited about the idea and then when I actually did get job I was elated, and I did illustrate the story.   It was right about here that our first son, Kip, was born.  Lynne and I were parents!  I was a Daddy!                                                       As much as I loved being in the forest everyday, I never did like fighting fire, it was too much like being in a firefight back in Vietnam.  The fevered pitch of all the gung-ho young would be fire fighters zooming around in trucks on dusty back roads like frustrated road rally enthusiasts, driving like maniacs to get to the fire sites where, once you arrived you got to be engulfed in thick, choking smoke and of course there was fire everywhere and uniformed “civilian soldiers” running around in highly agitated states squawking and barking into hand held radios, psuedo combat lieutenants calling the shots while helicopters and retardant planes fly overhead. Too much excitement, too much aggressive behavior, too much like combat. Too ridiculous.               The Forest Ranger I worked for was a very nice man and an excellent artist in his own right and he arranged for me to get another job, still with the Forest Service, but not in the Fire Control end of things, a couple of hundred miles away in a beautiful little town named, Baker. So it was that while Kip was only a couple of weeks old I took off to check out this new job and see what this town of Baker was like. The job was good and I liked Baker but the countryside was what did it for me, I thought the area was sooo beautiful.     I couldn’t find an affordable house to rent at first so I arranged to borrow a twelve foot travel trailer so Lynne and baby Kip could move up here and we could be together. There we were, two dogs, five cats Lynne a new baby and me, living in that little travel trailer parked in a gravel pit alongside a lovely river just outside of town, we stayed there for five weeks.  It was unbelievably cramped but we were together and we did very well.   We finally did find a house to rent and were able to turn the upstairs of that house into a studio space for me and I continued working on the book illustrations, which took several months to complete. During this time the author was getting more and more involved in politics and unfortunately for me he became so busy he never did get around to finishing up his story so the book never did get published.   But we were here and I was working and it was good.  Once the Baker area Forest Service folks found out I could draw they had me doing art related jobs for them, which was great.  It was around then that the local art center, Crossroads, asked if I would be willing to put up a show of my work, which I did.  Included in that show were the illustrations for the book that never got published.  A fellow named Troy Horton saw those illustrations and asked if I would be interested in doing the black and white illustrations for a children’s book he was writing and self publishing, a book he called, Zipperthings.  I liked Troy’s story so I agreed to do the illustrations. We became very good friends and he would come over to our house once a week to talk about the story and to get a home cooked meal.  Lynne was an excellent cook.  Troy lived up in the mountains in a very unconventional house he built by himself.  He would come down to town once or twice a week to play Bridge and do his shopping or whatever and to get a meal or two at the home’s of friends.  One of those times Lynne and I shared with Troy our desire to purchase some property of our own some day where we could build a house.  One thing led to another and in pretty short order we bought some mountain property from Troy.  That following spring we started the monumental task of building our own place in the mountains.  What an adventure that turned out to be.   We stomped around on the mountainside in three feet of snow looking for a site where we could build our house.  Troy was fond of saying that his place was beyond plowed roads.  Actually, it was beyond any roads.  He had to build the one that went up to his place as we did the spur road that led to ours.  Not only were there no roads, neither were there any flat spots (this was a mountain side remember) or water, or electricity, in fact there was nothin’ but mountain, lots of mountain, and we loved it.  The view overlooking the entire valley below us and extending all the way to the mountains of the Eagle Cap Wilderness some forty miles away could take your breath away.    Finally spring came and a building site was chosen.  We couldn’t afford to keep paying rent on the house where we lived in town and also make the land payment on the new property however there was nowhere to stay on the property so it became apparent (with the kind and gentle guidance from a “neighbor” who lived down below, one of the kindest men I have ever had the pleasure to call my friend, Bob Street, [the younger] who just happened to own a small saw mill) that we would have to build a small shack that first summer to live in while we worked on the big house.  Bob helped me hone my tree falling skills, which up until now consisted of falling snags for firewood.  I cut the trees and worked with him in the mill on and off cutting all the lumber necessary to build our two mountain houses plus eventual sheds for firewood and goats and chickens and hay barns and whatever else I can't remember.  That first summer and fall we built a little 12’ x 16’shack to live in.  A friend made the flat spot for us with his little bulldozer.  The big house was to be built a little farther up the hill on another spot he leveled by scooping out a whole lotta mountainside.  It was while we were living in this tiny shack that our son Bram let it be known he would soon be joining our little family. This meant there had to be some adjustments made to the building plans for the big house, which we gladly did.  Lynne’s mom came all the way out from Chicago to lend a hand when the baby came.  When we finally did get into the big house I remember she was a little concerned about the house having no front door.  She wondered if bears might not want to come waltzing in while we slept.  We told her not to worry and I hung a moving pad blanket over the door opening.  What a trooper.  She was the one sleeping downstairs with a piece of cloth hanging in the doorway to guard against all the beasties of the forest, in a house where there was no indoor plumbing or lights save the kerosene lamps.   The night we moved into the big house Bram created a little stir and Lynne had a false alarm although I’m sure it didn’t feel too false to her. Just a day or two later baby Bram was born … and I finally got the front door built and installed.   *             Somewhere in there I finished the illustrations for Troy’s book.  There was no where to work on the book in our little shack so I would snowshoe up to his house and work on a table he set up for me near a window where I could have good light to draw by, no electricity remember.  As the illustrations neared completion I took them and a basic book layout of the book to the local print shop.  Now some time before this I had introduced myself to Bob and Barbara, the couple who owned the print shop.  We got along really well and at some point I brought Lynne in to meet these folks and we all became fast friends.  So, here I am bringing in these illustrations and rough book idea to the print shop to see if Bob would make a book out of it for Troy and me.  Instead of giving me a quote on what it would cost to produce a book, Bob gave me a table to work at where I could “paste” the book up myself, which I did.  I liked learning about paste-up and I liked working at the print shop, there was sooo much to learn and it was all fascinating.  Then when I was nearly finished laying out Zipperthings Bob offered me a drawing table to work at on a more permanent basis as a freelance illustrator right there in the Print Shop.  I took advantage of this kind offer and quit the USFS.  What an opportunity.  It was here under the guidance of Bob and Barbara that I was given an education in the commercial end of the art business.   Two years later I expanded into my own space in another building. Right about here a talented lady named Jan Hindman saw the book Zipperthings which was now published and “out there”.   She contacted me asking if I would be interested in illustrating her book about sexual child abuse.  Would I?!  And so I met Jan and her husband Mac, two more of my dearest friends.  And yes, I did illustrate her wonderful book, A Very Touching Book.               I moved into a bigger studio and we were doing pretty well.  The arts business was starting to grow for me.  I took on all kinds of art jobs which is pretty much a necessity if I was going to “make it” in a little town like this.                But, somewhere along in here I lost some of my marbles.  Probably I had been losing a few here and there all along.  For me, all the insecurities of a small boy who watched his parents beat each other up and whose father finally ended up "walking out on him" (at least that is a child's take on the situation) turned into the deeply buried insecurities of a grown man.  I would look to others to get my feelings of completeness and happiness met,.  Though I eventually realized this it took me quite a while to do something about it.  I needed others to tell me I was okay, even though I did have someone who thought I was okay, my lovely wife and children, I was unable to internalize the kindness and love they offered.   For me to look back on how I was, how lost and mixed up I was, is painful and  I mention these times now not because I continue to wallow in the past thinking about the painful actions I involved myself in but because my mentioning these times might somehow help someone else who is hurting.  I loved my family in the best way I knew how and when I was with them I was okay, but as soon as I was left alone, even for a short while, I became panicky inside, almost like I was experiencing some kind of dry land drowning.  I felt I couldn't breathe, which sounds so ridiculous now, but at the time that was the case.  I needed something, someone to be around me.  I felt very uncomfortable, not exactly in pain but severely uncomfortable and I would do whatever was necessary to stop feeling that way.  Usually that meant gravitating to someone else who was just as needy, both of us trying to fill the empty spaces inside. Often that other person would be a woman and as the attachment grew with this person it very often became infatuation and I thought I was falling in love.   I would experience the euphoria of that state and be “all right” for a little while.  I can only imagine what I was putting my family through, all the lies and deceit.  What a dark time for me.  I was in a constant state of unease, dis-ease if you will.    MORE TO COME