Fleur la Libre

n u m b e r o n e

the passed on issue

Fleur Fleur lala Libre Libre

Next to losing your income, the hardest part of being laid off – with no real warning it was coming – is … oh, it’s a pop psychology phrase from the world of relationships I hate to use but must: lack of closure. No proper goodbye.

I worked 13 years at The Courier-Journal, during which I attended many coming and going celebrations for coworkers, threw parties for some myself, wrote up funny presentations for some of them. I can’t count the times I stood in the middle of the newsroom as journalists, copy editors, photographers -- professionals who had worked decades in that deteriorating building at Sixth and Broadway -- retired amid well-deserved fanfare. I also stood by at plentiful, awkward cake ceremonies for passers-through who were leaving to pursue better opportunities.

Well, fuck some cake.I had no opportunity to say goodbye to coworkers: no one wants

to be seen crying and in shock in the newsroom or to be the object of so much pity. I also didn’t have a chance to officially say goodbye to the funeral directors and other sources whom I’d gotten to know in so many phone calls, who helped me, among other things, track down families who might be willing to talk to me for a newspaper story at the worst possible time.

There was no time to ease into the idea that my obituary writer identity was being taken away. I wrote a lot of other things, but obituaries were considered by most everyone to be my forte. I have a knack for it, people have told me. I’m not bragging. Survivors and friends told me I got some essence of the real person into those stories. It’s as much a mystery to me as anyone how exactly that happened.

This zine is my personal goodbye letter to that obituary writer, who remembers bits and pieces of all those stories and will always be grateful for having been able to write them, for being trusted with them. These are my personal reflections about a few randomly selected people I often remember because I frequently see reminders of them and they inspired me.

Most of these people had news obituaries published in The Courier-Journal when they died and I've tried to attribute that information accordingly. A few pieces are personal essays on the topics of death and obituary writing.

-- Paula Burba

I’m not a regular at the original Highland Coffee. I’ve

been in a handful of times, interviewed and wrote about the

owners once and got more than one lead for newspaper stories

here, but I haven’t been in as patron often. They once had a

downtown location close to the paper where I stopped in at least

once a day for a couple of years, but they closed that shop quite a

while ago. This original spot feels so much more intimate, like

everyone else is a regular and I’m just a sitcom walk-on.

I’m not sure why I feel that way. The least condescending

baristas anywhere, ever, work here. “Everyone welcome here”

vibes ooze from here. It’s reminiscent of the heyday of Haight-

Ashbury or Greenwich Village, puts you in the mind of what you

know about those places: flower children and punk rockers, folk

singers and poets, Stonewallers and Black Panthers, meetings,

organizing, pushing change, the like -- even if, I imagine, it’s

cleaner and tidier here.

I’ve been coming here more often since I was kicked off the

corporate grid. If there’s one thing that’s not overwhelming or

obvious here, it’s any notion that corporations control anything

that matters.

Room & BoardSo I’m sitting here thinking I’ll probably take most of my

meetings here now and come here to do some writing from time to

time. I’m waiting for someone now to talk about possible business.

I’m facing the gigantic bulletin board by the front door. If

there is one there are 50 posters, flyers, photocopies and whatnot

tacked onto that bulletin board and taped around its perimeter. The

side of an adjacent soft drink cooler is almost covered, too. Most

notices don’t cover up the next one, but keep a respectable-though-

thin distance so as not to block anyone else’s news.

Everything interesting going on in this city must be

represented on that board. Some of it I’ve heard about and some of it

I haven’t. Nothing’s outdated: it’s by-and-large dedicated to the

possibilities of events still to come, not full of yesterday’s news.

Mainstream stuff like “Avenue Q” at the Kentucky Center and

“The Three Musketeers” by the Louisville Ballet have their big-

money posters tucked in amongst more modest flyers for hustle-for-

it folks like the Alley Theater and the 23 String Band CD release

party. Guitar lessons, boot camp, portraits, fundraisers for rescuing

pit bulls...

I wrote newspaper stories in one way or another about at least

a quarter of the stuff on that board. I’m a civilian now, but I still see

one blatant story up there begging to be written and at least half a

dozen leads on other stories. Not my job to pitch them anymore.

I’m just going to sit here and wait, contemplating a sheet of

white paper with a an octopus sketched on it in black marker with

this message: “The guy who was teaching me how to draw an

octopus died before we were done.”

I wrote an obituary for Phyllis Knight Gifford in October 2008, but my conversation with her about her husband, Sam Gifford, when he died in 2002 was one of my most memorable obituary conversations. I could almost literally feel her charisma over the phone.

Phyllis Knight (her professional name) represented, to me, the epitome of the golden age of media in Louisville. She told me a little about it, too -- those glorious Bingham years I’ve heard so very much about. She was at the television end of the Bingham empire at WHAS and then, after a full career on-air, became the the first full-time director of WHAS Crusade for Children.

Even though it was a golden age, women were still widely regarded as second-rate journalists (at least from what I've gleaned) except a few who just weren’t having it. I think she was one of them.

I was unaware how naive and uninformed I was when I spoke to her, but I instinctively knew she was being gracious with me. I remember thinking I’d give anything to sit down to lunch or coffee or bourbon with her and listen to as many of the stories about those salad days of local media as she could stand to tell -- the good and the bad.

She came to Louisville in 1955 and worked at WHAS radio before moving to television, where she became Louisville's Oprah when Oprah was still a toddler. Among the countless people she interviewed were Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan, Buster Keaton, Minnie Pearl, Johnny Unitas, the Rev. Billy Graham and Ralph Bunche (I had to look him up, add one more thing I learned because of Phyllis Knight.).

Her Kentucky Derby coverage and hats were legend, but she also reported on topics not discussed in polite society at the time, like adoption, cervical cancer, sex education and mental illness. She had depression and endured some publicity nightmares while ill. She made a comeback after a seven-year struggle, boldly going public with her own experience and reporting on the need for better mental health care.

As she told me about Sam Gifford's career at WHAS she mentioned without reservation or skipping a beat that he was married to someone else when they met, but they fell in love. They were married 45 years. Taboo and scandal didn’t seem to phase her. "I was always somewhat of a renegade," she told The Courier-Journal in a 1975 story. She was 81 when she died, a 1992 inductee into the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame and 1999 inductee into the Jefferson County Office for Women's Hall of Fame.

Phyll i s KnightPhyl l i s Knight

The Flock of Finns at Waterfront Park always reminds me that even though he was a celebrated folk artist with an impressive roster of collectors, 89-year-old Marvin Finn was not wealthy when he died in January 2007.

It wasn’t because Finn mismanaged money or was necessarily exploited by the art world. He just didn’t seem to care about money.

“Money isn't everything,” a retired Finn said in one interview for The Courier-Journal. “I could care less about it. Like I said, I don't do this to make a living or nothing. I just like to meet people who enjoy my work."

He was born poor in Alabama, grew up poor, and as a young man followed an older brother to Louisville, where he married and had five children. His wife Helen died in 1966 and he raised their children by working whatever jobs he could get with no formal education -- on barges, in construction, at gas stations.

But he was far from uneducated. When he wasn’t working in fields as a child, he was watching his father, a sharecropper, carve and whittle wood and build things out of whatever was on hand. Finn made toys for his children as his own father had done for him; elaborate toys like doll mansions and construction machinery that moved, all built from materials like clothespins, popsicle sticks and thread spools and painted with whatever leftover paint people gave to him.

At some point he branched out into bigger, more imaginative projects. He once described his creative method to The Courier-Journal: "I always have in my mind how I'm going to make a thing look, and when I get it done, that's how it looks. ... I have a different imagination every time I start doing something.”

Flock of Finns

"I thought everybody had an idea. I've got ideas I haven't even turned loose yet," he said in that story.

He first sold his work yard-sale style in front of his apartment in the old Clarksdale housing project and later at a hobby show. Even after he was “discovered” by the local art world proper, Finn still sold his pieces for beyond modest

amounts -- reportedly in the ballpark of $15 to $60. This spring The Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, where Finn’s work has been featured since the museum opened, raffled one of Finn’s signature roosters. The piece was valued at $2,500. Raffle tickets were $20 each.

I will eternally be in awe of Finn’s imagination and his distaste for greed to the end.

And I’ll always be proud of Louisville for doing something so honorable and imaginative as installing the Flock of Finns at Waterfront Park before Marvin Finn passed away.

I hope he enjoyed that bit of

recognition and appreciation. I hope it was more meaningful to him than cold, hard

cash. I hope he knew how high he set the

bar for folk art around here.

Every time I see “Kentucky Derby Festival, Inc.” on the

front of this building, I think of local theater matriarch Andrea

Pecchioni.

She started the Kentucky Contemporary Theatre and was

its artistic director for 16 years. The company was reportedly the

first modern alternative theater company in Louisville,

presenting such avant-garde work that an alderman (precursor to

Metro Council representatives) tried to shut down one

production.

This was a woman after my own heart.

She raised a quarter of a million dollars from investors –

who does that? – to buy that building, which had last been a used

car dealership, and renovate it into theater space. KCT opened

Andrea PecchioniAndrea Pecchioni its 10th season there in 1988 and eventually had two theater spaces and offices

there until it became too expensive to maintain. They sold the building to KDF

in 1995. She resigned the next year and KCT soon folded.

I’ve never been inside that building, but I imagine much evidence of her

heart and ambition and vision has faded by now. I secretly hope not.

Andrea Pecchioni died of cancer in February 2003 when she was just 58

years old. She moved here in 1978 and worked as a reporter at WHAS for a bit.

She performed at Actors Theatre in at least one of the early Humana Festival

plays, as well as working in the subscriptions department. She was acting in

Shakespeare in the Park when she got the idea to start KCT. I imagine she loved

acting in Central Park: she struck me as the epitome of an Old Louisvillian. I

think like many who live in that neighborhood, she wasn’t a native Louisvillian.

I remember she lived on Ouerbacker Court because it was the first time I’d ever

heard of it. Her daughters made it sound like an inviting, near-magical place.

I remember meeting her daughters, who came to The Courier-Journal and

talked to me about her in the lobby. They must have been there to drop off her

picture -- the majority of people didn’t have digital images they could email on

short notice back then and they’d either bring a picture to me or I’d send a

courier service to pick one up at their home.

I quoted one of her daughters in the CJ obit: “That theater really didn't run

on money. It ran on her heart.”

Pecchioni herself once described her vision to the newspaper as this: "My

feeling is that a theater makes its mark in the world not by doing works that are

done by other companies, but by doing works that will soon be done by other

companies."

I hope the history of KCT survives somewhere in Louisville. That

building, sometimes literally and sometimes more subconsciously, makes me

cheer for her and then it breaks my heart every time I pass it.

Every time I pass Memorial Auditorium, I think of two things: the

one time I’ve been inside it for an Ani DiFranco concert (so long ago I

don’t want to think about the number of years and why I couldn’t begin

to remember what it looks like inside) … and the time Mikhail

Baryshnikov came to dance in Louisville.

Baryshnikov came to Louisville because of Harlowe Dean, who had

found his way here to lead some of the city’s big arts groups. He

managed the Louisville Orchestra and was an officer of Music Theatre

Louisville and then became general manager of the Louisville Ballet. He

even performed with the Kentucky Opera once.

He was a voice instructor, a native of Michigan who studied at the

University of Kentucky and then spent 40 years in New York where he

was a behind-the-scenes kind of guy in the entertainment industry.

Those New York connections facilitated that performance by

Baryshnikov (yes, the one who played Carrie's last boyfriend before she

Baryshnikovwas here.

xoxo,Harlowe Dean

married Big on “Sex and the City,” and who probably really did hang out at Studio 54). Harlowe Dean supposedly talked the iconic ballet dancer into accepting a thoroughbred as payment, instead of cash, for the big Memorial Auditorium show. The show sold out and has been cited as a turning point for ballet in Louisville.

I suppose we have iconic performers who come to Louisville now, but it’s hard to imagine what it must have been like to see Baryshnikov perform here, in that building with a dedication plaque outside that (still) says “The World War.”

I remember talking to Bill Mootz, long-time arts critic for The Courier-Journal, when I was writing Dean’s obituary. He knew everything about the arts here, it seemed, and vividly remembered hanging out (or some classier, artier term for “hanging out”) with Baryshnikov and Dean the night of that performance. Mootz remembered who attended the party and what they were drinking. Mootz died just a couple of months after I talked to him for Dean’s obituary, but one of his successors wrote his obituary instead of me.

Baryshnikov was here in the 1970s but Dean was here to stay. After leaving the staff of the Louisville Ballet, he started HBA Ltd., which brought acts like the Peking Opera and Isaac Stern and the Vienna Boys Choir to perform in Louisville.

He lost his hearing in the last few years of his life. His daughter told me he was even more appreciative of the ballet during those years, as a vehicle for him to continue experiencing the fine arts. He died in May 2006 at age 89.

Passing Bearno's by the Bridge, I often remember Shirley A. Drake, better known to many as Madame Zelda.

She died in August 2008, but her obituary in The Courier-Journal made no mention of her intriguing careers – only one of which was reading palms in her gypsy-decor alcove of restaurants occupying that space at Second and Main streets. (Neither did it mention her age. "I'm like my mother. ... She always thought a lady didn't tell her age. ... I'm old, let's put it that way," she once told me during an interview.)

I wouldn't have known she died if a friend of hers hadn't called and told me. I didn't write an obituary about Madame Zelda, but I once did a memorable interview with her for a business piece.

Before she was Madame Zelda, she told me, she'd done commercials, theater and voice-over work. There on the site of the original Galt House, she'd read the palms of many attorney, judge and prosecutor types who frequented the old Timothy's and then Bearno's.

Madame

Zelda

In addition to its convenient spot downtown, the building was owned by attorney Larry Jones. I did write an obituary about Jones. He built his own theater upstairs from the restaurant, Squirrelley's Tea Room, where he regularly performed. I remember him, too: a charming lawyer who loved to entertain with magic, by all accounts.

A gracious, no-nonsense lady, Madame Zelda summed up her palm-reading career to me about a year before she died: “It's been really very interesting, because we're all after the same thing--love and money and money and love. ... We all want our lives to be running smoothly. ... I've had some funny experiences in there. ... Dealing with the public, it's just... sometimes it's funny and sometimes it's sad. But mostly I have really happy memories."

I remember having my palm read by Madame Zelda three times. The first time I had just moved to Louisville and wouldn't even get a job at the CJ for several more years. The second time was, I think, a few years later, during a party. The third time, I wrote down every bit I could remember of what she'd told me as soon as I got back to my table in the restaurant. It was the summer of 2007. She said lines in my left hand indicated everything converging, but not connected. I'd come into more money, she said, and noted my tendency to be guarded about money comes from childhood. She said she saw a big, sweeping move, very good move, in the next 10 or so years. She said I'll win awards and find success with writing.

I wrote obituaries for years. Many, many years.

A lot of people think: what an interesting occupation. Other

people think: what special kind of touched or stupid is she for

stalling out so low on the journalism ladder?

Most people will never have to cold-call someone rife with

grief, quiz them about someone beloved who isn’t yet resting in the

cold, hard ground or returned to dust and ashes.

It was almost 20 years ago the first time I called a brand-new

widow. Her husband dropped dead that morning of a heart attack.

An editor wanted a specific date I did not know (it was pre-Internet

journalism). I couldn’t afford to, but I would rather have been fired

than call this woman that day, asking newspaper-story questions.

I protested, stalled. I finally had to make the call, hoping she

would not pick up.

She picked up. She graciously answered questions.

I’ve made such phone calls hundreds of times since, written

probably a thousand obits.

I tried to do other things, outside newspapers, a couple of

times.

There’s a cliché in the newspaper business about ink getting

in your blood. I don’t know about ink, but life stories are in my

blood now. Writing them is like second nature — but never routine.

The panic of making that phone call never goes all the way away

and the absurdity of summing up a life, or just some facet of one, in

brief, tidy copy never stops being… absurd.

Death Becomes Her I don’t “see dead people,” but I do remember them. All the

time, everywhere.

There’s one corner on Main Street where three stories converge.

I see places for things that once happened there, routinely look for

them: sidewalk spots where civil rights leaders picketed for

integration of now-disappeared movie theaters; abandoned,

downtown, family-owned department stores; stages in upstairs lofts

where theaters started; schools and churches where teachers and

preachers impressed those who grew up to preach and teach more,

again. Passing hospitals I think of doctors, professors, scientists who

left research to help cure what killed them. I look for evidence of old

clubs where the single mother welder sang torch songs some nights.

Painters, dancers, writers, poets, photographers – art

makers with gusto and prophecies and legacies: they stay with

me. I’m agnostic at best, but nuns have blessed me and I don’t

mind it.

Sometimes I was struck speechless, a knot stuck in my throat

hearing a widow say “forgive me” for not controlling sobs while

describing her husband, a Pearl Harbor survivor dead of pneumonia

on their return from volunteering at Ground Zero, or a mother in

tears proudly describing her long-ill 9-year-old son’s bravery and

dignity. Men, too, ask for moments to compose themselves, talking

about those they loved.

I have heard so many stories, been witness to the finish of so

many lives. I’ve adopted philosophies from some – simple, graceful

things like “do not hate” and offer “peace and blessings.”

I remain terrified of my own death.

I’ve heard and read about many long-gone arts groups, but Leo Zimmerman’s Society for the Arts might be the one that most captured my imagination and envy.

Zimmerman was an abstract painter. A Male graduate, he got an art degree at UK after World War II -- during which he served in the Army Medical Corps (he'd planned to become a doctor like his father) and spent some time in France, where he studied painting. He entered an art contest when he got home after the war and won first prize -- enough money to get him back to Paris where he continued studying and producing art. He and a friend partially funded their life in Paris by selling popcorn – apparently an unfamiliar concept to Parisians at the time.

Back home in Louisville to stay, in 1953 he opened the Carriage House Art Supply Store on Fifth Street. Literally a carriage house, he had a gallery in the former hayloft and offered art lessons to the public. Also using the space was a theater group led by C. Douglas Ramey, who would later found the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival (Shakespeare in the Park).

In 1955, Zimmerman founded the Society for the Arts, a nonprofit that published an arts magazine in several incarnations – beginning as “Arts in Louisville Magazine,” then “The Louisvillian” and then a shorter biweekly “Gazette of the Arts in Louisville.” In a couple of years they began sponsoring an arts festival.

This group was so vibrant, avant-garde, successful, renowned, or all of the above, that Life magazine sent a photographer to Louisville on

l e o z i m m e r m a n

assignment to cover Zimmerman and the Society for the Arts. (That photographer was Alfred Eisenstaedt, who shot the iconic “V-J Day in Times Square” photo of the sailor kissing a nurse, as well as 90 cover shots for Life.)

In 1958 the Arts in Louisville House opened on Zane Street at Garvin in the former home of the old Louisville Athletic Club. (The enormous building burned to the ground in May 1969.)

This art house had a theater, art galleries, music room, library, restaurant and wine cellar/bar. The jazz concerts were legendary (Dizzy Gillespie performed there) and as a private club it was racially integrated years ahead of the city at large.

The society broke up in 1963, due to “staff cultural exhaustion,” according to an entry in “The Encyclopedia of Louisville” Zimmerman wrote himself. After that he stepped back from the public arts scene.

He worked as a facilities manager at the Louisville Free Public Library for a little over a decade and somewhere along the way in the 1950s had invented the Silicoil Brush Cleaning System, materials and a method to clean paint brushes without damaging them that’s still around today. Meanwhile, he hadn't stopped producing art.

With his “Rural-Mural” and conventional oil on canvas days mostly behind him, in the last quarter of his life Zimmerman created his Sluball and Slu Cube paintings (best seen and not described). These involved paintings rigged to present optical illusions with circles and cubes. When he got an Apple computer, he set about producing thousands of works now known as his “Apple Art.”

Despite his shunning of the arts spotlight, a show of his Sluball paintings was held in 1989 at the University of Kentucky under the name Leo Wrye.

Zimmerman died in April 2008 in Louisville at age 83. A retrospective of his work was held this spring at the Cressman Center on Market Street. The show was titled “Return to Main Street,” reminiscent of his early “Main Street Facade” prize-winning painting that financed his return to Paris as a young artist after the war.

I knew very little about Catholicism when I moved to Louisville

in 1995. As an outsider and a former Southern Baptist girl who once

felt called to be a preacher when she grew up, I always thought

Catholicism was ancient and regimental and way too complicated.

The fact that there was a celebrated holy man at the helm of it all

didn’t win any points in my mind, either. I’d gotten full-up with

sexism in my own denomination.

So how do you reconcile all that when you have to start writing

about beloved nuns and priests who made big contributions to this

city? Well, you have to open your mind.

Nuns may be a mystery or a funny Halloween costume to most

people who aren’t Catholic, but my personal experience with them

(granted, a limited number) has been to be inspired by them. When a

sister died, I would inevitably talk to other sisters from her religious

order, who seemed to me to be genuinely good-willed. Once I learned

a bit about what they’d done with their lives, I was awestruck. Case in

point: Sister M. Angelice Seibert.

Sister Seibert was 82 when she died in October 2004. She’d been

an Ursuline Sister of Louisville for 64 years and was Mother

Superior/president of the order for most of the 1980s. Her entire life

was centered around that Catholic compound on Lexington Road near

the protestant seminaries. She’d graduated from the Ursuline

Academy and earned her undergraduate degree from Ursuline

College, then taught there herself.

She was a science scholar, earning doctoral degrees in

biochemstry and enzyme chemistry in the early 1950s from the

Sister M. Angelice Seibert

Institutum Divi Thomae in Cincinnati. Later in her life she wrote and

lectured about medical ethics.

Her enduring legacy to Louisville history was serving as the last

president of her alma mater, the old Ursuline College. She led the

women’s college through its final five years before it merged in 1968

with Bellarmine College (now the thriving Bellarmine University).

When she assumed the college presidency her vision was clear.

She described it in a Courier-Journal story like this: “Here (in a

women’s college) they can realize their potentials of leadership and

authority without encountering the psychological barrier that exists

when women at a coeducational school compete for office with men.”

In hindsight, was that a feminist approach or the opposite of

feminist? Archaic or progressive?

No matter, it was the 1960s and enrollment was a little more

than half the number needed for the college to thrive, Seibert said in

Wade Hall’s “High Upon a Hill: A History of Bellarmine College.”

The college made the decision before their situation reached dire to

merge with Bellarmine.

For a while the school went by Bellarmine-Ursuline College, but

that lasted only three years before reverting back to just Bellarmine.

I’m not Catholic, so I can say out loud: this fact has pissed me off -- if

only on behalf of Sister Seibert -- as typically patriarchal since I

found out about it.

Some justice came about, however, in 1975 when Seibert was

the first woman in Bellarmine’s history to deliver the commencement

address. Bellarmine awarded her an honorary doctorate in 1992 and

recognized her as president emeritus in 1995.

Pardon me, Sister Seibert, but it was about damn time.

Girl, I pass that old apartment building sometimes now on

my way to a friend’s place — remember that apartment with the

crazy steep parking lot where Tony threw bricks through your

window or some such bullshit stunt after you left him for good?

Ha — remember how we used to analyze and dissect every

stupid fucking thing every stupid fucking boy we were fucking

did or said all the fucking time?

Then I remember just steps up the hill is the apartment

where you lived when you really fell in love, head over heels

(and vice versa, we’d say). Love of your life.

I still like it how those two buildings are back-to-back.

Last year I moved back to that neighborhood where I lived

when I really partied. Remember that apartment with Fort Knox

gates? You had a hell of a time getting in to feed my cats while I

was on vacation and flipped out because my car got towed and I

never thought to leave you keys to the goddamn car, too. How

the fuck were we supposed to know there’d be be street cleaning

that week? Stupid fucking city.

Remember the duplex you went with me to check out —

the one sitting up that gigantic hill, with a red bedroom and

orange living room and an off-street parking space? That girl

still living there let us in to look around and was so cool and

theApartment

turned out we’d met once before through another friend. I’ve

always been glad you talked me into taking that place. I lived the

hell out of life in that place, girl.

I pass by your old house over this way more now, too, but

truthfully I try not to too often because I get so sad. But sometimes

I go by on purpose, just to keep remembering.

Remember us sitting on that porch drinking beer and

smoking cigarettes? Sometimes we’d pass a bottle of Southern

Comfort, too. God, how the hell did we ever have so much to talk

about? We never, ever ran out of shit to talk about. Remember that

big-ass standing ashtray? It was like a fucking piece of furniture.

We could fill that thing in one sitting.

I wonder if we started to grow up after your baby. I guess a

little. Remember how we pitched a blanket in your backyard and

still talked shit about fucking boys, but also stopped to watch the

baby coo and smile, some crazy preemie miracle we couldn’t get

over? Especially you.

Oh, you and your blissed-out joyful ass — so happy you

made fun of your damn self. Your Gatlinburg shotgun wedding

and your little bundle still make me smile sometimes. But fuck, I

might not ever be able to look at one of those pea-pod Halloween

baby costumes again, like you had already ordered and never got to

see him wear. Those still make me cry.

You remember how I hate to cry in front of people, right?

You, you always threatening to go all cheerleader bitch on me to

make me laugh.

I still miss you.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Jim Willoughby in 2007 for a profile about him and his barber shop in Germantown.

He ran that barber shop for exactly 50 years, according to the small sign in the window from which “Willoughby’s Barber Shop” has recently been removed. Willoughby died last October at age 76. He didn’t close the shop until about three weeks before he died.

I regretfully did not get to write an obituary for him. Now I drive past that empty shop on Oak Street all the time, making my way from Old Louisville to the Highlands, and remember him. He was one of those people I could have interviewed all day, and did talk with for much longer than I logically should have. I couldn’t help myself.

He told me about how the weather was wreaking havoc on the price of hay over in Southern Indiana and about riding his motorcycle from Pekin to the shop, 60 miles round trip, and how he rode the rodeo when he was young and liked to fly airplanes back when it was an affordable hobby.

He’d finished the eighth grade in his native Crittenden County, where he was born in a log cabin. He earned his GED in the Navy then went to barber college in Louisville. He raised his family in quarters behind the shop and could tell you the history of Germantown and make it entertaining. It was easy to understand why he'd been a successful barber: he was a pleasure to listen to.

JimJimWilloughbyWilloughby

barber barber shopshop

Louisville seemed to know for the kuchens, doughnuts and pastries. I

learned the story of that little bakery when Konrad Bussman died in

April 2004 at age 74.

His family moved around Europe during World War II, as he

studied and became a master baker, married and had two sons. He

immigrated to Louisville when he was 26, speaking no English, only

to discover the family members who’d sponsored him to America

were sent abroad by the Army.

A Louisville minister helped find him a place to stay and a job at

a bakery where he worked until he opened his own shop at 1842

Frankfort Avenue, which he later moved to its current location at 1906

Frankfort Avenue. He owned his bakery for four decades.

He closed Bussman's Bakery in 1996, but not until he was

finished with all the Christmas baking for his regular customers. He

sold the business in 1997, which continues under the Bussman name.

I lived in Clifton for about 10

years, a few of them on the street

across from Bussmann’s Bakery. I

never went to Bussmann’s, but it

was a landmark everyone from

Instead of looking at the St. James Court Art Show as a major hassle (as it really can be in Old Louisville), for the past two years I’ve become a joiner. I even walked through it two different days this year. I do this solely because of Malcolm Bird.

Bird was 83 when he died in July 2010. He was born in Louisville and lived more than half a century in the Old Louisville neighborhood he helped revitalize.

It was Bird’s idea to string up a few pieces of local art and sell them so the neighborhood association, of which he was president, could raise money to repair the court's famous fountain. That fountain has been there since just after the 1880s Southern Exposition -- where Thomas Edison premiered his fancy light bulb.

Bird was the unofficial “Mayor of St. James Court” in the 1950s and 1960s when it and much of Old Louisville stood to deteriorate into further and eventual ruin. Instead, he was at the helm of that now-celebrated Victorian 'hood reclaiming its landmark status.

His actual day job was physical therapist, but he also played cello and loved chamber music. There are now a recital hall and a strings scholarship at the University of Louisville, both named for him.

A few months before the first art show (Oct. 12, 1957), the neighborhood association put on an operetta as a fundraiser on the lawn of Ethel B. duPont, whose story is also fascinating. Her duPont ancestors owned most of the area where the art show now takes place, as well as what is now Central Park. She was apparently not a spoiled heiress, but instead an activist and labor organizer. I like it that she and Bird worked together.

Once he had the idea for an art show, Bird set the date by checking with a meteorologist as to which calendar weekend had the best odds for fair weather. It was the first weekend in October,

Mayoro f St. James Court

he was told. That is so common sense I feel confident hardly anyone would do it that way now. I can’t speak for all 55 shows held the first weekend of October, but every time I’ve been it's been fair weather.

Bird didn’t just get the neighbors together to raise money. Neglect and disrepair weren't the only threats to the once-wealthy and elite-occupied Old Louisville. Urban planning was also bearing down on it. Bird was a leader in fighting the city’s plan to build a major road through the neighborhood. That idea was finally defeated in 1969.

He stepped down as chairman of the art show in 1967, two years before I was born. By then attendance was about 40,000 people for around 200 exhibitors, according to the show’s web site, which also says now more than 300,000 visitors peruse something like 750 exhibits each year.

It all started with Bird's idea to hang a few dozen pictures on clothesline strung from tree to tree so they could keep that fountain from ruin. That’s what I think about as I walk around the art fair now. Instead of cursing the behemoth, I marvel at Malcolm’s legacy. Maybe next year I'll listen to chamber music as I stroll.

123

Walker, Foster & Cartereducators incorporatedI’ve written about a lot of educators -- elementary school

teachers and principals to college professors and presidents. I didn't

grow up here and don't have any children, so I've never really

learned the ins and outs of the Jefferson County school system.

Sometimes that felt like a handicap, but in the end, it was probably

for the best. At some point I found myself always rooting for the old

city school system -- the underdogs, but always (my impression was)

filled with grit and determination.

I remember speaking to Newman Walker on the phone from

California when I wrote an obituary for Car Foster in March 2004.

Foster was practically a folk hero of education to those who knew

him. He traveled an unusual career path, starting out as a college

professor, then taking an administrative post in the old city school

system, going to the elementary school classroom as teacher and later

stepped back up to elementary school principal.

You know the sort of people who are obviously, giftedly

intelligent, but not conceited? The people other people always want

to be around? I got the impression Walker and Foster were those kind

of people. I was pretty sure either one of them could have talked me

into becoming a teacher, and I’m terrible with kids.

When Newman Walker died in February 2009, I wrote his

obituary, too. He was superintendent of the old city school system for

its final six years -- before the city and county systems were forced to

merge, unleashing controversy and, quite frankly, it seems, bitterness

and spite that are still around 35 years later.

Educators from around the country, as well as reporters from Time magazine and The New York Times, came to Louisville to learn from what Walker was doing here. He was a born leader, getting his first school superintendent post at age 27 and retiring as a school superintendent in Palo Alto 27 years later. He was 78 when he died.

Another educator I’ll always remember is Gladys W. Carter. She was 98 when she died in October 2007. She taught in one way or another for more than 65 years – literally a lifetime spent educating.

Her own education was in segregated schools: the old Louisville Colored Normal School and old Louisville Municipal College (the University of Louisville did not admit African Americans until the 1950s, when she was in her forties). She started teaching before she was finished with college and did her graduate work at Indiana University and the University of Chicago, teaching all along the way.

After 31 years as an elementary school teacher -- her most famous pupil Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) -- most people would call it a career. But Carter started working at the YWCA where she’d already been a volunteer and then became a branch director. When she left there, she opened a tutoring center in the basement of her home.

She taught the children of “Louisville’s black elite,” as one news clip I read put it. Those kids of the most well-to-do sat right beside the children whose parents couldn’t afford fees. In 1994 (around year 24 for this tutoring stint), she charged about $12 a week for tutoring. She told The Courier-Journal: “People can't understand why I would teach a child for $1.50 an hour. … Learning is more important to me than money. … Our people will never be able to rise to the level of competition until we sacrifice to help them get there. I'm willing to make that sacrifice."

I think when she said “our people” she meant African Americans and who the hell am I to question that?

She reminds me that I’ve written about several “black firsts,” as the generation that led the civil rights movement here in Louisville has begun to pass away. I can't fathom the things people endured, the courage they had or the willpower they maintained to remain nonviolent while trying to desegregate the city.

I count myself among those – what must be a countless number of people – who learned something from these three educators, even if I never met them.

The first time I really paid attention to the history of Actors Theatre was when Ewel Cornett died in June 2002 and Dann Byck called the paper to tell me about it. Most everyone who’s much interested in local theater knows about Jon Jory, the Humana Festival, etc., but I’d never heard this story about how the whole shebang got started until then.

This story has a hand in all the fascinating elements of Louisville: drama, downtown, ego, money versus substance, and a Bingham.

Cornett was an actor. He graduated from Male High School, appeared in the first season of “The Stephen Foster Story” in Bardstown and was performing in musicals at Iroquois Amphitheater when he was 16. He went to UK and earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Illinois. Then it was off to New York City to work on Broadway, off-Broadway and with touring companies.

He came home in 1964 to start a resident theater company. Around the same time, his former Male classmate Richard Block was getting together a new theater company for Louisville, too. These two even played the same role in their senior play at Male, alternating performances -- practically foreshadowing their role in local theater history.

Block was more concerned with the logistics and financial planning for his undertaking, Theatre Louisville. His board was headed by Barry Bingham Jr.

Cornett was focused on actors and named his company Actors Inc., with Dann Byck as president. Byck was CEO of his family’s business, the old Byck’s department store chain. (Byck resigned in 1981, in his mid-40s, and moved to New York to pursue a more artistic career. He became a Broadway and film producer -- including producing “Night, Mother” on Broadway, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Marsha Norman, his wife at the time. I wrote an obituary for Dann Byck, too, when he died in March 2009.)

Actors Inc.

So the race was on between Actors Inc. and Theatre Louisville. Cornett beat Block to the stage. Actors Inc.’s four-production season opened less than a year after the company was founded, with Christopher Fry’s “The Lady’s Not for Burning” on May 29, 1964, in a theater improvised on a shoestring budget in a loft above the Gypsy Tea Room on Fourth Street. It was reportedly legend.

At some point, the powers that be decided Louisville wasn’t big enough for both theater companies and a merger was negotiated the following year, forming Actors Theatre of Louisville. Cornett and Block were both kept as co-directors. Cornett gave it a go, but didn’t like the arrangement and so gave an ultimatum to the board in 1966: him, Block or someone altogether new -- pick one. Forced to choose, they picked Block, who stayed a couple more seasons, until Jory arrived in 1969.

After leaving Actors, Cornett left Louisville. He directed a dinner theater outside Baltimore, then co-founded and served as executive director of the West Virginia Arts and Humanities Council. He moved back home in the late 1980s and started a business teaching people to speak to audiences. Byck told me Cornett wrote a memoir about the early days of Actors, but I’ve had no luck finding any trace of it online.

There aren’t many of the heyday resident actors of Actors Theatre left. At one time the company had a cast of resident actors well-known to Louisville theater-goers, but that practice has gone by the wayside. The number of people who remember those early days is also quickly fading.

I, for one, will always secretly (or not so secretly) admire the fact that it became Actors Theatre instead of Theatre Actors. For that I believe we might have these two to thank.

Ewel Cornett was 65 when he died. Dann Byck was 72.

Hixson was co-organizer of the Kentucky Pro-ERA Alliance and

the Kentucky Women's Agenda Coalition, spoke at the National ERA

Rally, was chair of the Kentucky International Woman's Year and led

Kentucky’s delegation to that Houston conference.

I had little knowledge of that conference or the significance of

the 1970s events before I wrote an obituary for Allie Hixson.

She was born on a farm in Columbia, Ky., graduated from high

school there and borrowed $10 for the bus to Louisville to look for

work so she could pay for college. She gave up that dream after three

years of secretarial work, but met her future husband who was

stationed at Fort Knox. They got married on V-J Day (1945) and both

went to Oklahoma State University, sharing his G.I. Bill. She got her

bachelor’s degree, but when he got a fellowship to Harvard, she

became a full-time mother to their three young children. When the

youngest got to kindergarten, she started teaching and working on her

graduate degree at U of L, then her doctorate.

She was the first person to earn a Ph.D. in English from the

University of Louisville.

She led the English department at Louisville Collegiate School

for four years, but resigned to move to a farm in Greensburg. There,

she added the causes of rural woman to her itinerary. She held offices

in all sorts of organizations, local to state level, from American

Association of University Women to Rural American Women and all

points between.

I hope to remember her example, all her work on my behalf and

her ability to take up such dedicated activism when most people are

beginning to countdown to retirement.

International Women’s Year was 1975 and two

years later the National Women’s Conference was held in Houston,

Texas. Delegates to the conference were to form a National Plan of

Action to promote women’s equality. At that conference were Rep.

Bella Abzug, Lady Bird Johnson, Rosalyn Carter, Betty Ford, Maya

Angelou, Coretta Scott King, Jean Stapleton, Betty Friedan, Billie Jean

King … and Kentucky feminist Allie Hixson of Louisville.

When Hixson joined the feminist cause at age 50, she did it with

gusto. In just two years, she was delivering the opening speech at a

rally of thousands in Washington, D.C., commemorating the 57th

anniversary of women’s right to vote. "We will make it in our time,"

she told them. "We will become first-class citizens, every woman in

the USA. ... For my entire lifetime, women have begged and pleaded

and argued and reasoned - and some have died without seeing

passage" of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment.

Unbelievably, so did she. She died in November 2007 at age 83.

AllieHixson

“ D o n o t h a t e . ”Ernie Marx

November 8, 1925 – July 8, 2007

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