Chapter 2: Childhood and Early Schooling
Holty’s birth in Freiburg, Germany, of an American Jewish mother and a German father who had practiced medicine for some years in the United States, came about because his father had decided the year before to return to Germany and study with a famous specialist in obstetrics. Why he should have been born in a Freiburgian inn rather than the very Klinik in which his father was working was always a mystery to which Holty attached much interest, as he did to the city of his birth, itself. Since the family moved back to America before the end of his first year, 1900, Holty had no childhood memories of Freiburg, but he garnered a great deal about its history and associated himself with other native sons like the German Romantic artist Anselm Feurbach and the historian of the Renaissance Jacob Burckhardt.
In recollecting his childhood in Wisconsin, where Holty grew up in most felicitous circumstances as the only child (there had been an earlier daughter who died in infancy) of a physician and the only grandchild of a merchant who owned a chain of stores, he wrote:
The memories of early childhood emerge from a fantasy world of its own. Those that are authentic and not largely supported by hearsay are rare. The voyage of the recorder into so remote a past is hazardous. The result or reward for his efforts will be a lie, a falsehood that perhaps contains a greater truth. If the reader of such a chronicle is incredulous at times, so is the writer.1
My first memories are those of a “country boy,” for we lived a hundred yards south of a cross-roads somewhere in the State of Wisconsin, a place called Town of Morrison The town was my father’s employer; he was its country doctor. What I remember of the brown house we lived in was its ugliness. I remember my nurse—the one we brought along from the Black Forest where I was born. I remember the owner of the hotel, Mr. Falk, who was also the owner of the poolroom, the grocery store, and the lumber mill. He was the undertaker, the proprietor of the furniture store, and the wood and coal merchant. In fact, he was Morrison.
I remember our collie dog and I remember a horse that my father bought that contributed much to the annoyance and merriment of the family. He was an old ex-circus performer and sometimes, when in harness, he would dance two or three steps up the road, throwing his gigantic buttocks right and left, much to his amusement, not always to ours, especially when we were in a hurry to get to Greenleaf, our railway station, 14 miles away.
The farmers of the countryside were a polyglot community, consisting of Pomeranians, Slovaks, Letts, and Lithuanians. The languages were many and my father required an interpreter on most of his calls. The interpreters were always the children of the countryside, who picked up all the languages from companions at school.
When one thinks of what those people could endure, the cold winters, hot summers, and physical pain, I dare say that they constituted at least one vertebrae in the backbone of American husbandry. It was a customary dowry to have the bride’s teeth extracted, one and all, and replaced with false ones, preferably gold, primarily to save the husband possible dental bills, and secondarily, for the glitter.The earth was new for farming. The farmers labored at the foundation of what later became a rich dairy land. As we knew them, they seemed to be no more human than the beasts of the field. I say “seemed,” because this wasn’t true. As a matter of fact, their family life was quite complex. It was not unusual on the death of a wife for her sister, or some other female relative, to come to keep house and care for the children. Sooner or later trouble began to brew. The substitute housekeepers would begin to have children out of wedlock. The farmer, having gotten over one wedding ceremony, felt disinclined to go through another, and there would be suits and counter-suits, and the doctor would have to testify. The County Court House was some 30 miles to the southeast and in the winter time, my father preferred to ride his horse to town because the snowdrifts made sleighing cumbersome. I can recall my father coming home at night, the horse covered with sweat and sleet looking like a bear, and my father, with icicles on his moustache and beard, alternately cursing human nature and the laws calculated to curb it.
In his work, he had no nurses, no laboratories, and no assistant. He worked hard and, by empirical methods and the grace of God, took good care of the flock entrusted to him. He was jealous enough of this trust to feud with the Protestant pastor and Catholic priest, his only rivals in the Shepherd’s office.
I know my father loved this life. I also know my mother didn’t. Talented, capable and mundane, she was the product of cities. She wasn’t good as a practical nurse because she fainted at the sight of blood. She didn’t like to think of life practically without society, without the theater which she loved, and far from the brace of female musketeers—Aunt Martha, Aunt Bella, and Aunt Frances, the sworn friends of her youth.
Aunt Bella was tall, Aunt Martha was taller, and Aunt Frances was average height and slender. Aunt Frances was a school teacher and traveled every summer. Aunt Martha wanted to travel, and Aunt Bella loved games of chance. They were German-American girls, intelligent, stubborn, and lots of fun, and the best “aunts” I ever had.
At that time, all three of these girls were unmarried, and their visits in the pleasant summers were, I think, the highlight of mother’s life in Morrison.
The only other visitors I can remember were my grandparents at Christmas time, and my uncle who used to visit us when business brought him that way. As a matter of fact, he loved children very much and me in particular, and really wasn’t always “right in the neighborhood” when he came over. And, oh, I mustn’t forget Sam. Sam was one of my grandfather’s commercial travelers, an older man and a distant relative of his. He was one of those men who are involuntarily so funny that properly exploited, he could have been used to amass a fortune. I loved him because he was good humored and because he was funny to watch. He seemed to be all elbows and ankles, and (apparently lacked) seemed to have no knees. He walked as if stilts were attached to his hips. Sam came by whenever he was “making” towns around the Peninsula. I think he liked us. But he was also a great hypochondriac and took the advantage of consulting a medical man as a sort of variety from fishing around with bottles and pill boxes on his own.
I was a blond brown-eyed youngster who was very talkative, except in the afternoon twilight. Then, for some primordial reason, as my mother told me, I became silent, my face glued to the window pane to watch the sun set behind the scraggly trees that looked like up-turned celery roots at the end of the field.
I, myself, recall only two events. One 1 when a twister lifted our outside toilet over the barnyard fence to the accompanying shrieks of my nurse Sophie, who tumbled out forwards and safely before it crash dived. I remember my father at the head of a corporal’s guard of farmer boys bringing this 5-family 3-holer privy back by the land route. The rather massive structure was carried by the men on an improvised stretcher of 2 by 4 beams.
The other thing I remember is when our collie, inspired by the spirit of Nimrod, tore himself loose from the barn to which his chain was attached. I marveled at his strength since the chain was attached by six-inch spikes to the barn’s corner.
I have been told I also created a major disturbance by seeing a timber wolf slink about the house on winter nights. I am supposed to have imagined the wolf. (IV, 1-3)
Had my father or rather my mother (stayed) stuck longer in Morrison, I might have become a real country boy. But they didn’t, and we moved to Milwaukee some years before I was to go to public school and the City became my memory of home. Even when I grew up I could not understand that all cities did not have a large body of water like Lake Michigan on the east side or that there were places without water at all and without trees on all the streets such as we had.
Disregarding matters of the spirit, I have ample physical reasons for not being able to go home again. We lived in what was a relatively old part of the city, on the western slope of Yankee Hill above the valley, but below the summit of it. It was a nice neighborhood, with lawns before, behind, and on the sides of houses, and elms lining the street. But before I had graduated from High School, it had already become what is politely known as a blighted area, filled with boarding houses and parking lots. . . .
The Victorian period that in America established the Steamboat Gothic style as the House Beautiful did not last too long a time. But it did last long enough to suffer several changes.
My grandmother, veritable guardian of the hearth and home, redecorated that mansion three times. There was the Victorian Era, the Bamboo Era, and the Grand Central Railway Station Era. This latter generic term for household furniture is not popularly known, though any architect or artist of culture will know what I mean. The tables, buffets, highboys, and bureaus were generally made of mahogany or rosewood. They were massive and fairly simple. Like the Grand Central Railway Station they consisted of columns in profile for ornaments, and they combined the simplicity of Early American with the opulence of the slowly emerging industrial era—sort of a 1912 overture. The sofas were broad and squat, the tapestry was mellow without much cheer, and the bottoms of chairs were upholstered with mohair—functionally deficient because of moths. I will never forget our upholsterer, Mr. Heuley, who never bothered to take off his overcoat when he came to consult on professional matters. He always had a slightly runny nose which caused him to sniff at regular intervals. He had the fatalism of the mediocre craftsman-philosopher. “All I can say is, where you use mohair, you got moths.”
There was no functional economy about the house we lived in, but it certainly was comfortable. You entered through a vestibule, sandwiched between two doors, which contained an umbrella stand and a hat rack. The hat rack was a combination bench, mirror, and hat rack, the bench part being the receptacle of unmatched rubbers, baseball gloves, roller skates, and Tam o’ Shanters. As one passed through the farther door of the vestibule, one entered the hall of the house itself. Immediately to the left of that door was the elegant brother of the hat rack outside. This was a hard wooden seat, that at first glance claimed relationship to Florentine furniture. To the right of the hall wasthe stairway going to the second floor. To the left, one entered the first of two sitting rooms. As the result of my grandmother’s last furniture transformation, the sitting room and parlor became one long living room, at the farther end of which was the dining room. At opposite alternate ends of the living room there were gas log fireplaces.
Passing directly through the hall, one entered the library, a remarkable room which, despite three doorways and two windows, was dark even at noon of the brightest day of the year. The library had a wash stand behind a door. You opened the door and banged your knee against the cabinet. There were two drawers in the wash stand; both of them were stuck. If one went on through the farther door of the library, one entered the back hall. To the right of the door was a toilet with a glass window and a light inside. The light should have betrayed an occupant, but the passer could also look in and see a head or a newspaper or both. To the right of this little cubicle, stairs went down to the basement, up to the second floor, and at the far end of all this glory was the kitchen, large with ranges and an old oven set in a brick wall.
At the far end of the dining room were two doors, one leading to what we called the “conservatory”—a glassedin back porch, where we kept apples, a rubber plant in need of fresh air, and where one could step outside to cool off when the house was overheated in the winter time. The other door led to the butler’s pantry.
The second floor of the house was the land of bedrooms. These were strung out in the same rambling manner as the rooms below, all on one side of the hallway. The other side consisted of stairways, three in all, a front stairway, a rear staircase, and one that went to the attic. There was only one room on that side, and that was my playroom.
The Victorian interior was set within a shell of brick, wood, marble, fieldstone and cement, characteristic of the popular neo-Gothic style. It was built by a Mr. Torchiani, a contractor-builder who had constructed several houses on Jefferson Street. The interior plan for these houses was identical, though the dimensions of the rooms varied in size in accord with the different cost estimates. I would never have had to ask our neighbors, the Baers, where their toilet might be, not even on the first visit, because it was in the exact same spot of the house as ours. The other Torchiani houses I had seen had rather modest exteriors but not the one we lived in, because this one had been built by our Bramante for himself. He gave free rein to that Italianate soul that in the homeland created the Campo Santo in Genoa. It seems Mr. Torchiani’s business failed in some depression, or as they used to be called “hard times,” and he sold his dream house to my grandfather.
Our house was 45 feet wide and 120 feet long; the short side faced the street. It was a two-story house with a 14-foot attic capped by an assemblage of towere. With cellar windows five feet above the ground, the aggregate vertical footage gave it a castle-like appearance.
The facade was the answer to the prayer of those who crave variety. No two windows were of the same size, no framework of similar style, no two towers of equal dimension or character, no two dormers on the same plane or elevation, so that the eye could find no visual meadow for repose. So much for those architectural elements that could plead function as an excuse. But Mr. Torchiani’s addition of a marble-and-stone balcony and the quasi-Persian tile ornament above the first floor windows, along with the colored glass spotted here and there in superfluous portico windows, had no function to excuse them. They represented the pure spirit that seeks the beautiful for its own sake.
Here in this house a new and strange world opened its doors to the four year old boy from Morrison. When he arrived he saw his first crankless wall telephone. When the time came for him to leave there was a standing phone on a table, though one still had to give the operator the number to be called. (IV, 4-6)
My grandfather’s house sheltered my parents, myself, mother’s brother and his wife. My grandfather’s new venture in business, begun in partnership with his only son in my infancy, called for drastic economy and this placed seven of us under one roof. There were also a cook and a maid. Four more relatives lived within the block, but on another street. My grandmother’s sister and her husband, my great grandmother on the maternal side, and a cousin, a year or so my senior, lived on Milwaukee Street. Through the gates in our backyard fences we could get together without having to cross the street.
Before my birth, my grandfather was a man of wealth. But while I was in the womb, he was forced into bankruptcy through the business failure and subsequent suicide, of a brother whose home was in Atlanta, Georgia.
This explains the country Doctor my father became. It also forecast the rhythm of pendulum-like swings that have pursued me in my own life and seeded it with the violent storms of change at once distasteful and out of keeping with my nature.
Fortunately, I loved everyone about me, was outgoing, and my affectionate nature seemed to inspire those with whom I lived and there was a happy response. I did not feel a lack of privacy. Later when my uncle and aunt established a home of their own and the relatives on Milwaukee Street moved away to a country town, I was saddened. Hence I looked forward to family get-togethers.
When there were only five of us left in the house, my father was its spiritual head. He was the best educated, the richest in his emotions, and the most impressive in personality. My mother was the hostess, the one whose equanimity of temper and love of company made the house hospitable. It had a reputation as such in the city. My grandmother was the dowager if I may call her that. She enjoyed all the activities of the house, but made herself responsible for none of them, leaving its management of it to my mother. Whatever my mother did, whether it was cooking or training new cooks or maids or organizing the social life, she did it easily. Her great passion in life was swimming. Next among her loves was the theater and life amongst actors and actresses as with her half-dozen girlhood friends. She enjoyed reading the popular literature of the time, though she was well aware of the shallowness of most of it. She cooked well, but her own choice of foods was almost ridiculously simple. She liked cooked ham, chicken, and watermelon, and nothing else. Despite her obesity due to a glandular condition, she was very attractive. Her blue eyes and blond hair which turned to white without passing through that muddy stage, was not heavy but ample and she was always exquisitely groomed and what is called “appetizing.” She had the most sensitive of ears for all manners of sounds and could learn languages and dialects that appealed to her with astounding rapidity.
My grandmother, though a small woman, was handsome and had been quite a beauty in her youth. She loved culture, quite for its own sake even though she was reared in an era when young women learned poems and quoted them only for the purpose of impressing the swains-in-waiting. She was exceedingly vain and romantically idealistic; that is, until push came to shove. Then the realist in her came to life, and she was an antagonist or protagonist to be reckoned with and could be quite a tiger. She was rather modest in her material demands and never asked for more from my grandfather than he could give her. Nor did she chide him for some of his misadventures, in short she never complained. My grandfather adored her but was often impatient with her in a gentlemanly way. Grandmother had acquired throughout the years numerous dresses with much lace upon them. She had the habit of taking the lace from some dresses and sewing it on others, for amusement or pasttime. But this infuriated my grandfather, who feigned to disapprove of all purposeless pursuit. His highest praise for any man he knew was when he called him a “hustler.” He held those contemporaries of his that met at Martini’s coffeehouse each afternoon at 5 o’clock in contempt, though they were all well off and elderly. I believe this love of action was a part of his aim to become Americanized in typical Horatio Alger fashion. I suspect that he too would have enjoyed the more leisurely life of the patrons of the fading European-type coffee houses in the midwest. Henrici’s in Chicago, quite as elegant as the Cafe of the Scale in Milan still exists, but Martini’s is gone and surely forgotten by now.
There is no doubt that my grandfather did live in his business. He was the born merchant and so concentrated in his stores and warehouse that it amounted to egocentricity. Through my father’s influence he relaxed considerably later in life. He became president of the German Theater association, and enjoyed Friday evening meetings of a German intellectual society that my father had persuaded him to join.
Next to, or equal with, his business devotion, his greatest love was his grandson. I was the sunshine by being born when and what I was. On Saturday afternoons he would take me to amusement parks, wildwest shows, for suburban trolley car rides, and he bought me expensive presents that he could hardly afford, just to see the joyful look on my face. After supper, it was my privilege and chore to go to a hall closet and bring my grandfather his after-dinner cigar, taking it from the large copper-lined chest that served as a humidor for his “Havanas.” Usually, he would simply ask me to do this but when he looked at me before asking and uttered the word or sound “TCHT,” I knew I would find on the chest a box of my Nueremberg lead soldiers. Others at the table would just smile, shake their heads, and say, “Grandpa, you will spoil that boy.” Grandfather was rather superstitious about me, regarding me as his luck piece. When we strolled about at the end of the trolley lines for an hour or so before taking another car back to the city, he would ask me what I thought about this or that piece of property which he considered buying as an investment. I was perhaps seven or eight years old at the time. My youth and ignorance of real estate to the contrary notwithstanding, I always advised him and he always took my advice. Oddly enough he never lost money through me. The property invariably improved in value, but usually so slowly that had he put the money invested in a savings bank at 6 per cent interest, the gain would have been about the same.
My grandfather’s desire that I should go into his business was not solely vain or selfish. It is natural for a man to want to know that his life’s work would be carried on by one of his blood. No doubt he wanted to insure my physical and material welfare and going into his business seemed the most logical way to accomplish that end.
He worried about my future to the last days of his life, and counselled me to stick to my uncle. He did not tell me to trust my uncle for some reasons which he did not divulge. Perhaps it was because of an innate secretiveness, the one trait I disliked in my grandfather, that prevented his confidence in me completely. I know that he often tried to unburden his mind of certain worries and just couldn’t get himself to speak out in a forthright manner. It wasn’t within his conscious power to overcome this silence of the mind and soul. (IV, 12-14)
It wasn’t given to many people in this century to have as joyous an infancy and childhood as I had, and, as my German great-grandmother used to say, “Heaven itself is indeed hung with violets and base viols upon which the angels can pluck and string happy melodies to celebrate the passing days.”
All the things that attract other children interested me, though I was probably a bit more spoiled than most because I was an only child. I was gregarious enough, but there were certain games that I preferred to play alone. I was passionately devoted to lead soldiers, of which I had a great many. The usual games that children have of setting up the soldiers in rows and shooting them down with corks from a cannon did not give me pleasure. Rather, I liked to set up historical pageants to illustrate the events from my history readings. I was one of those precocious children about letters and the stepping-stones to literature were dull to me. As I learned to read, I preferred to browse about in history books at home, and history became the literature of my everyday life. American history did not interest me much for it was too close in time. I preferred the Crusades or the Caesars of Rome. At any rate, I illustrated pageants, famous marches, and military campaigns with my lead soldiers, my toy horses and trains, and the tin castle that had a drawbridge, and I wanted no one to touch them. As a matter of fact, it required quite a resolve to break down one tableau to prepare the tables for another. . . .
I wanted to be a fireman, and I wanted to be a soldier, and I wanted to be a cowboy, and then later, under the rather sentimental influence of my grandmother, I wanted to be all kinds of things romantic. I remember one day, at the age of about 15, catching myself with tears in my eyes as I read about the sad fate of the Austrian composer, Franz Schubert. There was great danger, as there usually is in that sentimental period, of becoming too moved about everything except the real and the near. Perhaps living in a comfortably situated, respectable, upper-middle class family was responsible for some of this. (IV, 6-7)
Very few of the old families of the neighborhood had children young enough to attend our public school, and it had become a school for the children of poor people. There were Italian children from below Wisconsin Street, and Polish children from above Knapp. There were Russian-Jews from the valley below, and immigrants with odd, funny looking clothes and black stockings that were so old they had turned both brown and green. There were also three Negro children in the school. (IV, 15)
My parents were careful of the boys and girls with whom I associated. That is, they didn’t want particularly naughty boys whose parents had little or no influence upon them to corrupt their son. But there were no other restrictions on my choice of companions.
The public school I attended for six years was faced with a specific problem that is not unique in American History. The task of Americanizing the children of poor immigrants was considered of as much importance as the teaching of the ordinary subjects of elementary education. The learning of the new language was the lesser part of the chore, because children at an early age, unless they have some particular reason to resent doing this, learn the new tongue within a year’s time. For older children there was at Jefferson what was called an upgraded class, devoted to teaching English so that these advanced pupils might be assigned to their age groups as quickly as possible once they had a grasp of the new language.
The educators felt that the real objective consisted of imbuing these youngsters with all-American ideas and that meant a silent struggle with the parents.
Should the parents who were too old and too rooted in their past to change be permitted to impose the old country customs upon their children, these would, it was thought, be condemned to remain foreigners forever in the adopted land. It is hard to accomplish this educational task and it was not done well. To idealize becoming an American, the educators elected to pour calumny on the old country and so brought about exactly the antithesis of their aim.
The immigrant child became ashamed of his land of origin, and of his parents, and it broke down family communications. The old folks addressed the children in the native tongue, the youngster pretended not to understand even though he knew well enough what was said. If he was asked a question he would finally answer, first in English and then so that the oldster could know what he was saying, in a sort of pidgin version of the only language his parents spoke. It usually took a box on the ear to get him to speak with those lamentably contemptible “foreigners” at all.
The inculcation of pure patriotism through flag ceremonies and instruction in American History, the only part of history taught in elementary schools, was not too bad. The history books were scandalously one-sided and unfair to the enemy whoever it was, the British or the American Confederacy. The furor of daily classroom pledges to the flag, our country, and our land, that made a mockery of these ceremonies blossomed only in World War I. Baseball teams did not usher in each game with singing of the national anthem, and we still sang “Columbia the Gem of the Ocean” as often as “My Country ‘tis of Thee.” (IV, 16)
The class rooms were dusty as all school rooms are, and they stank of often-worn, seldom-washed clothes. I remember the health inspectors washing the lice-infested heads of some of the immigrant children with kerosene. But we were all equal before God and our teachers and each other.
I am glad I went to Jefferson Street School. It was as valuable experience as a young boy anywhere in the world could have had, because it was what some of us Americans were privileged to know—true Democracy. Perhaps fortuitous circumstances made it possible. After all, those disturbing conflicts that bedevil us today were far from the crisis stage. The Civil War was 40 years past, World War I had not begun. Perhaps because there were so few negroes, no one could make capital out of vicious prejudice directed against them. The common belief that anyone by dint of industry could make his way in the world made all of us equally unconscious of poverty or wealth. The industry and tenacity of the immigrant boys were held up to us by our teachers as exemplary, and made those of us unkind enough to call them “green horns” ashamed of ourselves. . . .
The tough boys remained in public school until they were 19 or 20 year of age and then graduated immediately to the State Reformatory. This was before the days of YMCA and other public agencies that concerned themselves with child delinquency. Corner gangs annoyed the janitors and shopkeepers, stole in the candy shops, and smoked “sinful” cigarettes in partnership behind the school building. Conditions were so bad that it became necessary to have at least two male instructors in the school to protect the female staff. These teachers were still recruited from the unmarried daughters of shabby genteel families and prosperous farmers. The male teachers were young men working their way through college, usually to a law degree, and they were picked for brawn as well as for their pedagogical abilities.
Adult scandals were also connected with that particular school. I remember when our principal, an impressive looking man with a gray moustache and sideburns, was removed from office because it was discovered that he was the owner of one of the city’s brothels. I remember also the gossip surrounding his successor, an elderly old maid, who was personally above reproach, but whose brother was a medical doctor, specializing in venereal disease and who advertised his services to “men in trouble” on the proscenium curtain of one of the town’s Burlesque show theaters.
Our third grade teacher shot to death the wife of her paramour in one of the state’s big crime cases. Ordinarily such crimes are not unduly featured in states where there is no death penalty and Wisconsin had no capital punishment. The murder was committed, I must add, at a much later date. I mention it only to assure those who believe morals and manners have declined in the last fifty years. There are only more people today and the circumstances governing our daily lives have changed (IV, 15).4
It was not the unsavory circumstances of their son’s first pedagogical experience that persuaded the Holtys to move him, so much as an event that happened when, chasing a ball from the playground, he ran into the street and almost collided with an automobile—his father’s. The family hurriedly conferred and decided, for the boy’s own good, to remove him from public school and enroll him at the German English Academy. The culprit did not like the switch and recounted an incident that proved its invalidity, even though it turned out well:
Ironically, I must add that though I was sent to this school for better supervision, I was hardly there four weeks when I broke two ribs and an arm in a well-supervised soccer game. The injuries were painful, but there was a five weeks vacation because of it, which was a consolation to me. I cannot recall any elementary school year in which I did not spend two or three months at home in the winter time, with whooping cough, tonsilitis, or other minor ills. These were play months, and necessary ones for me. There were no idle moments for my grandmother, who was an excellent reader, read fine things to me and when my teachers came to help keep up with my lessons, their visits always ended in coffee cake, buns, and an agreeable party, much appreciated; the maid would bring in the tea things, and this marked the end of the lesson. Some of my earliest diplomatic efforts were concentrated on those maids, for I implored them never to be late, preferably to appear early. (IV, 18)
The G.E.A., as it was called, consisted of a grammar school and a high school. The educational level was good, the teachers excellent, and all of them were holders of at least a Master’s Degree. Their superiority over the old maids and the College student instructors was evident even to me when I was still in the grammar school. The pupils came from well-to-do or truly wealthy families. I did not like those who were little purse proud snobs, but I got along well enough and was rather touched by the warm welcome extended me. Later I found out that this camaraderie was official policy. It did not necessarily come from the heart as was the case at public school where true emotions and feelings, whatever they might be, prevailed over the copy book rules of polite conduct.
At public school we had had calisthenics, but no real physical culture. At the Academy we had such a program. There was a large gymnasium with all the equipment required for turning, ropes to climb, leather horses, standards for jumping and piles of mattresses on which to land. We had a basketball court and a tennis court of sorts in the yard between the grammar and the high schools. All this pleased me and I entered the athletic period of my youth. My joy in games, particularly ball games, took precedence over previous interests and the lead soldiers began to gather dust. My interest in history would have followed the lead soldiers into oblivion but for my encounter with one of our professors, a passionate student in the subject.
One of our teachers, a bird of passage on his way to the career of a college professor, was a young German. He was generally pale with a hangover from his nocturnal whiskey-sour drinking, and was not gaited to working with children, for they could not respond to his intense interest. I caught some of his fire and my sincere response to his lectures struck a sympathetic chord in him and we became friends. His teaching enabled me to grasp the significance of historic events and taught me how to arrange them in a meaningful sequence. Until then, history had been the subject matter of story telling to me. Through this teacher I had my first glimpse of the joy of order.
Professor Maurer’s handling of his subject was classical, and could be applied to any other study, even to creative procedure. One begins with perception. One reflects on a possible logical order of things or events, chooses the most reasonable one and concludes by interpreting the whole.
Although he did not like to work with children he could help them through graphic demonstration which he sometimes employed. I remember his taking us all. out to Juneau Park to demonstrate the migration of the Germanic tribes as they moved west, south and south-west from the north of Europe to the Mediterranean. Each group of two, three or four youngsters represented a tribe and our teacher placed them in the positions of their points of departure. Holding a watch in his hand, he dispatched the different groups according to historical time. That was fun, like the start of a foot race. The groups or tribes then went through the motions of battling other groups, taking prisoners and leading them tied and chained. The chains were to be imagined and the captives mimicked their sad state by walking along with their hands behind their backs — and grinning happily. In the battle parts we swung imaginary swords and protected ourselves with imagined shields. When we reached the other side of the park — or the Mediterranean, we had a fair idea of what it was all about.
I was singularly fortunate throughout my school years to have known many teachers that were persons of -distinction and whose influence on some of their students was beneficent and lasting.
All instruction at G.E.A. was given in the English language. There was one German class and Dr. Maurer’ s course in World History (Weltgeschichte). This latter was not only a kind of German propaganda, but it was slanted where the Reformation was concerned. We were given the Protestant version. Milwaukee’s Germans were overwhelmingly Lutheran, especially those who were well to do. When I would retell what we were taught, in conversation at home, my father, though a dissident Catholic, would fume and sputter at the lies. This did not prevent his being respectful and friendly with a near neighbor who was a Lutheran minister, Pastor Gausewitz.
His father did not disagree, however, when the young Carl decided to return to public school after his freshman year in the Academy’s high school. By this time, he had discovered an interest in art and realized that he could reach his goal of getting into art school more rapidly in public school, which required fewer credits for matriculation than did private school. Because of his extra credits from G.E.A., Holty was able to enter in the second half of his sophomore year at Riverside High School, situated on the upper Milwaukee River about two-and-one-half miles from his house. The distance was not too far for walking, which he loved, especially as the route led along streets made gracious by the trees that lined them:
There were numerous species as the names of some of the streets, Poplar, Cedar, Oak, and Elm proclaimed. Though delicate in health, and dangerous in decay, the most beautiful were the Elms. They grew tall, fanned out gracefully in the upper branches and the foliage canopied the streets with green in the late spring and summertime. In the Autumn, the most beautiful season of the northern midwest, we walked under vaulted arches of red and gold.
Even the meanest collection of houses were no longer repulsive to the eye in this idyllic setting and some of the foolish idiosyncrasies of the builders became lovely and meaningful. Useless arches and silly towers invited the observer to see these shelters, for that is about all they really were, as fantastic pavilions and miniature dream castles. It was a world of dreams such as the primitive folk painters often reveal to us in their pictures. (IV, 20)
Holty had much company en route to and from school. A gregarious youth, he was happy to rejoin his many friends from whom he had detoured in private school. As he said: “The companions were numerous and my father chose to interpret my happiness in this broader companionship as his son’s deplorable ‘love of the Herd’.” (IV, 20) The boy’s chief interests were extra-curricular rather than academic, however, having to do with football and the school newspaper:
Football made the beautiful autumn even more attractive. Kicking through the dried leaves on the way to football games is just a little bit better than kicking your way through dried leaves. And while the game itself has lost some of its excitement now for me, the beautiful spectacle of the lengthening shadows on the gridiron, the blue autumn sky, remain as glamorous as they ever were. The cheerleaders and the crowds bore me today, but it wasn’t so then. After a victory on a Saturday afternoon, we ran at a dog trot for three or four miles from the stadium to the heart of the town, making a circle at every street crossing, catching what was left of our breath and counting the score out loud. In that day, there were just four high schools in the city and two of them had to lose each Saturday afternoon. The victors, however, went to the Schubert Repertory Theater on football night and sat in the pit and made life miserable for the actors, smacking their lips and· chirping like birds every time the hero kissed the heroine. . . .
I don’t know whether there is as much enthusiasm today about student publications in the secondary schools as there was half a century ago. At that time the High School paper was popular with those who read it as well as with those connected with it directly. The competition between the schools of the city was keen in these intellectual and artistic pursuits as well as on the playing fields. Students who dreamed of becoming writers bent to their contributive tasks with enthusiasm and a greater zeal than they brought to their assignments in English composition. The same was true of the illustrators and cartoonists on the staff of the paper. There was more pleasure and a spirit of fun and a far greater range of possibilities doing art work here than could be found in the pedestrian design and color exercises of the art classes. The motivations of professional and adult life were brought to life and action. It was very real to us and we took it seriously. All contributions to the paper, even the stale jokes that were interspersed throughout each issue bore the signature of the contributor.
Working on the “Mercury” and painting countless posters announcing events at school turned out to be more significant than anyone, including myself, could have thought it would be at the time. I was Art Editor and chief cover designer for the little monthly publication, and massive Annual issue. . . .
Through my interest in our Journal, I began to look at the art works of others, that of real artists, whose work could be found mostly in foreign magazines such as “L’Illustrator” or the Munich “Jugend.” There was little in American magazines of interest to me. American illustrative art had reached its zenith in the first decade of the century with Howard Pyle, its dean, and Walter Appleton Clark, now all but forgotten, but perhaps its finest artist. Even this work, with which I was acquainted failed to inspire me as the work of the designers that emerged one by one out of what is now fashionably referred to as Art Nouveau. [There was also] the impact on my work of the French and British War Poster exhibitions. . . .
I did not put into effect my original plan which was calculated to get me through High School as rapidly as possible. Perhaps I found life at the school too pleasant to want to terminate it. Perhaps, and I think this was the real reason, I lacked the determination to plug at studies in which I was not interested and rather took the easy way out through the elective courses that required the greatest number of credits. I reached the age of determination rather late in life, when the hammer blows of tragedy and disaster finally convinced me that I could not run from trouble and difficulties forever. (IV, 20-22)
- The first paragraph (actually the third) was rearranged to the beginning of this piece with which Holty introduces his memories of childhood. In telling of his early life, the author goes into much more detail on personalities and settings than in later sections where he concentrates on his own art and his acquaintances in the art world. I have decided to include more of this material here, not only because it illuminates the subject’s growth and development but a whole segment of Americana in the burgeoning 20th century.