Post-Retirement Art Classes

After I retired and moved to Ashland I used the educational opportunities offered by Southern Oregon College (as it was known at the time — it has since first become Southern Oregon State College and then Southern Oregon University). As a senior citizen I could by Oregon law audit courses at the college at no charge and under this regulation I audited several political science courses, coursed in history (including hagiography [sic — I think he meant to say historiography], literally the study of history making) and last but not least a course in the philosophy of religion. The latter was really a seminal experience and did much to influence my thinking on religion and philosophy.

Of importance also were the courses I enrolled in for credit concerning art subjects, or later on auditedf under the senior citizen regulation. The first course I took was a beginning watercolor class, the stimulus being that I decided I wanted to render in color various sketches of old cars that I had started to draw in my spare time as a retiree. This was followed by a more advanced watercolor class, several two-week watercolor seminars (held during the summer sessions at the college) at which established watercolor artists were the instructors. I look back on these courses with nostalgia and appreciation for what they opened up for me.

Later on I took some drawing classes and these led in time to figure drawing and figure painting classes. Some of the earlier classes here were taken for credit but the later ones were audited. The instructor for more of these was Margaret Sjogren and she was an excellent teacher and certainly influential in my development of drawing and painting skills. I have also taken drawing and watercolor classes offered by the Rogue Galley in Medford and following these have participated in the non-instructional sessions in figure drawing of painting there. However this activity ceased shortly before my heart attach and subsequent bypass surgery and since then I have not participated in any further classes of any kind.

The beginning watercolor class was given by Jim Doerter, and was an excellent class, giving the students an exposure to various techniques. The next more advanced class was by Cliff Sowell who was nominally the instructor usually assigned to watercolor classes. Sowell was also the motivating force behind the summer two-week seminars (four each summer). These ceased when he died as the result of chasing errant cattle on his ranch near Cave Junction.

Of the artist/instructors at the seminars I participated in the most effective were Judi Betts and secondly Phil Austin. Betts was an art instructor in the Baton Rouge schools and her experience as a teacher made her better than Phil Austin. Jean and I have a small watercolor by Betts and I had a print of one of Austin’s watercolors but disposed of it when we down-sized on moving to Mountain View Retirement residence.

The other instructors I had were Margaret Sjogren and Robert Alston in various drawing and oil painting classes. It was with these two teachers that I began drawing and painting the nude figure, principally female. It has been an area in drawing and painting that has fascinated me ever since.

[My dad's handwritten autobiographical notebooks end here. Next, I will begin transcribing family letters he wrote, beginning in 1944.]

Retirement Locales: Auburn vs. Ashland

Back to our trip to Eureka and my introduction to huckleberry pie on the way from Eureka to Redding. Redding was another retirement possibility and I think we looked into it a little. Redding is too hot in the summer though so it was never very high on the list. One edge it did have was some remote employment in the chemical engineering field — one of the large paper companies had a facility at Anderson, about eight miles south of Redding. But I never looked into this. I suppose that Eureka also presented this possibility.

One of the two places that we finally narrowed our retirement consideration to was Auburn, California. I think earlier we had explored other towns in the California foothill country; I know we visited Grass Valley and Nevada City and I think we looked in at some realtors. Over the years we lived at 411 Bonnie Drive we visited Auburn several times. A longtime friend of Jean’s dad’s, Al Flint, lived there in retirement with his second wife. I think her name was Katherine.

I don’t know just how we started this practice of occasional visits to their home in Auburn, but they were pleasant, relaxed occasions. Al Flint was a grizzled gray man, I suppose in his late 60s or early 70s when we visited them; Katherine was I surmise younger, still dark-haired and ungraying and one of those women with a surprisingly deep, rich voice. She outlived Al and after his death moved away from Auburn to someplace further south in California. A very hospitable lady and she served us more than one lunch I’m sure, along with our daughters whom I am sure were along with us.

I think Al remembered the air gun or rifle that Jean’s dad made at one time. Jean thought her dad had disposed of this by giving it to her cousin Glen (who ended up in Idaho, and was a gun fancier, going to gun shows and indulging in such activities) but when she queried Glen about it he said he didn’t have it. So what happened to it is lost — it wasn’t in the house on Stuart Street when Jean’s dad died.

I’m sure we also passed through Auburn on various trips, up I-80, or when driving through the “gold country” on such trip as to or from Placerville. And there was the memorable supper we had at Butterworth’s when Jean and I, Muriel and Palma drove to Houston after we accepted the transfer there. We had left El Cerrito late afternoon so it was suppertime as we came to Auburn. As we were driving around looking for a place to eat, Palma spotted this old house which had been turned into a restaurant. It hadn’t been open long at the time, and we had a truly exceptional meal. A mark of its character was the fact that Muriel and Palma ate the vegetables with relish and without demur. It was also the place where Jean had her first experience with key lime pie (I think).

Jean and I went back to Butterworth’s once after we moved to Ashland, this time for lunch. It was still elegant and the lunch was very good but, for me, it didn’t have quite the magic of our first encounter there. Anyway when we really started to a serious consideration of places where we wanted to move back to in the west, Auburn was one of the two places in the final running, along with Ashland of course.

Whether it would have won out, had there been a stronger response from realtors there, or even a response at all from the school system I don’t know. Ashland on the other hand seemed much more receptive and may well have been the better choice as things have developed since. The last time we passed through Auburn was a year or so ago. Jean was interested in delving around in Truckee on a genealogical search for possible traces of her Ribley grandfather. Family hearsay was that he had a sawmill there which burned. This was during the 20- to 30-year gap in his history of which Jean has been unable to track down any record. It was during this period that he was supposedly married to his first wife. But we found no trace of him or of his supposed wife.

Eureka and Huckleberry Pie

Then there were the trips we took on which I checked out various rural properties — I don’t know just when we made these trips but I suspect it was before we acquired the old Joe Johnson farm or the half of dad’s farm after the settlement of his estate when mother died. After this I think my urge to own some farm property was satisfied.

I recall the trip, with the girls along to the 10–15 acre ranch near Turlock; it is remembered as the watermelon ranch as that was the only crop still in evidence. It much have been in the fall of the year when everything else (it appeared to be a small truck farm operation) had been harvested.

A more reasonable investment would have been the alfalfa farm in the vicinity of Chico. This was considerably larger and would have been a more profitable and more easily managed property. But in the end nothing developed — though I was interested enough to take some color slides. These are probably still tucked away in the boxes of slides we have, which we haven’t looked at in years.

When we married Jean had a 35mm camera which she had purchased second hand from Henry Kingsley at work. We used this for several years and we have some slides from the trip we took to Yosemite when Muriel was small. Some of these have deteriorated over the years but are still mementos of various trips. Later we bought and used a Japanese 35mm camera, a Ricoh, which we lost when the ’69 Plymouth was stolen in Golden Gate Park in 1978. This was replaced by another camera, which I think can take either slides or negatives for prints, but which hasn’t received much use.

The leads on possible rural land investments resulted from perusal of such catalogs as those put out by United Farm Agency. I think I continued to received these even after we were here in Oregon but they have now stopped coming. Even those I received while we were living in El Cerrito contained listings of Oregon property, much of it in the northwest corner of the state. Associated in my mind with such property was always the possibility of these places as being places for retirement.

One time Jean and I took a driving trip to Eureka to check it out for retirement potential. On that trip we did not take the girls along. We made the trip at a time when the Cold War and the threat of a nuclear attack on the U.S. was more prominent in the public thinking, and I had decided that the least vulnerable area in the U.S. would be northern California or southern Oregon. There would be virtually no military or population targets worthy of notice and in addition the prevailing wind pattern would be generally west to east and would move radioactive clouds away to the east. And of course the area had no upstream targets so it was safe from the standpoint.

At the same time we did not want an area that was too isolated and with no potential for survival as to shelter and food. So we made the trip to Eureka to check it out as a potential place to move to (even before retirement). I rather liked Eureka and the area around it, having had ever since my days in San Pedro and my first experience with the sea cost (out at Point Fermin) an attraction to the seashore. It does have considerable rain and cloudy weather which did not appeal to Jean but such a climate has a certain attractiveness to me.

The Eureka area economy is of course largely based on logging though there is some agriculture — dairy farms and the like, I suppose mostly for local consumption. The economy has in recent years been depressed and will be more that way in the future, but that does not affect the livability of the area, assuming that there would be income from other sources.

Near Eureka is Arcata with Humboldt State College which I suppose like SOSC in Ashland brings events of cultural interest to the area. Eureka is an old town so there are interesting old buildings in it, such as the Carson mansion. The waterfront with its fishing boats, piers etc. is an area that fascinates me, as it provides many opportunities for sketching and the like.

All in all, I think I could be happy and content in Eureka.

On this “scouting” trip we turned inland from Eureka and took the road to Redding. It was on this leg of our journey that we stopped for an afternoon snack and I had my introduction to huckleberry pie which as ever after been a favorite of mine. The place we stopped was a small town beginning in W (Willow Creek?).

After we moved to Ashland Jean and I made a short trip over to the coast and our route took us past this town, whatever it was. We tried to find the place where we had had the huckleberry pie previously and couldn’t so we stopped at another restaurant for lunch. On inquiry of the waitress who served us I found out that the place we had stopped at before had burned down, probably shortly after we had been there originally.

The first piece of huckleberry pie I had was definitely of a reddish hue and Jean says the huckleberries she had as a child were like this and that she understood the local Indian tribes gathered them for sale. Later on, here in Ashland, we’ve had further contact with huckleberries, but these seem to be a different variety as they are both larger and more purple or blue than red. These huckleberries grow in the forest at the higher elevations (I used to think they only gre in the wild but I’ve seen the plants advertised for sale in local nurseries so I think they can be grown under cultivation also).

We have picked huckleberries a couple of times up in the Cascades, but never successfully as to amount. Mostly what we picked was enough for a pie or two. At least once we went with a couple from the local Methodist church, the husband had leads on places to go to find them. We found some, but not in the abundance that I had expected.

Another time Jean and I went for a hike along a forest trail starting at Four-Mile Lake up off Dead Indian Road and we chanced upon a small stand of huckleberries. We weren’t prepared for picking but I think we had a paper bag with us in which we had carried our lunch and we picked enough berries for a pie I guess.

The trail to Four-Mile Lake is a nice hike and once we had Palma along with us for the walk; I think it was on that occasion that I made a couple of sketches of a well-known local mountain (I can’t recall the name right now) with Four-Mile Like in the foreground. I have since used the sketches for ink drawings of the scenes.

On the way to Crater Lake from Medford there is a Becky’s Cafe where the road leaves Highway 62. We’ve stopped there several times and the cafe has a specialty of huckleberry pie in season; we’ve often treated ourselves there. On one occasion (I think we had Palma and Dave along while they were visiting us) we stopped at the cafe both on the way to the lake and on the way back and I, at least, had a piece of huckleberry pie both times. It seems to me that Palma may have also indulged herself in this regard.

Early Retired Life

After we were settled in Ashland, I did make a few rather desultory probings about getting some employment, not necessarily along the line of engineering but looking into that also. Nothing came of these efforts however locally and they gradually dwindled. I have mentioned the idea I had of getting a BS in business from the college here, but this too wasn’t implemented because of a lack of pressing reasons.

During this time I wrote to my last supervisor at Shell for a possible recommendation in my attempts at securing some engineering work. It happened that the engineering department was scheduled to develop a large, rather complicated design for one of Shell’s processes or s potential licensee and he needed to assemble the staff for the project. Anyway he offered me the opportunity of working on the project as a “consultant” and I decided to take him up on it.

So from March 1975 through October or November I spent most of the year in Houston, plus a brief period in early 1976. Initially I simply stayed at a motel near downtown Houston, later I was able to set up a series of house-sitting periods when various Shell personnel were on vacation etc., so I didn’t use the motel facilities from then on. This afforded Jean a good opportunity to join me which she did for a considerable part of the time. During the summer of 1975, Palma also joined us in Houston; first she worked I seem to recall as a “temp” but later she was continuously employed at Pennzoil I believe it was.

The work was quite profitable money-wise and in addition it provided sort of a tapering off of my engineering career, which in retrospect softened the transition process into retirement.

Since I came back after the brief stint in 1976 I have done no engineering work at all, and as of the present time (late 1991) I would be quite out of touch with current methods, status of computer programs etc. As the years have passed my interest in engineering in a specific way has gradually disappeared, although I suppose you could say I still have a general interest.

For awhile I continued subscriptions to a few technical magazines. The last of these was the general organ of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, entitled Chemical Engineering Progress, which I have decided to discontinue in 1992. I will still receive a monthly newsletter, with its news of obituaries etc. but here too the names of persons described or listed seldom contain any names that I have known so it is of swindling interest.

I have also dispensed with the periodical information on technical meetings. I doubt I’ll ever attend another, the technical sessions would mean nothing to me, the chance of encountering old-time acquaintances small, and the plenary sessions of at most marginal interest. I shall probably continue my membership contributions in the society the rest of my life; actually because of the years I belonged I am listed as an emeritus member and do not have to pay any further dues.

Here in Oregon there are two local sections of the AIChE, one in the Portland area and the other taking in the rest of the state, from Salem south through the Willamette Valley and including a few stray individuals like me farther south. I belong to this southern group and have attended occasional meetings when it could be included with some other trips. The section is rather small so it doesn’t have a very active program but it is interesting to experience occasionally again the flavor of a local meeting of the institute.