Sentimental Sunday: Sailing New Worlds Together

Benita (McGinnis) McCormick (1889 - 1984)
Phillip Columbus McCormick  (1892 - 1981)

Not until the early 1980s did time finally begin to catch up with the couple who had deftly evaded its reach their whole lives.
 

Benita (McGinnis) McCormick gazes lovingly at an oil portrait by
artist Mary Rowley of her husband, Philip McCormick, on their 50th
wedding anniversary, at their San Mateo home, 1971.
(Photo courtesy of Suzanne Wieland)

My Great-Uncle Phillip McCormick slowed down considerably after suffered a pair of strokes in 1980, as he was turning 88. Aunt Detty, three years his senior, walked a bit slower by then, but she was still sharp of mind and memory and did her best to help Phil regain his speech and his own memory.  For some time, he was laid up in a hospital bed in the McCormick's study, where a physical therapist visited him regularly.

Aunt Detty was devoted to Uncle Phil in those final months.  She would sit next to him, often bringing visitors into the room so they, too, could stimulate him with fresh faces and voices. Remembering tales of days gone by, she often stopped in mid-sentence to ask him a name or a detail, as if she could not remember it herself. 

When he could not recall a word or a name or a date, she would gently give him a hint or a wink, never prodding but encouraging him to surface the memory from the recesses of his mind.  She was not about to give up on him.  As with any long-time married couple, their life had not been without its ups and downs.  Now, in the midst of their greatest challenge, they would weather the storm together.

A sailor's daughter and herself a life-long adventurer, she knew what it was like to navigate rough waters. Moreover, like any long-time married couple, she and Phil  Some years before, she had, in fact, done an oil painting of two men in a small fishing boat, holding steady through rocky seas. Now she steered the course for both Phil and herself with unwavering determination and resolve. 

"Through the Storm," by Benita McCormick.
Date unknown, probably 1960s or 70s.

After some difficult weeks, Uncle Phil slowly began learning to talk again, but it was too slow for his liking, and not longer after that he suffered a couple of setbacks.  Noticing his frustration,  Aunt Detty would squeeze his hand or pat him reassuringly on the shoulder, leaning over to kiss him tenderly. The adoring way he gazed back at her through his blue eyes when the words would not come spoke volumes more than anything he could have said.

It was hard for the family to say our final goodbyes to him.  I remember my Aunt Jane, Phil and Benita's daughter, calling on March 24, 1980, to give me the sad news that he had died.  

Everyone worried about Aunt Detty.  When you have spent 60 years of your life with someone, losing them must be like losing a part of your body. She tried to be philosophical about it and used to talk about their being together again someday when she got to Heaven.  She was 92 by then and still living on her own.  She did her best to keep active, receiving visitors and reading and responding to condolences from friends and family far and wide.  But the nights were the hardest, after everyone had gone home.

In a letter to me in the summer of 1981, a few months after Uncle Phil's death, she wrote,

I am very slow in answering all the wonderful folks who told us they loved us with their many kindnesses and prayers.  But they were a prodigious group and only now am I working my way through the pile of mail before me.

More mail comes daily from those who have just heard about Phil.  Thank you for your great comfort and love during my ordeal.  

I feel more like myself now, though the arthritis is still very tough - no new medicine seems to reach it.

But...I shall carry on, eh?

                                                           Aunt Detty

Carry on she did, busying herself with her projects, old and new.  One of them was selling bee pollen by mail order. She was convinced of its health benefits and saw herself as a pioneer in the nutritional supplement field, predicting (with great accuracy, it turned out) that its popularity would grow. Even after moving in with Jane and her family in San Carlos, she sent samples of bee pollen to grocery and drug stores, sports groups, even to major league sports team training camps:  the San Francisco Giants in Scottsdale, Arizona, and the San Francisco Forty-Niners in Redwood City.

Unfortunately, bee pollen could do only so much to stave off the ravages of old age, and Aunt Detty grew increasingly frail. She could hardly walk anymore, and Aunt Jane, Uncle Ole, and their daughter Suzanne took turns pushing her wheelchair and helping her with her daily routine.  

She was a guest of honor at our wedding in the summer of 1984.  As delicate as she looked by that then, her triumphant face showed her pride at witnessing the day as we walked down the aisle past her.  You would have thought she had orchestrated the whole thing.  She loved my husband - "I'm just mad about him, Linda.  What a dreamboat!" she had written to me after meeting him a year earlier.  

Five months after our wedding, Aunt Detty fell at Jane's home.  The fall precipitated her decline rather quickly, though today I can't remember the particulars; maybe because it was too painful to think about at the time.  When we heard the news, my husband and I had just returned home from a trip to Mexico City, and I was only too grateful to have the chance to go to the hospital to say one last goodbye. She drifted in and out of consciousness and died peacefully a few days after Thanksgiving, on November 26, 1984.  

She was 95 years young.

Of course, being Aunt Detty, it was only fitting that she would have the final word. And so it was that her funeral, after all the eulogies and laughter and tears, we listened to the reading of a poem she had written around the time she and her beloved Phil had celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.  

I would like to think of it not as her farewell, but rather as a love letter to Phil and an au revoir to all of us. 

Voyage for Two

When I have finished all my earthly tasks

And said my last goodbye to those I love, 

And settled my cold bones in that warm earth

My venturous spirit then will want to rove

And bidding me to follow she will race

To that dark harbor where the strange ships wait

And we shall steal abroad like ghostly mice

And hide in shrouds until she clears the gate

And I shall know the ecstasy I've sought

In waves of beauty promised by fair isles

With color far surpassing all my dreams

Enough to meet the distance of their miles.

All exotic places hall be mine;

Those I have known, and those I fan would woo

But Darling, that is when I'll know the truth.

I just won't want to seek them without you.

So we shall wait unseen, my sprite and I,

In some sweet spot, bright as a wild bird's feather

Until you hear the call and find us there

And you and I shall sail new worlds together.

- Benita McCormick, 1971

************

Copyright ©  2016  Linda Huesca Tully 

Sentimental Sunday: The Golden Years of Life and Love

Benita (McGinnis) McCormick (1889 - 1984)
Phillip Columbus McCormick (1892 - 1981)

With an unabashed love of life, Phil and Benita McCormick could have written the book on aging gracefully. Open to new generations and ideas, even well into their 70s and 80s, they blazed boldly forward into the changing world and never looked back.

Venice Canal, by Benita McCormick.
Probably painted between mid-1960s-1970s.
From the collection of Suzanne (Olson) Wieland.

In the late 1960s, they moved into the resort-like Woodlake complex, at 820 Delaware Avenue in San Mateo, California. (You can see a map of the large complex here.) The complex offered a wide variety of facilities and social activities for its residents of all ages.  Uncle Phil was an avid reader and continued to study conversational Spanish and do crossword puzzles. He loved spending time outdoors and thrived in the California sunshine, taking long daily walks, playing golf, and cheering on the San Francisco Giants baseball team.  

Aunt Detty busied herself painting and teaching art classes, writing, and taking on various entrepreneurial projects. A devout Catholic, she had helped some people convert to the faith and wrote about the experiences in a couple of articles published in Catholic Digest.  

A woman ahead of her time, in her late 80s she studied Eastern philosophy of the human body; this led her to promote the benefits of acupuncture and bee pollen. She believed the brain could be exercised to keep it sharp and fit, much the same way one exercises the body, and she even named her brain "Corty," short for cerebral cortex.

It was always a treat to visit my great aunt and uncle.  My sisters and I would pile eagerly into our family's blue 1969 Chevy Brookwood station wagon for the 40 minute drive up Interstate 280 from San Jose to San Mateo.  Knowing a good story or some surprise was in store, we'd race to ring the doorbell and jump up and down impatiently for the sound of the buzzer to unlock the building door.  The elevator ride to the third floor was another novelty. 

I can still hear my mother reminding us to walk, not run, as we dashed past our parents down the corridor and around the corner to apartment 307.  Aunt Detty was always ready to greet us at the door, her eyes sparkling and arms outstretched to greet us with those loving Irish hugs and kisses.  Uncle Phil would be waiting inside, his beret already on his head and a putter by his side, ready to swoop off the antsiest of us downstairs to the putting green or poolside. With a wink at my father, he'd hold his hand out to the wiggle-worms, and off they'd go.

While Aunt Detty and my mother went into the kitchen to prepare coffee and treats, there was time to scan the walls and table tops to spy what was new or rearranged since our last visit:  a Spanish Talavera plate, a family memento, or one of my aunt's many oil paintings.  A must-see was the bathroom wall, where visitors scrawled messages and left silly jokes and sketches.  There was a story behind everything, and our aunt was only too happy to recount them, occasionally embellishing a bit for her receptive audience.

Souvenir crystal pitchers from the 1893 Chicago World's 

Fair, engraved with the names of Benita and her younger 

brother, Eugene McGinnis.  Eugene's lost its base, so it appears

shorter. They erred with "Benetia." From the collection of 

Suzanne (Olson) Wieland.

She continued to be a prolific artist, and the walls of Apartment 307 were graced by a rotating exhibit of her latest or favorite works.  There were sketches and oil paintings of the McCormicks' travels around the world - New Mexico, Italy, Spain, Mexico.  There were still lifes - one of a bowl of bright yellow lemons juxtaposed against a black background, another evoking a Dutch kitchen, with a covered copper pot resting on a crowded table draped with cloths, and a variety of landscapes (such as the one above of a Venetian canal) inspired by her travels.

In the 1960s or 70s, Aunt Detty took up a new study of the human form.  She produced a series of South Pacific style nudes, their graceful figures concealed tastefully by tropical flowers and trees as they silently gazed into the distance.

I think that of all Aunt Detty's paintings, the sentimental favorite was a tender portrait of her only granddaughter, Suzanne Olson, then about three or four years old.  You can see a partial version of that painting below.

Suzanne Olson, about three or four years old, sitting
on the hearth in front of her parents' fireplace. Oil on
canvas. Painted by Benita McCormick, circa 1965. 
From the collection of Suzanne (Olson) Wieland.

The lovely oil on canvas won first place in numerous art exhibits across the Peninsula.  Today it hangs in a place of honor in Suzanne's home, a treasured reminiscence of innocent days gone by.  

In the picture, Suzanne, dressed in a pale blue nightgown, is leaning back slightly in front of the family hearth, hands clasped and eyes fixed contentedly on something outside our view.  Her rosy complexion and shoulder length golden hair glow in the light of the evening fire, as if to reflect the warmth and purity of her family's love that surrounded her.

Once we settled back in the living room, a regal-looking Aunt Detty held court from an overstuffed arm chair as she surveyed her subjects. She and my mother brought long-gone Gaffney and McGinnis relatives and ancestors back to life with their hilarious stories, breaking out albums filled with old black-and-white family pictures and occasionally pausing to sketch out jaunty family trees on napkins and scrap paper.  The "scrap trees" sometimes made their way to me, and I would stuff them into my own makeshift scrapbook when we got home.

On summer afternoons, we'd go down to the swimming pools with my parents and Uncle Phil. There were two pools at Woodlake: the "grownup pool" and the "kiddie pool," where we usually played.  From there we could watch our uncle stroll to the putting green, a daily ritual of his, where he would meet with his golfing buddies in the "putters'  club" and practice his strokes.  At 6"4", he was easy to spot in a crowd, with his snow-white hair peeking out of his one of his many tweed caps.

Then it would be back to the apartment, where you could see the big jetliners taking off from nearby San Francisco International Airport.  Most were Pan American Airways or Trans World Airlines 747s bound for exotic destinations: the Holy Land, Europe, Mexico, and the Far East.  My sisters and I would watch spellbound from the balcony as the jets banked toward the Pacific Ocean and steered their course toward adventure.  We knew they sometimes carried our uncle and aunt off to those exotic places and could not wait for our own turn to fly away and explore the world, too.

Indeed, Aunt Detty and Uncle Phil traveled the world well into old age, thanks to the airline flight benefits they received through their daughter, Jane, - first from Trans World Airlines (TWA) and then from Delta Air Lines.  They visited the Holy Land in 1962 and returned to Europe and Mexico a number of times.  In their mid-80s they went to Japan, beaming as airport personnel whisked them off the plane in wheelchairs "in high style" Aunt Detty said, to save them from walking long distances.  They basked in the adulation of the Japanese who paid them the high respect accorded to respected elders for the experience and wisdom of their years.  

Closer to home, they began volunteering to visit elderly and ill patients in local nursing homes, where they would read, teach, and sometimes just keep residents company.  People often were surprised to learn that these "youngsters" visiting them were, in fact, much older than they.

Aunt Detty would throw her head back and laugh along with them when they learned she was in her mid-80s.  Quoting Mark Twain, she would remind them, "Age is a matter of mind. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter."

************

Copyright ©  2016  Linda Huesca Tully

Amanuensis Monday: Portrait of a Woman

Benita (McGinnis) McCormick (1889 - 1984)

A local Bay Area feature story from the mid-
1970s depicts Benita (McGinnis) McCormick 
with mementos from her travels.
Clipping courtesy of Suzanne Olson Wieland.

[Note:  Amanuensis is an ancient word meaning one who performs the function of writing down or transcribing the words of another.  Derived from the Latin root manu-  , meaning manual or hand, the word also has been used as a synonym for secretary or scribe.]

A few years ago, my cousin, Suzanne Olson Wieland, sent me a newspaper clipping about her maternal grandmother (and my maternal great-aunt), Benita (McGinnis) McCormick.

The paper was most likely The San Mateo Times, a publication covering peninsula news of the San Francisco Bay Area. Based on the photograph, I would estimate the article was published in the mid-1970s.  

A transcription of the story follows here.  (The story contains one factual error; it refers erroneously to Aunt Detty's son as "George." His name was Phillip, and he went by his nickname, "Bud."

PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN

She Grabs An Idea…

Then Just Hangs On

Artist and businesswoman, Benita McCormick, zips through life with vim and vigor.  The secret of her zest is to grab hold of an idea in the same way one would grab hold of the tail of a donkey - then hang on.

It was shortly after her marriage to Phillip McCormick, a railroad executive with the Baltimore-Ohio in Chicago, that Mrs. McCormick began putting her ideas to work.  Prior to that she had been too busy studying art illustration and painting at the Art Institute in Chicago and the galleries in Paris and later, working on the Chicago movie censor board.

Mrs. McCormick’s method is to take a creative idea, hammer and chisel it into the commercial world and produce a going concern.

Shortly after her marriage she got the idea of teaching children to paint to music after seeing the moods created by violinists during the rehearsal of love scenes in Hollywood.

She rented a studio in the Astor Hotel in Milwaukee, where she was then living, and began to teach the children painting to the tunes of the Teddy Bears’ Picnic and the Clock Shop.  Her idea was so successful that the Milwaukee Art Institute copied her idea and installed an electric organ in their institute.

Her painting classes brought an acquaintance with the youngsters’ mothers and out of this grew her interior decorating business which was soon thriving.

The McCormicks returned to Chicago and became involved in raising their twins, Jane and George (sic).  What then could be more natural than for a young mother busy at home to decide to redecorate her dining room?

So Benita set to work.  She stripped the dining room of its five panels of wallpapered hunting dogs and began to paint.  She painted the room in oils showing the different fairytales that would entertain the children.

Article about Benita McCormick 

Guests coming to the house were impressed and soon she was doing scenes for other people’s homes. One painting she did for her father, of his favorite fishing haunt, added $500 to the sale of the house.

As the children grew older and became more independent Benita turned her interest towards advertising.  She got the idea of making Christmas cards that showed the different models of cars.  And she soon had more orders than she could handle.  The result was a studio business that ran for three years.

A business enterprise that started during World War II and was to last for 16 years began when Benita dreamed up the idea of a job survey.  Her idea was to call people in their homes and tell them of the job opportunities available to them.  She would then send the prospective employe her card and have them present it to the personnel office that they applied to.

It was a workers market in those years; there were hundreds of jobs available that employers were desperate to fill.  Benita took her idea to the most conservative firm in town and won them over with a contract.

At the end of 16 years of personnel work Benita decided to retire with her husband and “have some fun.”  They made their base in San Mateo and began to travel.

They went to Europe and fell in love with Spain where they stayed one year.  After a year in California they returned to Spain and toured the Near East and the Holy Land as well.

“I’m mad about Spain,” says Mrs. McCormick, “I love the people, they’re so warm and friendly.  I like Barcelona best because it has a lot of life to it.”

It was during her stay in Barcelona that Benita became interested in applying gold leaf to statues.  She found a man in Barcelona who worked in gold leaf and became his student for five hours a day for eight months.

Professor Antonio’s studio was what had once been a stable and later the carriage house of a great mansion.  It had walls one foot thick that were pocked with cannon balls, a false floor and cathedral-high ceiling.

Back in California, Benita applied her newly learned gold-leaf technique to making coats of arms.  She first became interested in shields because she thought “it was a nice thing for people to have pride in their families.”

Like all her ideas, this, too, has become an enterprising project with Benita making coats of arms for families and newly formed businesses.

And the McCormick’s coat of arms is “Without Fear.”

************

Copyright ©  2015  Linda Huesca Tully

Travel Tuesday: The Exotic and the Mundane in Mexico City

Benita (McGinnis) McCormick (1889 - 1984)
Phillip Columbus McCormick (1892 - 1981)

Gilbert Cayetano Huesca (1915 - 2009)
Joan Joyce (Schiavon) Huesca (1928 - 1987)

From the Many Branches, One Tree treasure chest, this 1966 photograph celebrates the spring visit of my great-uncle-and-aunt, Phil and Benita (McGinnis) McCormick, to Mexico City, where our family was living at the time.

Cover of the folio containing a souvenir photograph of my
parents' and great aunt and uncle's dinner at the Mauna Loa
Restaurant, Mexico City.

Souvenir photograph of dinner at the Mauna Loa Restaurant
in Mexico City. Left to right:  my parents, Gilbert and Joan
Huesca and my great aunt and great uncle, Benita and Phillip
McCormick.  Spring 1966.

My parents, Gilbert and Joan (Schiavon) Huesca, took them to dine at the legendary Mauna Loa Restaurant at 172 Hamburgo Street, in the Zona Rosa neighborhood of the Federal District.

The Polynesian-themed restaurant was considered by many to be quite exotic in its day.  It later burned down, but its former customers and fans still talk about it today, and you can view photos of it on the Critiki blog. Indeed, my parents and my aunt and uncle shared fond reminiscences of their beautiful evening for many years.

The rest of the McCormick's visit was much more mundane.  Some days after their dinner at the Mauna Loa, my parents and youngest sister travelled on personal business to Brownsville, Texas.  Brave souls that they were, Aunt Detty and Uncle Phil stayed and babysat my other two sisters and me for the week.

Uncle Phil used to walk to our elementary school to pick us up at the end of the school day.  Though in his 70s by now, he remained energetic and relished his daily walks through the city, nonplussed by the high altitude.  One afternoon on our way home, he took us into a candy shop to look at all the treats.  It was Holy Week, and the shop, like most others in the city, was sporting a colorful window display of its most festive creations and goodies in anticipation of Easter Sunday.

As only children could do with a loving uncle, we talked him into buying us half the candy store.

Well, maybe not that much, but it must have seemed that way to Aunt Detty when we got home, licking our sticky fingers and chasing each other around the house on a sugar high. There went her chances of getting us to eat our dinner that night!   

As she regarded us with exasperation, I wonder if she recalled the words of our late grandmother and her sister, Alice (McGinnis) Schiavon.  "Nana" once joked to my mother that having four little girls was like going on a wild adventure with four little monkeys.

Luckily for us, Aunt Detty couldn't stay angry for very long.  Hours later that evening. with Uncle Phil nearby in his chair with his pipe and newspaper, my sisters and I sat at her knee, breathlessly listening to her recount one of her Irish fairy tales in a dramatic brogue.

Monkeys never had it so good.

************

Copyright ©  2015  Linda Huesca Tully

Sentimental Sunday: Keeping the Lord Company in the Dark

Benita (McGinnis) McCormick (1889 - 1984)
Phillip Columbus McCormick (1892 - 1981)


Phil and Benita (McGinnis) McCormick's love affair with Spain began in 1960, when they arrived for a couple of months and ended up living there for a year, making some of the best memories of their lives.  Benita - my great-aunt Detty - also created some of her best art there.  In her untitled ode to Spain below, she painted a loving picture of the country that captured her heart and sparked her imagination.

Iberian Peninsula at night, NASA,
International Space Station, December 4, 2011
Creative Commons; in the public domain

My husband and I used to wonder

About this nocturnal activity of a people.

It puzzles most visitors,

But we think God loves it.

Picture, if you will, El Rey de los cielos

Gazing nightly upon our dark, revolving earth.

All is stygian

Except for a little glimmer

Around New York. 

The Americas are asleep.

Then, gracefully, España spins slowly into view

And warms His heart.

For there below, stepping gaily but with authority,

Heads high, spines straight, toes pointed,

Under the gleaming lights

Of every town and city in Spain,

Pass a proud and beautiful people,

A whole nation of night-walkers,

Laughing and talking

To keep the Lord company in the dark.

- Benita McCormick

************

Copyright ©  2015  Linda Huesca Tully

Treasure Chest Thursday: We'll Always Have Barcelona

Benita (McGinnis) McCormick (1889 - 1984)
Phillip Columbus McCormick (1892 - 1981)

Married couples often have a private word or catchphrase, born of shared experiences and rich with meaning.  My great-uncle and great-aunt, Phillip and Benita (McGinnis) McCormick's catchphrase was, "We'll always have Barcelona."

"Las Ramblas" depicts a Sunday afternoon on the famous boulevard in Barcelona.
My great-aunt Detty, Benita (McGinnis) McCormick, painted this as an ode to the
year long sojourn she and my great-uncle Phillip McCormick spent in Barcelona.
Oil on canvas, 1970.

Those of us who loved them during their 50-plus years of marriage knew that of the countless places around the globe they had visited, nowhere else resonated with Aunt Detty and Uncle Phil more than that captivatingly proud, complex, and progressive land of Gaudì, Dali, and Picasso.

Barcelona was many things to Phil and Benita.  It was a retreat that offered them respite from the pangs of separation as they watched their children become adults and reclaimed their own lives.  It was a haven of inspiration, offering new ideas and methods of expression to an artist and an art lover who welcomed growth and new ideas.  And it was a seat of romance, where Arab and Roman influences danced gaily with the Catalan culture and rekindled their passion for life and each other.

As time passed, all it took to elicit a nod and a knowing smile was for one of them to repeat that storied phrase, summoning in an instant those memories of their glory days in Barcelona.

In 1970, some ten years after their extended stay there, Aunt Detty painted a tribute to the city that stole their hearts. Titled "Las Ramblas," it is an 18" x 24" oil on canvas depiction of various groups of people, from lovers on a park bench to little girls in their First Communion veils and dresses to their parents gathering with their families on the famous Barcelona boulevard on a sunny Sunday morning.

"First Communion Sunday in Barcelona."  Inspiration for her later oil on canvas
painting titled, “Las Ramblas,” this was painted by my great-aunt Detty, Benita
(McGinnis) McCormick. It is reminiscent of Degas’ style. Her writing in the
lower left hand corner notes the title and her name, "Benita E. McCormick.”
Watercolor, circa 1970.

Their daughter, Jane (McCormick) Olson, gave me the painting many years ago.  A couple of years before she died, she gave me another, smaller painting, this one a watercolor, of the same boulevard.  It seems that Aunt Detty had painted it first but was not entirely happy with the result, so she stored it away in a trunk for many years.  Both paintings hang on adjacent walls in our family room.

First Communion Sunday, the watercolor above, focuses on a group of little girls right after their First Communion and is reminiscent of the motion and pattern of an Edgar Degas ballerina portrayal.  Unlike its later version, Las Ramblas, its mood is brighter and more impressionistic by way of its lightly-brushed figures and pastels. The day feels warmer, hot even, with a flat light on the ground and surroundings. 

By contrast, Las Ramblas has a more complex combination of shadows and light. The time of day seems later than the one in the watercolor.  There is more subtlety in the details and gradation in the colors, with just a hint of a light blue sky beyond the sunlight-dappled canopy of trees. The activity is more varied; while the little girls first catch your eye, your find your gaze traveling diagonally toward the flower stand in the lower right hand corner, up to the center where the men in white suits stand as their wives talk, and then finally resting on the young people on the bench who seem oblivious to everything but each other.  

I have always loved this painting the most of all my aunt's works.  Every time I look at it, I wonder about the stories behind the people and marvel at how they seem so connected.  Though I have yet to visit this charming city, still I am drawn into its busy, charismatic boulevard where untold surprises await.  I can almost hear the lilt of my aunt's voice beside me as I weave my way through a sea of faces and a cacophony of sounds - life at its best.  

Thanks to Aunt Detty, we too, will always have Barcelona.

************

Copyright ©  2015  Linda Huesca Tully

(Almost) Wordless Wednesday: Visiting El Greco Museum

Benita (McGinnis) McCormick (1889 - 1984)
Phillip Columbus McCormick (1892 - 1981)

Toledo, about an hour's drive from Madrid in central Spain, was one of the excursiones requisitas,  or obligatory stops, for my great-aunt and artist Benita (McGinnis) McCormick.  She and my great-uncle Phil made a pilgrimage to the Museo del Greco during their year-long Spanish sojourn in 1960, to view the master's dramatic artwork and see a replica of his Renaissance-era home.  

Benita and Phillip McCormick leaving El Greco Museum.
Caption reads, "Recuerdo de Toledo - Casa del Greco."
"Souvenir of Toledo - Home of El Greco."
1960, Toledo, Spain.

The caption on this picture postcard is disconcerting.  While the museum is situated on land where El Greco's home may have stood, the home within is in fact a very good replica.  It probably did not matter to Aunt Detty and Uncle Phil, who like many visitors to the museum, were presumably more awed by the excellent exhibit of many original paintings and sculptures of El Greco and other 17th century artists.

************

Copyright ©  2015  Linda Huesca Tully

Travel Tuesday: Rebirth in the Land of Mañana

Benita (McGinnis) McCormick (1889 - 1984)
Phillip Columbus McCormick (1892 - 1981)

When a letter begins with the words, "Sit down," a big announcement is sure to follow.

That was how my great-uncle-and-aunt, Phillip and Benita (McGinnis) McCormick, learned that their daughter, Jane, had married her true love, Eldon "Ole" Olson, in a private church ceremony in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, in May of 1960.

Reading the news in their Barcelona pension, some 5,000 miles away from home, they were undoubtedly surprised, though maybe not entirely. True, it had been easier to see their son, Bud, marry and start a family, but letting go of their daughter was tougher to do.

They had to admit that she did what they would want her to do, which was to follow her heart and do things her own way.  Besides, she had tried her best to cushion the news.

Did Aunt Detty gold-leaf this small statue of
the Virgin Mary? From her collection of Spanish
Madonnas, it now sits on my dressing table. 

In characteristic fashion, Uncle Phil and Aunt Detty rose to the occasion. Swallowing their pride, they sent her and Ole their congratulations and decided to extend their stay a while longer. And being the larger-than-life couple they were, even in their 70s, their idea of "a while" turned into a year.

Spain, a place to retreat in a moment of uncertainty as they struggled to give their daughter some room to grow, became the place of their rebirth and rediscovery.

They made the rounds of the major art museums and architectural jewels, not just in Catalonia but throughout the country and became active members of the local artists' colony. Uncle Phil, already somewhat familiar with Spanish, began taking a conversational class so he could talk to people during his long walks through town.  Aunt Detty, always looking to reinvent herself artistically, signed on with a master artist to learn the art of gold leaf.

In a 1960 letter to my parents, Aunt Detty's words spill out breathlessly, and she seems to abbreviate many of them to help her fingers keep up with her rapid-fire thoughts.  Here, "g.l." stands for "gold leaf," while "E" stands for España, or Spain:

I've had 6 days of wonderful gold-leaf application.  Yesterday I g.l.  a little shelf.  Today I do the Virgin (plaster) that I helped repair & prepared for g.l. yesterday.  There is no one I know of in our country doing this gold and silver work and after we tour the rest of E, we may return here for Sept. & Oct. do do further study with this wonderful maestro - the head of the craft in Barcelona.  We work in his studio-workshop - the former stables of a castle (walled - even now, if you please) and so old that even Antonio's father, who had the place before him, doesn't know its age.

I wonder if the small statue of the Virgin Mary, shown in the picture above, is the same plaster Virgin that Aunt Detty was gold leafing?  My cousin, her granddaughter Suzanne (Olson) Wieland, gave it to me a couple of years ago, one of a collection of Madonnas Aunt Detty brought back from Spain.

Evidently, her hosts were equally fascinated by their older pupil:

Each day our lesson from 4:30 pm till 8 pm is punctuated by loud rings of the bell to admit some visitor, or client, to meet the "Americana."  [The maestro's] daughter, 14, brings her school friends and his sister-in-law came to check on me. . . . Evidently I pass muster, look harmless, and so get the welcome Española!  I love them all.

Aunt Detty and Uncle Phil were especially taken by the Spaniards' slower pace of life, their philosophy that there is always mañana - another day, and that if things don't resolve themselves right away, they will work themselves out eventually.  In the same letter to my parents, she marvels at this slower pace of life.

Joan, this is a week to the day from the start of this note.... you also know what mañana means - Mary Harlow told me that if a Spaniard says "Mañana - mañana" that really means the next day.  but life is so full here - I can understand how it takes months to get things done.  No wonder they think we do everything by "machinas" we move so much faster than they.

As with everything else they did, Phil and Benita McCormick wholeheartedly embraced the lifestyle of mañana.  Sure enough, they gradually accepted the idea of Jane's being married and lovingly welcomed their new son-in-law, Ole Olson.

************

Copyright ©  2015  Linda Huesca Tully