Anne Hale

APRIL 9

PLANS FOR CIVIC STUDIO: TOWNE CLUB EXHIBITION

I am going to incorporate a Walk-A-Thon to promote community and stories and walking, three glorious components of life, into our exhibition on the 22 of April. I will be creating a booth that will be set up at the exhibition, and from 4-5 (approx), I will be taking pledges and signing willing and able bodies up for a Creston walk and talk, "Steps and Stories", which will occur mid-way through the Exhibition (5-5:30ish i'm imagining). The walk will be a leisurely stroll around Creston, while telling stories about places, people, and lives, and promoting healthy living and healthy community while traveling in the neighborhood by foot. Stories to the moving background of the Creston neighborhood backdrop. I will be facilitating this walk and talk, which is a culmination of my experiences in Civic Studio: Creston with an experience that for me, will be the fitting finale. When siging up, the walker will tell me a short description of themselves, or a short story about their lives, or even a title of a story, and which will help me to facilitate conversation. If one does not want to walk, they may pledge steps (I will be wearing a step counter), and they can tell me a story about themselves right there (steps for stories), so they may participate right then if they are not able to perform the actual walk experience.

P.S. The walk will be a Towne oriented experience, open to all.

April 8

I interviewed (or attempted to interview) 3 ladies who graduated from Creston High in the years between 1927 and 1930 (these ladies are now in their nineties :) ). The first woman I contacted was Jessie Jakolat.

Jessie kept repeating how unqualified she was to shed light upon creston, because "she had only been in creston since her JUNIOR YEAR IN HIGH SCHOOL". yes, although she has lived here since 1928 or 1929, she felt she did not have as much insight as her classmates who have lived in Creston their whole lives, the same house since birth. She gave me their contact information, and although i assured her that she could definitely tell me things that were interesting and that I hadn't known before, she really seemed insistent upon passing the baton of Creston stories/info to her classmates. I did get her to tell me a few facts:

she remembered when leonard street was a gravel road
she went to creston her junior and senior year of high school and graduated from creston in 1930
she is ninety-two years of age

Next Contact:
Eleanor (Roffett) VanOosten

Eleanor has lived on Edgewood NE for her entire life (Jessie told me this). When I phoned Eleanor, she laughed at my request for any information about Creston. At her laughter, I smiled from the other end of the phone and asked, "Are you laughing because that is an odd request?" And she laughed and sounded befuddled and said "yes", and that she didn't have any information, and although I tried once more to let her know that any information was only for my/the class' knowledge about the area, she declined my request and I did not want to push her, as she didn't sound too happy after the initial laughing at our "preposterous" idea of finding out more info about the history of this increasingly guarded neighborhood of creston.

Next Contact:
Maude (Gibbs) VantHof
After calling Maude a few times (I tried to call around 6 pm and she asked me if I could call sometime in the morning, so I tried 11:30 AM and she told me to call later, that it wasn't a good time) Though I was discouraged by this, I called once more and my conversation was a bit more fruitful. Although Maude too thought that Creston or herself did not have much worthwhile to share, i assured her that anything she know about Creston before January of 2005 would be new to me, and she told me she'd "try to think of some interesting things, and that I should call her back after the weekend".

I did just that, and she did have some information for me, which was refreshing.

She lives on Forest facing Spencer, and has lived there since she was six years old. She remembers playing where the Creston High School was later built, and she was in Creston's first graduating class in 1927.

She mostly told me about school information when i asked her about the differences between Creston now and Creston as she was growing up. She told me that schooling then was "serious", and that "we were afraid of our teachers, I mean, we respected them. We called them 'Missus' or 'Mister'. " She was enrolled in "gym and all of the other subjects", which she said she enjoyed.

I asked her about some of the businesses in the downtown section of Creston and about how those had changed. She said there used to be drug stores and doctors' offices and ice cream shops that are all gone now. She and I agreed that it used to be almost entirely family owned small businesses there, which is a contrast from today's business chains in Creston.

One interesting fact she also recalled was that they called the movie theater across the street from us "The Peanut", and as she was growing up you could get a movie ticket for a dime.

For more info about businesses, Maude looked in the back of her Creston High yearbooks and read me some of the ads that were from local businesses which brought back more info. She reported, "there were 3 dry goods stores, 2 of those were run by widows" {{{{{{NOTE: i thought that interesting in lieu of granny, another widow}}}}}} (Maude continuing) "There were 2 ads from coal companies, 1 ad for a '$25 made-to-measure suit for men' at 1350 Plainfield, 2 drug stores between Sweet and Leonard, and 2 candy kitchens". I asked her if she ever visited any of those stores, and she said she did regular one of the "candy kitchens", usually the one which sold ice cream sundaes.

I had also asked the 3 ladies I interviewed if it would be possible for us to get together, face to face to chat together, to share stories, and they were hesitant, but thought maybe it could be an option, but then this last time I spoke with Maude and I asked her if she would still like to do that, she said Jessie was out of town this week, so it wouldn't work, and she didn't pose any other solutions so I didn't want to press the matter, and I thanked her very much for her time and stories and information.

The Brittany Brainity Bonanza – FEBRUARY 18, 2005

Just now at lunch, Emily, Becky, Kate, Jenny Pope and I had a wonderful discussion about our studio. Kate said she imagined making our entire space super shiny— glazing and waxing and glossing everything. I then continued to propose the idea I've been half joking half serious about for the past 3 weeks of suspending a huge cargo net about 8 inches above the floor in the space. This serves many purposes. First of all, it ceases all activity on the floor. The mop marks, the dust, the melted snow, the asbestos, the foot prints, and showcases them. It makes them an index that is decidedly (by us) finished. It makes the marks extremely important and vital to the foundation of the space, a history and a monument of people and time and function which no one made notice of, but literally trod over for decades. The different tiles also reflet this site-specificity and identity over time, and evokes questions and narratives. Why are there patches of mis-matching tile? Is there something that was covered up, or did one style just sell out at the local hardware store? Whose footprints are walking in circles? What were they thinking/experiencing while doing this? What footprints overlap, and what are the relationships between those people?
The cargo net provides a way of suspending the viewers and the trodders from disturbing these histories and artistic indexes of life and place. The difficulty of maneuvering on the cargo net almost creates child-like instincts of crawling on the nets, and therefore inspecting the floor at an unusual level, peering through the holes between the ropes at the showcased floors, noticing things never noticed before about the space through its often forgotten history of the floor index, and at a very personal level, low and in your face. One could even touch the floor by poking a finger through the spaces between the ropes to further examine their imagined stories.
Also, cargo nets remind me of the cargo nets in the ape house in zoos, and often with our large store front window and the activities that are new in this space, passers-by pause and stare in at us, sometimes cupping their hands against the glass, and I have felt like we almost need to or want to perform, just as the apes at the zoo, so the aesthetic quality of the nets is a signifier of many things, and could be more to others than the ones even listed.

Another way we discussed of showcasing the history of this space and appreciating its beautiful ugliness of the gutted dusty building is to cover the floor and walls with plexiglass, same idea, suspending the walls and floor behind an untouchable. Protecting us from hurting the floor and walls, ceasing all activity and arbitrarily calling them "finished", and creating the same spectator source as the cargo net, just a different quality. Making a floor important by showcasing it behind a clear protectant, kind of like framing trash and giving it a totally different connotation. Again, narratives would be formed as well as provocative questions, and history/index would be preserved and celebrated;
instead of focusing on making something "NEW" in the space, we'd celebrate the history and beauty that is still existing there, and some that has been mysteriously boarded over, mopped clean, or otherwise obscured, for any reason. We enjoyed the thought of the new footprints and marks made on the new plexiglass floor would be layered over and relate to the old marks, the foundation marks, and then we thought theoretically, once the new plexiglass layer was deemed "complete" with indexical history, then a new layer would be put on (all layers with about 1 inch of separating air betwixt) and continually, the space would be filled with layers of this indexical history, and evenutally the space would change as you'd have to stoop through it, then crawl through it and eventually, the space be so filled with history it would be inaccessable.

AND WE LOVE THAT.