The Infamous 1973 Gran Torino Station Wagon

 

The 1973 Gran Torino/Missing Photo Album-Scrapbook Story:

John Janovy, Jr.

Sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, we bought a new smallish station wagon, a 1979 Mercury Zephyr, as a family car, but mainly as Karen’s car. A year or two later, I decided that it would be better in the long run if our good, relatively new, family car was not driven to Lake McConaughy, and Martin Bay beaches, over the washboard gravel roads between Cedar Point Biological Station and the lake, so I went into Ogallala to the Ford Agency and paid $600 for a well used, light blue, 1973 Ford Gran Torino station wagon. That would be Karen’s go to the beach car, and we left it out at CPBS during the winter.

The Ogallala part of this Gran Torino experience took place while I was CPBS director, mid-1980s. When I would go out to CPBS in May to start my summer’s teaching, research, and administrative duties, and before Karen and two of our children would come out, I would get into that station wagon, clean it out, make sure it was running okay, making sure that there were no mouse nests in it, get the oil changed, tires checked, etc. One summer I turned on the air conditioner and sure enough, there had been a mouse in the fan, and of course it got pulverized. That led to a highly educational day in which I took the inside all apart, removing the dashboard, etc., got out the fan, cleaned it off, and reassembled the interior. I also remember personally replacing brake shoes. And, when I eventually brought that vehicle back to Lincoln, did the tune-ups—points, plugs, timing, and once even a carburetor job (interesting; it had a large engine with a four-barrel carburetor)—I used it as a field car, and even driving it to Denver with several students to the American Society of Parasitologists annual meeting. When our son turned 16, that became his vehicle.

Now, fast forward thirty-eight years, to the Cedar Point Biological Station 50^th Anniversary celebration, August 16-18, 2024, and the annual Rocky Mountain Conference of Parasitologists (RMCP) meeting at CPBS, September 5-7, 2024. As a contribution to that celebration, Karen spent the previous year assembling a truly massive, and highly archival, combination photo album and scrapbook, containing photographs going back to the early 1980s, pictures of staff and some students, class rosters, newspaper clippings from the 80s and 90s, etc. This was a truly major contribution to the historical record of that program, initiated in 1975, and the place where so many parasitologists, including those now in major academic and scholarly positions across the country, got their professional start. That album/scrapbook was a major hit, studied by attendees at the 50^th Celebration, and later at RMCP. Then it disappeared.

When Karen and I went into Goodall Lodge for breakfast on Saturday morning, September 7, the album/scrapbook, product of Karen’s work for the past year, was gone. Subsequent efforts by CPBS staff to find it, have failed. It was not alive; it could not have flown off somewhere by itself. It was on the dining hall ping pong table Friday evening; by Saturday morning, it was gone. My e-mails to people I knew were at the RMCP meetings produced no information about what might have happened to it. After a couple of weeks of trying to trace it down, hassling the CPBS administration (who assured me they were looking for it everywhere, and I believe them), I finally admitted that I was as angry as I have ever been over something that has happened at UNL. As a result of that anger, I decided to reconstruct as much of that album/scrapbook as I could, and publish it. Thus I got into our files of photo negatives and started scanning. That effort will take a while, but in the meantime, here is another Gran Torino story. The connection to the CPBS photo album is finally admitted at the end of this piece.

Sometime during that vehicle’s time in Lincoln, the front passenger side door got bashed in. I don’t remember the details, but nobody was hurt and no police reports or insurance claims were filed. It just happened. The next summer, when I had it out at CPBS, I went over to the salvage yard at Brule, found a wrecked 1973 Gran Torino with a good door, bought the door, and replaced the one that was bashed in. The only problem was that the new door was yellow, and the rest of the car was blue. So, I painted the yellow door with some outdoor enamel that was fairly close to the right color. The photo attached to this story is black and white, but you can tell that the right front door has trim missing; I don’t know whether this pic was taken before or after I painted the door, but probably after.

Eventually the 1973 Gran Torino wagon started leaking transmission fluid, and I was not going to get it fixed. So I drove it to El Reno, Oklahoma, traded it in on a new Ford Taurus for Karen, and drove the Taurus home. I don’t remember all the family car situations during the late 1980s and early 1990s, but I know that at some point in our family history, we owned four Fords and/or Mercuries of various styles and ages, and that I did routine under the hood maintenance on all of them. Eventually, the family automobile supply sorted itself out, I bought a Dodge pickup, and I quit doing that under the hood stuff because my training, mainly on a 1955 Ford I owned when I was in the army, no longer applied.

The CPBS film files that I had at home included a roll of black and white negatives that had a bunch of pictures of the 1973 Gran Torino station wagon, and because that car was an interesting piece of our CPBS experience, and because I was so pissed at the fact that Karen’s archival work had disappeared, and because I was doubly pissed at that disappearance because there was no way in hell it could have walked off into the hinterlands by itself, I decided to write this piece and post a picture or two of that vehicle.

If anyone finds that photo album/scrapbook, let me know.

 

 

 

The Flatwater Folk Art Museum in Brownville, Nebraska

 

The Flatwater Folk Art Museum – Brownville, Nebraska

John Janovy, Jr.

Let’s ask a question: What if only one percent of the vehicles slamming along I-29 between Omaha and Kansas City slowed down and took the U.S. Highway 136 exit at Rock Port, Missouri, for a nine-mile jaunt into Brownville, Nebraska, and a tour of the Flatwater Folk Art Museum?  The answer is obvious to anyone who’s visited that museum: For the remainder of their trips, and the remainder of their lives, those travelers would be wondering what was going through the minds of people who made those objects. Eventually, by the time they reached Omaha or Kansas City, they’d be pondering the role of art in the everyday lives of everyday people, remembering times that design overrode functionality in items they’d purchased, and planning to stop in Brownville again on the way home for a second, more serious and reflective, look.

We expect to be impressed with internationally recognized treasures in the world’s major museums; we’re stunned, however, by the personal impact of folk art because it makes us think about what we as individuals value beyond its monetary worth—images and pieces that remind us of our beliefs, experiences, cultural environments, and traditions—those elements that combine to make us who we’ve become since birth. Human lives are built from the circumstances of our birth and the events in which we participate, not always by choice. Piece after piece in The Flatwater Folk Art Museum’s collections seem to state that common fact about our existence. They all are powerful statements that no matter who we are, we share this very human trait with people we’ve never met and are never likely to meet, but we share that trait through their art and thus what they were thinking when they decided to make those pieces.

It’s obvious that the Flatwater Museum’s collections were assembled by director George W. Neubert with this characteristic in mind. Every piece is powerful, embedded with skill, focus, attention, and purpose by the person who made it. No matter what’s on the walls or shelves, you can envision the artist at work, not in a New York studio but maybe in a garage, out on a back porch, in a barn, or sitting at the kitchen table after children have gone to bed. Much of it seems to focus on the commonplace—shoes, a hat, fishing lures, religious figures, pottery—but handled in such a way that it acquires dignity, timelessness, and backstory. In this way, the objects remind us that all humans have dignity and backstory, and whatever they accomplish in their times on Earth can, and typically do, produce something that can seem timeless, if that something is only a memory. But when whatever they decided to make sometime during their lives ends up in a museum, everything that maker brought to the human experience becomes timeless even if the person is long gone.

The museum’s building itself, a repurposed church moved to Main Street and 6^th, in a town that doesn’t have many streets, comes across as a piece of folk art itself—found, recognized as a familiar and timeless artifact, rescued, and changed into an object with a new purpose and a new message that’s a greatly expanded version of its original one. The museum director’s description of this building and its contents tells the story:

The folk art collection of the Flatwater Folk Art Museum is a collection of vernacular expressions and creations reflecting the human spirit and passion of common folk celebrating the diverse and universal traditions of life’s experiences, ceremony, and rituals.

It’s impossible to walk through this building without picking favorite pieces, then thinking about why those pieces stand out in your mind as something special. The masks remind us that our faces are our most distinctive features, and that what we do with them parallels what artists do with the idea of a human face, a way to present us with the leading issue of our time, and probably of all our history: the distinction between a kind—a species, our species, as represented by a skull in a hand-made glass-sided box titled H. SAPIEN—as opposed to an individual. Individuals, not kinds, make art, including folk art; kinds make war.

That last principle could easily have been the driving force that produced a human figure with blue legs, a red torso, and an obvious canine head, its round white eyes staring out, and a story written around the figure on its yellow background:

An old man told his grandson, my son, there is a battle between two wolves inside us all . . . one is evil . . . one is good.” The boy thought about it and asked “which wolf wins?” The old man quietly replied, “the one you feed.”

That’s exactly the kind of museum piece one remembers, especially in a world awash in violence fueled by hatred and despair.

On a more pleasant, and perhaps relaxed, note, much of one wall is occupied by fishing lures, all of them hand-made, of course, and collectively telling us something about the range of ideas people believed would help them solve a problem, namely catching a fish, and then putting those ideas into practice with their hands, pocketknives, and paint. The center piece, however, is far too large to be used as a real fishing lure unless someone was going after orcas, and the fins suggest it could have been a weathervane. Maybe in its original location, but there by a folk artist, when it pointed in a certain direction, it was time to go fishing. Its mouth full of teeth, made from nails pounded in and heads, instead of points, sticking out, could easily be the most distinctive feature of this masterpiece, a simple but powerful reminder of folk art’s fundamental nature.

Like most museums, this one both merits and inspires repeated visits. Director George W. Neubert has granted permission to take photographs, but subsequent use of those images for purposes other than as an excuse, or maybe inspiration, to try making your own folk art, will need his permission. The town of Brownville is rightfully proud of its reputation as a cultural hot spot, with the Flatwater Folk Art Museum as its centerpiece.

 

 

 

 

 

 

From a letter written about the Ft. Benning jump school experience, spring, 1960

 

From a letter written to my then fiancé, now wife, in the spring of 1960:

This new place isn’t too red hot but it’s a lot better than the other BOQ. Here I have a private two-room apartment, share a bath with one other person, and the first thing I did was unload every single item out of that car. I have no idea what I’ll be doing for the next one-and-a-half months, but should find out Monday. The jumps were fine, not what I’d call real fun, but enjoyable. I guess there’s a natural or subconscious fear that keeps them from being fun, but it’s such a fascinating feeling, like being on dope maybe. You probably don’t want to hear all of the details, but since I’m vain enough to think someone might ask, you’re going to get them anyway! It’s really strange how the guys change personalities in the waiting room, everyone doing something different to keep from being scared. Number 45 sang and hummed constantly, and 47 and I laughed and kept telling each other what was going to happen if he came out too close behind me, etc., how I was going to grab his chute and collapse it, and how he was going to run my static line thru the harness so I’d get dragged behind the plane and all, real funny stuff like that. After about five inspections you get up and walk out on the runway (it’s sheer misery to walk in a parachute, they crush you from every angle). About this time I was just a little dazed but not scared, and your heart just starts beating faster and faster and faster. They sit you down in the plane and count you off and you fasten your safety belt and the plane takes off (about this time I started getting a little scared and tight). You go thru the jump commands and look up and the plane is roaring so loud you can’t think and the doors are off and the wind is blowing thru the whole plane like a tornado. Finally the first guy “stands in the door” and when they start to go is when the whole thing hits you like a ton of lead. When they start, the cable from your static line is on just starts jerking, and you think it’s going to jerk the plane apart, and you can see your buddies up there and then they’re gone. The second when that cable starts jerking is the most exciting because it just jerks you out of a daze and into a mechanical awareness; As soon as I got close to the door all the fear and excitement left and I just turned into a shuffling machine and did every movement by reflex action. I don’t remember standing in the door, or how my door position was on any of the jumps except the last one. On the first jump I was the last man out of the plane, had a good exit (my exits are pretty good!) and snapped right out. It’s pretty funny, you have to fight your way to the door because of the wind, and when you jump the prop blast (you’re traveling 130 mph) hits you and you’re gone. It’s sort of like dropping a. ping-pong ball in front of a fan, there’s no falling sensation whatsoever but only a feeling of being swept away. When you first go out it turns you sideways and then sweeps your feet out, so that you’re traveling feet first and facing upwards; as soon as your chute pulls out the prop blast blows it over your head and jerks you over so you’re traveling head first facing down; about then it opens and you feel a sort of tug at the shoulders and you’re airborne! The first jump I landed in a ditch in the mud. The wind was pretty strong, but they jumped us anyway. I hit on the side of the ditch, I was “holding a slip” (steering into the wind to decrease impact velocity) and came straight down on my feet and took all the shock on my left foot, but I did have them together, and so what would have been a broken leg was only a sprained foot; still I landed pretty hard, in the mud, tried to get right up, made it about half way m and got jerked right back down again a couple of times and finally made it up and ran around the chute and collapsed it. The second jump I started getting scared when I got close to the ground and tightened up a little, again hit like a rock, and didn’t enjoy it a bit. The third jump I was scared stiff before even boarding the plane because I knew something was going to happen, and it almost did. As soon as my chute opened I was almost on top of another guy (your chute will collapse if it gets over another) and my lines were twisted so badly I couldn’t get my head back or steer—I just kept drifting in until my feet were hitting the edge of his canopy, and I kept yelling at him to “slip away” but he didn’t hear, and I kept thinking “I’m glad we’re high enough so that if mine collapses it will fill back up again before I hit the ground!” But finally my twists came out and I was able to steer away; I did a perfect (for a change) landing and got dragged about 200 feet before I was able to get up. The fourth jump was perfect, good landing and all. The fifth one we did with about 100 lbs. of equipment, rifle, pack, and all that stuff, and we had a graduation ceremony right there on the drop zone. All in all it was a great experience.