NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665

September 23, 1999

Plains Folk: Noticeably Absent

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University
©1999 Plains Folk

My good old cousin Bernice, first cousin across the section road from my father, has passed on to better things, an occasion not of sorrow but rather of remembrance--beginning with two graduation presents hanging in my living room.

The first was this lithograph portrait of Will Rogers, rope in hand, by Charles Banks Wilson, long-time artist laureate of Oklahoma. She thought it suited me when I was 18, and it still does. The second, a handsome cut by Berger Sandzen, was a college graduation present. She gave it to me because I went to Bethany College, the institutional home for the great Swedish-American painter.

Swedes from Oklahoma to Minnesota have fawned over this piece by Sandzen, but I know the story behind it. Sandzen gave it to a gallery owner named Baker in Great Bend, Kan. Baker didn't like it, so he stashed it in a closet. Finally he gave it to Bernice, who shared his sentiment and hung it in her garret studio. There I picked it up and liberated it.

Bernice, you see, was an artist who never went beyond local renown. Most of her works are in family hands, where they are appreciated for their local color and family ties. Let me tell you, though, about a few of her even more obscure works.

Included in this category is a big, flat archival box full of sketches, bold ones, all based on the horrific prophecies in the book of Revelation. These were the basis for a series of paintings that Bernice executed as a young woman and donated to the Lutheran seminary in St. Louis. She gave me the sketches to keep, and I intend to preserve them as historical documents. She was a quiet woman, with a reserved but fine sense of humor. The paintings don't seem to fit at all with what I know of her. What they are, I realize--all these terrible beasts and horrible carnage--is graphic evidence of the froth and furor that lies beneath the quiet surface of evangelical German Lutheranism.

Up in my office I have "Job's Friends." Bernice did this wicked wood carving on a grotesquely twisted branch of bois d'arc, or hedge wood--a hard wood, thorny and hot burning. You remember Job's friends, of course, and what a sorry lot of friends they were indeed. When I began my career in academic administration I brought this carving, with its mocking faces, into my office. Nobody but me ever understood what it meant. Now I keep it in my faculty office as a reminder, just in case I ever again should be tempted to go into management.

Then, to remind me of my roots, I have a drawing exercise Bernice did as a young girl on the farm. Here in simple, almost cartoonish lines stand Uncle Alvin's three milk cows, Rosie, Texas and Lady. Rosie, lying down, has a nice pug nose "like Dad always liked," Bernice said. Standing at right is Texas, the orneriest of the three. Standing at left is Lady, Bernice's favorite because "she was so nice and well behaved."

Oh yes, and then there are the stories. Talking about the cows reminded Bernice of the great Airedale dog of her girlhood, protector and scavenger par excellence. Particularly she remembered the day the beast came up the quarter-mile drive bearing, or rather dragging, a quarter of beef. They never did figure out what neighbor the beef came from.

Then there was the time she went to Missouri to study painting with Thomas Hart Benton, and the rustic students drove the master to such distraction he retreated to his barge and refused to meet them any more.

Or the time when Uncle Alvin and Grandpa Alfred went to town with the wives, Aunt Emma and Grandma Meta, in the back seat, of course. After conducting their business in town the men failed to make sure the ladies were still in the back seat, which they weren't. Once home, it was an embarrassingly long time before they noticed the absence.

There are absences we really should notice, and think about.

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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136

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