93/02/04

Shortgrass Country

by Monte Noelke

            Two prominent San Angelo families allowed the art museum at Fort Concho to exhibit their N.C. Wyeth collections beginning in mid-January. A gala opening reception entertained local and out of town guests dressed in finery and steeped in the graces.

            Women dominated the scene. However, the wide range of Wyeth's illustrations also brought out a number of hombres who hadn't learned to nod their heads in stiff white collars but had been broke to lead and work on a tight rein due their secondary role in a long-term marriage contract.

            Wool Capital citizens have always supported the arts. Way back in the early 1890s the Arc light Saloon picked up wireless reports of the Fitzsimmons and Corbett match.

            Every church had a choir and a pianist. Advent of the automobile opened the opportunity to make the bull fights once a month across the border from Del Rio at Villa Acuna. Almost every small community offered a slate of weekend goat and calf roping to entertain and edify spectators.

            Annual stock shows and rodeos brought in professional actors and a complete carnival to build a base for the young people's enlightenment. Also, a popular baking soda company distributed free picture-memory cards to the elementary schools. By the time those of us who bothered to thoroughly complete the fifth grade had stayed over a few extra semesters, we could link orange and sun bleached hay stacks and big fat women covered in thin scarves lying on purple love seats to classical artists so fast the teacher thought we were cheating.

            Know-it-all busybodies like some of the Dallas and Fort Worth scribes claim the western provinces are culturally deprived. At lunch a week or so ago an old compadre reminisced over all the New York plays and Boston concerts a prominent civic booster and art patron used to bring to San Angelo. The consensus at that table certainly didn't support such outlandish charges. If we were so limited in esthetic appreciation then how come half the kids in town had "Barnum" or "Bailey" for a middle name? Obviously it was because their moms and dads loved the circus so much.

            Nobody will ever believe how much it meant to spend 27 months studying the fifth grade curriculum. Over Christmas, some mean kid grouped three red-feathered, steel-shafted arrows right above the door knob, sunk deep into the thick, dark oak door to the old fifth grade room. The news had hardly reached the second chair at the downtown beauty shop until the biggest tattle-tale that ever graduated the Mertzon High was blabbing how she bet Monte Noelke was the one who shot those arrows into the schoolhouse door.

            Having Mr. Wyeth's work is going to inspire other collectors to share their arrowhead frames and barb wire samples with us.

            Even though a guy doesn't make extremely good grades in school, at least he doesn't have to be a life-long stool pigeon.