SECTION SIX
Service and remembrance are very closely linked.
Let’s return to the theme of military service that crosses the line between these two panels and the group of men who lost their lives. The US Navy serviceman in green fatigues on the left side of the line is Stephen Brunton who served in Vietnam, transporting troops and supplies on the dangerous jungle rivers of the Mekong Delta.
Next to him stands Calvin Barra of the Calpella winemaking family. Calvin was drafted into the Marines in 1944 and served in World War II for nine months. He was killed at the battle of Iwo Jima, just days before his 20th birthday. His father Antonio and brothers Pete and Charlie were working in the vineyard when uniformed men drove up to bring the sad news. Read more here. See him in uniform below.
The man kneeling in uniform is Army Sgt. Jason J. Buzzard (above), who was the first Mendocino County serviceman to die in the Iraq war, victim of an improvised explosive device in Baghdad. He was a 31-year-old husband and father of two, whose motorcade returning his body home to Ukiah was greeted by highway workers, policemen, and hundreds of citizens all along the route from Sacramento.
The fourth man in this group who died for his country is presented differently, as an older person painted in a picture frame. This is because his circumstance was different; Michael Moore was a pilot in Vietnam but he was able to come home. He married his sweetheart Betty and they had two children. He worked in sales and then as a Ukiah middle school math teacher.
But his service in the US Air Force in Vietnam ultimately claimed his life due to complications from exposure to Agent Orange. Read about Michael Moore on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial website and see him below.
Michael Moore’s family attended the mural Grand Opening, glad that to have his and others’ delayed sacrifice represented.
The two figures at the bottom of the two panels represent the ultimate sacrifice in iconic form.
The fallen soldier in a World War I dress uniform lies in state as if we are at his wake. His headstone straddles the line between service and remembrance, where – in the land of the living – a woman grieves his loss. She places the memorial red poppy on his grave and they cascade upon her. The poppy as symbol of the fallen sprang from a poem written by World War I brigade surgeon John McCrae who was struck by the sight of the red flowers springing up in ravaged Flandres battlefields littered with thousands of dead. The woman painted here could be the soldier’s wife, or sister, or the daughter he would never know.
The top of the scene depicts Ukiah’s Russian River Cemetery in spring with cherry trees in blossom and Memorial Day wreaths laid along gravestones lining the road.
Remembrance refers not just to families but to communities and cultures. We remember and miss our loved ones. But it’s also important to remember events and actions, to remember people who epitomized or changed their communities. Or who acted with such compassion that we want to thank them forever. All of this is true of the next group!
The famous Ukiah painter Grace Carpenter Hudson was part of a truly distinguished family. All four of her grandparents were abolitionists who fought to make Kansas a free state by moving there (from Vermont and Indiana) in order to be eligible to vote against slavery. Clarina, while still in Vermont, took the unusual step of leaving a difficult husband and supported her family by teaching and then by publishing poetry and essays on the role of women in society. Her second husband was a progressive newspaper man, so Aurelius was brought up in this environment.
In 1854 the Kansas Territory was positioned for statehood and many abolitionist New Englanders flooded in, as did pro-slavery settlers from Missouri. The Nichols-Carpenter family soon worked four land claims and Aurelius A.O. Carpenter started two newspapers, the Herald of Freedom and the Kansas Free State. On May 21, 1856, a pro-slavery mob burned much of the free-state stronghold Lawrence and ransacked the two newspaper offices, wrecking the presses and dumping the type in the river.
In response, abolitionists organized around John Brown and murdered five of the offenders. This led to the Battle of Black Jack in which A.O. Carpenter, an excellent sharpshooter, was crucial to the abolitionists’ victory. Along with other wounded men, he was nursed by neighboring free-state women, including his future wife Helen McCowen.
Kansas entered the Union as a free state in 1861, but by then A.O. Carpenter had joined the McCowens traveling by ox wagon on the California Trail. They settled in Potter Valley, where Grace and her twin brother Grant were born, and where the family became close to the many native Pomo living there. Photo below: May Carpenter standing. Helen, Grant, Frank, Grace, and Aurelius Ormando “A.O.” Carpenter seated. He took this portrait with a shutter release bulb held behind Grace’s back
Aurelius co-founded a newspaper called the Mendocino Herald and soon the family moved to Ukiah where Helen and her husband established a photography business. She did much of the portrait work while he traveled as a County Assessor. He took photographs of all types of work and places and these images are how we remember A.O. now. Important resource: Aurelius O. Carpenter – Photographer of the Mendocino Frontier by Schenk, Holmes, Smith-Ferri 2006
Raised in this educated, artistic and entrepreneurial family, Grace was well positioned to achieve success. Add compassion to this mix: Grace’s mother Helen saw the Pomo people as equals and recognized their tremendous suffering as white settlers took their land, food, freedom and safety. Helen took in Native workers and servants, but she treated them like friends. And this appears in the Carpenters’ photos and Grace’s work as she developed into a mature and world-renowned painter.
Another crucial resource: Grace Hudson – Artist of the Pomo Indians, a Biography by Lanson and Tetzlaff 2006
Grace’s progressive family recognized her talent and the value of education. At age 15 she was enrolled in the California School of Design, living on her own in San Francisco! She excelled and desired to keep painting. In 1889 she met the man who she would marry, young Dr. John Hudson, with whom she could follow a creative path. He developed a rapport with his Pomo patients and began learning about their language, culture and exquisite woven baskets. Ultimately, John stopped practicing medicine to become an ethnographer and Grace focused her painting on the lives of the Mendocino Pomo. Mary Mitchell was Grace’s model for The Dowry 1902 and I painted her with her baby Garland from the photo below.
The man standing to the left is Soon Quong Wong, the Hudson’s Chinese cook, but also close friend. His wife remained in China but their four children visited often, attended Ukiah schools, and all had a deep relationship with Grace and John. The life and work of the Hudsons exemplified empathy and cross-cultural respect when that was not the norm.
Chinese in Mendocino County, Lorraine Hee-Chorley 2009
*This page is in progress – much more soon. See some of it on the SECTIONS SIX page*
The remembrance of loved ones ranges from honoring a long life well-lived, to despair over a life snatched away too soon.
We carry our departed loved ones with us in our hearts where they can no longer go, into the future.
See more here.
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