Adiós

I have been to Chautauqua in many incarnations: scholar, Director of Youth Ministry, teacher, lecturer and participant and today I add a new chapter to my Chautauqua story with my attendance at the wedding of my next door neighbour Elizabeth Congdon.

The wedding is taking place in the elegant surroundings of the Hall of Philosophy with the celebration conducted from the same platform where I delivered my “Education in the New Millennium” speech.

And it is from this seat of learning and the learned that I draw this project to a close.

For our main partner schools in Britain and America the summer holidays await and many of you are moving on to pastures new next academic year. I hope that you have enjoyed the encounters we have shared with the world over this past year and if I may leave you with a parting thought it would be this…

try always to live every day of your life. This is a wonderful world and we owe it to ourselves to drink in the wonders of creation.

Wednesday June 6th 2007. Lake Placid, New York.

Robert Louis Stevenson spent the winter of 1887/1888 in Saranac Lake, New York. Some communities make the most of their history, no matter how tenuous the link and Stevenson in reality spent a very short period here.

That said the Scottish author did compose the twelve essays of the Charles Scribner series; The Master of Ballantrae and The Wrong Box whilst in Saranac.

It was to Saranac Lake that the author came from his home, in one of my former home towns, Bournemouth, England; enroute to the South Seas.

I have completed the journey the other way round and now from the South Seas I too make my stop at this humble home that was the New York resting place for a master literary craftsman.

Then its back on the road to Randolph via the Brick House Café in Brewerton.

Tuesday June 5th 2007. From Randolph. New York to Lake Placid.

On the road again and I am heading up to Lake Placid through the beauty of the Adirondack Mountains. Enroute we stop in Brewerton at the Brick House Café for lunch.

The scenery was spectacular and Lake Placid itself is a most pleasing vacation destination. It was here in 1932 and again in 1980 that the Winter Olympics were held.

Tonight we dine at Charlies with a lovely view of Mirror Lake.

Monday June 4th 2007. Randolph, New York.

Jamestown, once the home of a great furniture empire, a centre of cultural assimilation and what is often forgotten...a small city with a big history.

Jamestown's own Robert Jackson had an emminent career in the legal world rising to be the United States Chief Counsel at the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg...

"One's right to life, liberty and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and the other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections".

Sunday June 3rd 2007. Randolph, New York.

One of the most interesting and unexplored histories of this area is the Underground Railroad that brought escaped slaves north to Canada and freedom. In dear old Jamestown one such house existed on 7th Street where Catherine Harris carried out heroic services for fugitive slaves...sadly today this is a very poor area renowned for its social ills.

One of the cute links I find with this story is the fact that just as the ladies of Changi passed messages to their men in the quilts they made for their fellow inmates, so underground railroad messages were also passed in quilts crafted by slaves and containing coded locations of stops on the road to freedom.

Sunday morning in Randolph and after baking muffins we are off to Randolph United Presbyterian Church in God-fearing small town America.

In the afternoon we take to the water on my beloved Chautauqua Lake...Now I really feel at home. Summer is here and the Lake has come alive, in our case with David, Chris, Alice and I.

Saturday June 2nd 2007. Main Street, USA.

After coffee on Main Street at Oregano's I am off to the school horse show.

Randolph Academy is a non-secure detention facility and it provides some of the most innovative and customer focused educational programmes I have seen anywhere in the world. From animal husbandry to hairdressing to catering skills the education offered is practically focused. The basic premise is that the education provided will allow the student participants to play an active role in the outside world when they leave school.

Many of the students here are the victims of abuse, some have found themselves on the wrong side of the law...but all are children, all are people and all deserve to be given a fair and equal chance to engage with society. I have nothing but admiration for the special educators who work here and for a curriculum that thinks out of the box.

It strikes me today just how difficult it must be for the staff here. On a day like today when some families have made the attempt to come and see their children and when the school is effectively open to the outside world; it must be almost impossible to monitor legal judgments that do not allow student and family members to be on their own unsupervised or that prevent student engagement with other peers.
I am more than impressed with the way the staff here monitor and care for the students.

After the show, where so many students I have known over the years are just so pleased to demonstrate their skills and show me their prizes, we head off to have sun tea with Gayle on her porch.

On March 14th 1878 Buffalo Bill Cody brought his "new and exciting border drama" to the stage of Jamestown's Allen Opera House. The site of the opera house is today the Reg Lenna Civic Center (a late 1800's theatre built on the site where the old opera burnt to the ground on January 21st 1881)...

Tonight nearly five years to the day since its original discovery the complete billboard that advertised that 1878 performance will go again on public view. After 129 years a piece of American cultural history again comes to life.

What makes this billboard so important is not just the fact that Buffalo Bill was one of the first people ever to use billboard advertising; but the fact that this work of art was actually used to promote the show. It was displayed for public knowledge and it was never intended to survive. It was never a collector's piece but rather it served its purpose and has only survived because it lay hidden behind a wall for some 124 years.

Mike, Alice and I are lucky enough to be witnessing history as the six panel billboard, believed to be the oldest in the United States (home of billboard advertising), is unveiled.

Laura Schell, the paper conservator, is a true artist. Salvaging and re-assembling the hundreds of pieces of paper that comprised the billboard, her work of conservation and restoration has brought to life a lost period of history. In the 1870's new posters tended to be pasted over older advertisements and so few originals survived. The Jamestown billboard was pasted to the wall of a building that sits on the corner of Third and Pine streets and its discovery was a matter of chance following the collapse of a brick wall in June of 2002.

This 26ft by 10ft billboard advertised a "border drama"; such shows were carried out by Buffalo Bill's theatre troupe a full decade before he began his Wild West shows. The particular show performed in Jamestown was based on the 1857 Mountain Meadow Massacre and it was staged here only a year after the execution of John Lee for his part in that massacre.

The world-premiere reading of the new play 'Behind The Buckskin Curtain: Buffalo Bill's Border World' tonight was sadly a disappointment. Whilst I could see where the playwright was trying to go with his work (in drawing parallels between the time of Buffalo Bill and the modern day) there were just too many loose threads. Further, in a good play the political messages are subliminal and not overt. From Shakespeare to Miller the writing was timeless though set in a specific time. What I mean by this is that the writings could be interpreted to any period because they covered universal themes...this play was far too trapped in Bush-era quips.

Tam's Birthday 2007 and I am in Randolph, New York.

Shuffle off to Buffalo...

Henry Ford and Teddy Roosevelt, Harvey Firestone and Susan B. Anthony, literary and cultural icons, philosophy and William Glover...What do we all have in common I hear you ask? The answer lay until today in the Chautauqua Institution.

For all the years I have spent in Western New York, it was only a matter of time before I would beat a path to the Roycroft and further strengthen that Chautauqua link.

From 1895 until his death in the sinking of the S.S. Lusitania, Elbert Hubbard focused the attention of America and the wider civilised world on the town of East Aurora.

Hubbard, the one time sales partner at Buffalo's J.D. Larkin Soap Company, entered the world of publishing to "make a book like a William Morris book". As his fame grew so too did his Roycroft complex, modelled after William Morris' Kelmscott Press and Crafts complex in Hammersmith, which Hubbard had visited in 1894 in order to meet the great man.

By 1896 Hubbard's new print-shop was housed in a building that he modelled after the old chapel at Grasmere where Wordsworth is buried.

With the Roycrofters, East Aurora became a specialised centre not just for printing and bookbinding, but all manner of arts and crafts from mission-style furniture and leather goods to copperware and intellectual discourse.

Best known world-wide for the classic work A Message to Garcia which focused on the acceptance of responsibility and doing the "right job", Hubbard was the leading North American lecturer and literary figure of his day. His eminent circle ranged from Booker T. Washington to Andrew Carnegie and his Roycroft Inn and Campus became a cultural centre known for its unpretentious discourse and the industry of its employee-followers.

The Roycroft Campus continued as the leading American centre for the arts and crafts movement until 1938 and today beyond the Inn the movement is once again flourishing in former campus buildings.

In case you have not guessed, today I am in East Aurora to explore the Roycroft, to marvel at the beautiful crafted woods in the Inn, to dine whilst listening to Jazz played by Natural Elements and to visit Vidler's five and dime store and a Buffalo institution.