copyright 2008, JA Kendall
Beautiful Signed, Hand Painted Prints & Gilcee Prints of Lasting Beauty by JA Kendall, including Tall Ships, San Francisco & New Orleans
A Boy Named Shel - A great story about the life and times of Shel Silverstein, that touches a bit on John Kendall's life.
The ‘70s’ proved to be the most creative decade of my life. In June, 1969 I left the Sunapee, New Hampshire area for the West Coast to look into the possibility of getting my Master’s degree in Art in California. I had spent three years teaching 1st – 12th grade art in both Sunapee & New London, NH and felt that it was time to again pursue my own education and see where it might lead me. My decision to go to California and spend a year working in the San Francisco Bay area so that I could claim residency and go to school as an in-state student proved to be one of the best decisions of my life. As a California resident I was able to get my Master’s degree in Creative Arts at San Francisco State College for the sum of only $75. per semester. I received my degree back in 1972 for the grand sum of $225., which covered the three semesters I attended San Francisco State. I got a great education for next to nothing and had the added treat of having the name of Ronald Regan, who was Governor of California and President of the Trustees at the time, and S.I. Hayakawah’s signature on my degree since he was President of the College back then.
Being in the San Francisco area during that time period was incredible. Musically, and artistically, I couldn’t have been in a better place in the world. Groups such as Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, & Big Brother & the Holding Company were just getting their start and could be seen for only a few dollars at places such as Fillmore West & the Family Dog or for free in Golden Gate Park. The entire Bay area seemed alive with creativity to me back then. The music, the lifestyle, and being enrolled in college again studying art all seemed to get my life headed in a positive direction. While researching the houseboat community at Waldo Point in Sausalito as a possible location for my creative project for my Master’s degree I met a person who I truly feel changed my life. In those days the old ferries sitting in the mud flats at Gate 5 & Gate 6 such as the Charles Van Damme, the San Rafael, & the Vallejo ( home to the philosopher Alan Watts & collage artist Jean Varda, a friend of Picasso ), as well as the riverboat Issaquah, really got my attention. The houseboat community that surrounded these fine old boats truly intrigued me. I had the feeling that I was looking at an abandoned movie set. I had no idea the first day I visited this unique area that I would spend seven of the most creative years of my life as a resident of this floating community. One day as I was checking out the houseboat community, and forming ideas of what I might do there creatively towards my Master’s project something happened that I still look back on as a life changing experience. I walked up the gangplank leading to the San Rafael ferry, continued walking through the ferry and encountered a bearded character who was wearing a captains hat and sitting on an overturned skiff on the back deck He looked vaguely familiar as he looked up, somewhat surprised to see me. I immediately introduced myself as John A. Kendall, a graduate student at San Francisco State, and someone who was intrigued by the area and interested in doing my creative project there etc. etc. etc. As I rambled on, and on, he simply looked up after a while and said “ So, who gives a shit !!! “ This stopped me mid sentence for sure. After a short pause he said he was just kidding and that I seemed like an interesting character who he would be happy to introduce to some of his friends who were film makers & photographers in the area who might be able to help me out. I had just met Shel Silverstein in person, sitting in front of his houseboat out behind the San Rafael. Although he didn’t actually introduce himself as Shel I soon realized who he was from articles I had read by him in his cartoon series for Playboy Magazine. Shel did introduce me around and I later started doing my “Sepia Pen & Ink Wash Drawings” as part of my creative project which I felt captured the feeling of this community located in the mud flats. Larry White, who was working on a Master’s degree in filmmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute at the time, & I spent a winter on Shel’s Boat where we collaborated on a mixed media film about the community based on my sepia ink wash drawings, still photographs, colored slides, & kodalith images of the area. My Master’s project was shown on Shel’s boat to the head of my department & a couple of my professors rather than in a sterile classroom at San Francisco State. Members of the community put together a meal for the event which proved to be a real happening at the time. Fun was had by all during that creative peak of my life. As the mixed media film was projected and the stages of the project were displayed the boat gently moved to add to the overall feeling of the event. I got an A+. Life was good !
Flash ahead, over three decades to the present, when I get a surprise call from Lisa Rogak, a writer who is researching a biography about Shel called “A Boy Named Shel”. Apparently, Lisa was researching people to interview who knew Shel in the past and she came up with my name at the houseboat community site “Waldo Point.net”. Since I now live back in the Lake Sunapee area in Georges Mills, and she is from Lebanon, NH, only 25 miles away, we arranged an interview at my home & Gallery overlooking the North end of the Lake and spent a couple of hours talking about Shel. She saw a scene I did of Shel’s Boat called “Shel’s Boat From the Madonna” and she asked to use it in her book. She said that she would give me credit for the scene & list my website along with information I shared with her about Shel in the biography.
It was a pleasure talking to Lisa, who had previously written about Dan Brown “The Da Vinci Code “ & who later followed up her biography about Shel with a book she is currently completing about Stephen King. It was an honor being in the biography “A Boy Named Shel” and a trip down memory lane sharing some insight into one of the most creative characters ever, who influenced young & old alike. The following is some of what we shared which is in the chapter “ Drain My Brain “ which Lisa gave me permission to quote.
DRAIN MY BRAIN
The pace of life on the West Coast suited Shel, and as the ‘70s began, he spent the majority of his time living in California.
In 1970, it wasn’t entirely clear that the Summer of Love had completely ended, so while some who had committed their lives to saving the world and ending the Viet Nam War through peace, love, and flower power were still hanging on, many others had left it behind and were clearly looking to see what was next. Then, as now, California was the place where many trends got their start before eventually becoming part of mainstream America, and some of the possibilities in the experimental stage including organic food, disco spreading beyond the walls of local gay discotheques, communal living, and the back-to-the-land movement. Those who didn’t want to leave San Francisco but who favored living in a cooperative neighborhood with like-minded people had begun to flock to the small houseboat communities in the bay.
Larry White was a photographer who lived in a nearby houseboat on San Francisco Bay and served as the caretaker for some of the other boats in the community. John Kendall was a graduate student who had just arrived from New Hampshire to attend school, and like most students, he was broke and looking for a place to stay. They had met in the city, and White had invited him out to Richardson Bay to stay for the winter because he needed another person to help him houseboat-sit for one of his clients. White asked Kendall if he was handy with tools.
The cantilevered window in the galley of Shel’s houseboat turned out to be a huge design flaw because it was built too close to the surface of the water. Whenever more than a few people were visiting, the boat sank down a few inches, and water poured in through the window.
Though Shel loved his houseboat, he knew that it needed some work and he wasn’t the one to do it. “Shel was not handy,” said White, “He wasn’t good with a hammer and pliers and didn’t know how to put things together. While he was a visionary in his work, he was not a practical person and he didn’t know how to fix his boat.”
Nashville producer Fred Foster remembered that the first time he met Shel at the Mansion it was clear the place was filled with men who were less than handy around the house. Then again, with a staff numbering over a hundred, twenty-four-hour room service, and more nubile young girls gathered in one place than they knew what to do with, knowing how to handle a hammer and nails wasn’t usually the first priority.
“They were talking about this expensive pool table that they couldn’t use because the felt was warped, and they didn’t know what to do,” said Foster. “Hef and all the big shots at the magazine were gathered around the table, examining it at every angle and wringing their hands while Shel stood by watching this, utterly fascinated. I told them it’s sitting by the swimming pool, for God’s sake, with all this humidity the felt is curling up. Put a heat lamp over the thing and it will straighten out. They did, it worked, and they couldn’t get over it. I think I even got a note from Hef.”
Shel knew that while he needed to find a couple of people to work on his boat, he didn’t want to tell them outright that he wanted them to completely overhaul the boat. After all, even though the ‘60s were over in the rest of the country, people in San Francisco were still living like it was the Summer of Love, and he knew that it would be hard to find people who wanted to work.
John Kendall remembered the way that he and White were suckered into doing the work.
“Guys,” said Shel, “I’ve got this opportunity to go somewhere for the winter, but I’m torn between freezing my ass off on my boat or going to the Mansion, where it’s a lot warmer and with much better visuals.”
“Once he got us to agree to stay on his boat, he slipped in the killer,” said Kendall.
“Make sure it’s safe, and it would be great if you could do some scraping every so often,” he said on his way out the door. Kendall wasn’t opposed to doing a little work, but was shocked at the condition of the boat.
“Once we got down there, I saw that it was a complete mess,” said Kendall. “The hull was all rusted and we had to get down there with scrapers and steel brushes. We spent the entire winter cleaning the hull while thinking of Shel in the Mansion with all the Bunnies.” But they never considered abandoning the job. Besides, Kendall was fascinated with Shel’s work, and he thought that living on his houseboat for even a few months would provide him with a little bit of a window into Shel’s brain.
While some would hesitate at offering someone they had just met the opportunity to spend the winter in their home, by this time Shel had honed his instincts about human nature to the extent that he could size up a person in a few seconds. Shel knew people so well that he was able to capture the universal foibles of humans in a few choice words or well aimed brushstrokes. While he always lived and traveled alone, he was smart enough to realize that he needed people to help him with the stuff in the background so he could live his life the way he wanted.
“When you saw the places where he lived and how he put himself together, he did so very well, but in order to pull it off he needed people around him who could do it for him,” said White. “He really had to be able to trust in people to make sure that things were done right for him, and he did.”
White also saw how clearly Shel’s child’s-eye view of the world extended to his art. “It was obvious in his work,” he said. “If he didn’t have a purity of thought and there wasn’t a certain amount of naivete in his personality, his work never would have come out of him so effortlessly, or looking the way it did.”
Serving as caretakers-in-residence on Shel’s boat meant there were occasional surprises. “Every now and then there would be a little knock at the door, and the voice on the other side would ask if Shel was there,” said Kendall. “When we opened the door, more often than not a beautiful girl would be standing there.” The exchange usually sounded something like this:
“I was just in the area and thought that I’d stop by and say hi to Shel,” she’d say.
“And who are you ?” the two twenty-something men would ask while they tried not to drool.
“I’m Miss January.”
But there were surprises inside as well. Along with thousands of books lining the shelves around the room were hundreds of puppets and dolls, perched right in the front of the books, as if they were watching over the room and offering a benevolent blessing. Many of them were hand-carved Asian puppets Shel had picked up on his travels.
“He did love puppets,” said White, adding that Shel never did anything with them in terms of his art. “I think he was attracted to their interpretive nature and the fact that they were pieces of art. And he loved that they were unusual one-of-a-kind things.”
Tucked in with the puppets was another, more disturbing find. Kendall told of pulling out books to read or picking up one of the puppets to examine it more closely, and more often than not, hiding behind the book or puppet would be a nitroglycerine tablet. In addition to being a powerful explosive, nitroglycerine is a frequently prescribed medication that can ease the symptoms of angina, pain in the upper body that comes when the heart isn’t receiving adequate oxygen. Angina is usually caused by arteries that are gradually narrowing, and slipping a small nitroglycerine tablet under the tongue will widen the arteries and increase the flow of blood to the heart, thus relieving the symptoms.
It’s likely that Shel was first diagnosed with angina and a chronic heart condition in the wake of his car accident, because the army would not have drafted him otherwise. It’s also probable that besides having bad childhood experiences with doctors, the diagnoses made him swear off doctors forever and was instrumental behind his decision not to drink heavily or do drugs most of his life. His was probably the most unusual request that some of the drug dealers in the ‘60s and ‘70s received in their businesses: “A hundred tabs of nitro, and hurry !”
When Kendall mentioned the stashes to White, he said that Shel kept them around just in case he had chest pains.
“I had an idea that something was going on, but we never talked about it,” he said. “Shel was definitely a man’s man. He didn’t want to show any sign of weakness at all, and his energy was so enormously high. He wanted people to feel at ease while he was around and he didn’t want them to start treating him differently, so he would never mention anything like that.”
If he did, the other houseboat residents may have wanted to hold a party or an awareness-raising fund-raiser, and that was the last thing he would have wanted. But the Richardson Bay community regularly welcomed any excuse to throw a party or fund raiser.
Larry Moyer, a good friend of Shel’s and a photographer for his Playboy travelogues, also lived in the houseboat community.
One time Moyer had a fund-raiser on his boat to raise money so he could take his sick cat to the vet. “So many people showed up that the boat sank,” Kendall remembered. “People just kept coming and the boat got lower and lower and finally the water started to come in the door. He didn’t think too much about it, and we took all the electrical equipment out but more people came and the damn boat sank. So Moyer said maybe it was time to get off the boat, and some stepped onto the dock and others started to bail it out and little by little, it came back up. It was a pretty strange time.”
White stayed for a full year on Shel’s houseboat, and Kendall stayed for the winter and in the spring he moved to another houseboat nearby. When he was back for a short visit, Shel looked over some of the drawings and photographs Kendall had created over the winter.
“He complimented me on my work and told me to stay with it, to stay creative,” said Kendall.
“Don’t get a bullshit job you hate,” were Shel’s parting words. “Do something you love, time will pass, and you’ll have fun.”
Kendall followed Shel’s advice: Today he’s a marine artist back in New Hampshire who still works in the sepia pen-and-ink wash technique he first experimented with while living on Shel’s boat.
I mentioned earlier that the ‘70s was the most creative decade of my life. It was actually more than that. That era set the tone for a creative life that still continues. I believed that just about anything was possible and wasn’t afraid to try something new. After moving onto my own boat, locally known as the A-Frame, a two story structure out behind the old Charles Van Damme ferry I decided to do something risky, thanks in part to the advice of Larry White. Instead of moving back to New Hampshire, armed with my new Master’s degree to continue teaching art I decided to join an art movement in San Francisco that would enable myself and others to be street artists there. ( I eventually did continue to teach art but not until 1985 when I took the position of art teacher in Henniker NH. ) After getting the required thousands of signatures of registered voters in San Francisco to get the proposal on the ballot to make this a reality it passed about 3 to 1 in favor of street artists. I think that I had license # 30 the day it became legal to be a street artist. To this day, street artists are still a unique part of the creative culture seen in the city. I had seen thousands of tourists visiting that fine city by the bay on a daily basis and decided to create a series of San Francisco street scenes to sell to these tourists to take back home when they left. My scenes went to countries all over the world during the early to mid-‘70s. while I was one of the original street artists. I felt that I could create truly timeless images of San Francisco using my sepia brown ink wash technique, while eliminating some of the current day things that I considered eye sores such as telephone poles & wires, a few street signs etc. I proceeded to go into the city across the Golden Gate Bridge on a daily basis from my new floating home at the houseboat community and sit on location over a period of time to create my series. The first scene was called “Looking Down Hyde Street”, and was created over a period of a few weeks to a month. I worked on location, while literally sitting out in the street on the steepest part of Hyde Street overlooking San Francisco Bay and Alcatraz Island. It had a Rice-A-Roni cable car in the foreground and on board were myself and my brother James, who is now a prolific song writer with over 1,100 songs to his credit. This Alfred Hitchcock touch, as I referred to it in those days, (which I now have to refer to as my “Where’s Waldo” trait since many younger people don’t know Hitchcock) became something that people began to look for in my scenes. I still can be found in my scenes, along with James, and now my two sons Christopher & Cody.
My decision to stay in the San Francisco Bay area proved to be a good one as I continued to create a series of ten San Francisco street scenes over the next few years which I put into print and sold to thousands of tourists from around the world. This series has recently been re-printed as 30th Anniversary museum quality giclee prints that I now offer on my site www.jakendall.com along with my entire series of twelve Sausalito houseboat scenes which were part of my Master’s project. Three of these scenes feature Shel’s boat, and another scene was created from Shel’s boat called “The Madonna from Shel’s Boat” while Larry and I were living there. Shel had the philosophy that anything was possible, and by all means follow your dream. I guess that rubbed off on me, along with his appetite for traveling off to far away places just to experience them in your own unique way. During the mid- ‘70s I left for places such as Cologne Germany, where I created the scene “the Koln Dom – Cologne Cathedral” over a period of about three months, working on location from a small bench in a little concealed park in front of the Cathedral. On two separate occasions in Cologne people recognized my technique and knew that I must be Kendall. One couple had purchased scenes I had done in San Francisco while I was a street artist there and another couple recognized the detailed sepia ink wash technique that I was becoming known for from scenes I had created that their neighbors had hung in their home. When I heard them say “You must be Kendall” it was music to my ears.
I spent 1976 & 1977 in the French Quarter in New Orleans where I created a series of detailed street scenes featuring the lace balconies the Quarter is famous for, along with a series of Jazz Musicians which captured the feeling of the area. Oddly enough, I am about to complete a scene I started there back in 1977 which I plan to call “A Time Warp on St. Peter”. The scene was originally supposed to take place 10 – 15 minutes after a scene I created called “Buggy Ride”. It was going to show myself & my old girlfriend Elizabeth, in the buggy we were talked into taking in the previous scene, coming right at you on St. Peter Street in front of Preservation Hall, across from a local bar called Johnny White’s. The scene was about 85% complete when I unexpectedly left for the Island of Ibiza off the Coast of Spain. Since I spent about five years there doing scenes of the Island and starting my series of Tall Ships, followed by a year doing private yachts in Antibes France, between Cannes & Nice, I never completed the scene. In any case, the scene has taken on a life of it’s own and will now feature both my sons, Christopher & Cody, as street musicians along with their mom Maribeth and myself in the buggy. I will have aged in the scene over 30 years. This true time warp features people who passed along years ago, such as Johnny White, as seen back in 1977, and characters such as my sons who were not born until ’86 & ’91. Since I want my scenes to have a timeless feel this scene certainly fits the bill. My life, thus far, has been something I was happy to experience and capture in my own unique way. My hope is to live a long creative life and create scenes that people can continue to enjoy long after I’m gone. Since I was born on Leap Day February 29th a long life would be, lets say, 25 years. Since I will be only 16 (in a matter of only hours, as I write this) I am well on my way. I will finally catch up to my youngest son Cody, who turned 16 back in September. My sense of time, and what I consider to be timeless, has always been a bit distorted over the years I’d say.