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From the Editor
FROM A STONE SHACK
In 1966 and 1967, John Boldt, Tom Minnich, and I spent a lot of our time working and hanging out at the shopping area in south Wilton. John Boldt, from the Norwalk-Westport borderland, walked up and down the aisles of Caldor’s Men’s Department in a suit and waited on customers. Tom Minnich, from Wilton, dispensed with his tie and jacket as he took direct control of the Outdoor Department.
How did we meet each other? None of us remembered. I worked with Tom in the Outdoor Department. He might have been the one who hired me. I was no junior manager type but rather an assistant janitor type who was constantly tearing cardboard cartons apart and taking them out to the dump out back.
We were very caught up in the changing culture, the whole range from classical to rock to country blues. Movie stars and singers gave life to our imaginations. Newspapers and television newscasters told us what our lives were actually like.
Little did we know that living a few miles up the road from the Minnich home lived the lady who would turn out to be the Champion of the American Spirit, Jean Lipton. In time, celebrities fade away, but what Jean Lipton discovered turned the artistic world upsidedown. In her 1942 book, American Primitive Painting, Jean Lipton made the unequivocal statement that folk art is in every way the equal of classical art. “…[I]t is the author’s firm belief,” she wrote,“ that a small number of highly gifted primitive painters, unhampered by any external requirements or restrictions, arrived at a power and originality and beauty which was not surpassed by the greatest of the academic American painters.” Leading Americana painter Christopher Gurshin speaks of Jean Lipton as the ultimate doyenne of the American arts.
She lived in her Colonial farmhouse in Wilton from 1937 to 1980. With the way things were, we were right there and never knew she existed.
Max H. Peters
Publisher and Editor
Header photo by Skip Broom, HP Broom Housewright, Inc.