After graduating from Norwalk High School in 1967 I hopped a bus and got a job in Wilton at Caldors, a department store that has subsequently morphed into a WalMart. I had friends in Wilton that had cars and together we made week-end forays into New York City in search of big-time action. One trip in particular to a spot called Steve Paul’s Scene near Times Square we saw Howlin’ Wolf, joined by our neighbor at the next table Jimi Hendrix who jumped up on the stage and jammed with Wolf and his band late into the night.

    Knocking around New York, Wilton and Westport, we constantly ran into showbiz stars. What we didn’t know that living and working right in Wilton was a lady that would someday outshine in a most basic way all the great names we were so dazzled by. Her name was Jean Lipman and she was  already in 1967 considered the doyenne of the folk arts field. Her first book, American Primitive Painting, had been published by the Oxford University Press in 1942. Her ideas went far beyond the academic. She wrote “I continue to hold my conviction that the folk artist’s freedom from the restrictions of academic art, indeed their technical liabilities, made way for a compensating emphasis on and splendid achievement  in the realm of pure design.” Folk art is every bit the equal to formal art-  that’s the ground-breaking truth Jean Lipman taught the world.

    If we had only known, back in 1967, that Jean Lipton’s colonial-era home in Wilton was filled to the brim with folk art treasures and that if interested people showed up on her doorstep she would show them around. It would be decades before we realized what we had missed in our own back yard.

                                                                                                                Max H. Peters
                                                                                                                Publisher and Editor