Oral history interview with Tom Blackwell, 2009 September 22-November 11 Funding for this interview was provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art. Contact Information Reference Department Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington. D.C. 20560 www.aaa.si.edu/askus Transcript Preface The following oral history transcript is the result of a recorded interview with Tom Blackwell on September 22, 2009. The interview took place in Andes, New York, and was conducted by Judith Richards for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This transcript has been lightly edited for readability by the Archives of American Art. The reader should bear in mind that they are reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose. Interview JUDITH RICHARDS: This is Judith Richards interviewing Tom Blackwell in Andes, New York, on September 22, 2009 for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, disc one. Tom, let's begin with you family background, if you can talk about your relatives— TOM BLACKWELL: My family background, I was born in Chicago, 1938. JUDITH RICHARDS: What was the exact date? TOM BLACKWELL: March 9, and so I'm not quite a baby boomer, pre-baby boom. JUDITH RICHARDS: Where did your grandparents come from? TOM BLACKWELL: On my father's side, they were Irish so they came from Ireland. On my mother's side, English, and who had been in the country for a long time. I think they were fairly early English settlers. On my mother's side, their family name was Tankersly. JUDITH RICHARDS: How do you spell that? TOM BLACKWELL: T-A-N-K-E-R-S-L-Y. Tankersly, and my grandfather on my mother's side was an amateur painter. Watercolors mostly and fairly good, actually. I saw one or two of his things and he had some talent, no question. JUDITH RICHARDS: What did he do for a living? TOM BLACKWELL: He was a sales rep for what was then a burgeoning industry in, I guess we call it telecommunications, then they called it the phone company or something you know. JUDITH RICHARDS: Did both your grandparents live in Chicago? TOM BLACKWELL: At one time they did yes. I think on the mother's side, they lived somewhere, I think, in Champagne, Illinois. JUDITH RICHARDS: That's the Tankerslys? TOM BLACKWELL: Tankersly side yeah. The Blackwell side of the family which is where I got my name, I mean, they were I guess what one would call lace-curtain Irish sort of—well, I mean what I've ascertained about them is that they were fairly, you know, really lower-class kind of. And my grandfather on Blackwell served in the Spanish American War. I remember a funeral I went to, I have a vague memory of playing with him as a very young child and he was like sort of Abe Lincoln to me. He was tall and very sort of gaunt and forbidding looking man with dark hair and so on. His wife, my grandmother Blackwell who was I think the real business person in that family. What they did really was, I don't know what my grandfather Blackwell did for a living, but his wife seemed to have a talent for real estate and she bought sort of property and fix them up and then would sell them at some point for profit or rent them out. I think she was a fairly astute business woman of a—you know not of any great note but apparently she kept the whole thing going. JUDITH RICHARDS: She was the main bread winner? TOM BLACKWELL: Well, she was the smart one of the group. That's—I'm just extrapolating from little bits of information that I've gleaned over the years. JUDITH RICHARDS: Did your mother and father meet in Chicago? TOM BLACKWELL: They met in Chicago at the 1933 World's Fair, which was a huge thing in Chicago. My mother was, she worked at the Coca-Cola Pavilion there and my father was employed as a guard at the Fair. And, the thing is, I mean, you know, we're out here talking about early childhood, well, I mean, on the Blackwell side of the family they were all alcoholics. I mean there's serious alcoholism in the family and my father was an alcoholic and my— JUDITH RICHARDS: One of the reasons your mother was in charge? TOM BLACKWELL: No, you're mixing generations. We're skipping ahead a generation. JUDITH RICHARDS: Oh, yes, okay. TOM BLACKWELL: Okay, so anyway, we were talking, I mean originally, we're talking about my grandparents on the Blackwell side, now we've skipped up to my parents and— JUDITH RICHARDS: So they met because they were both working at the World's Fair. TOM BLACKWELL: They were working at the World's Fair and from what I've gathered my mother was not a terribly serious person, I think. And my father was, aside from his drinking, and so on not a—I mean there was no sort of aspiration or anything like aspiring to higher education or doing anything in the world. I mean, they were basically people coming out of the Depression and just, you know, it was a hard time coming. Just getting by was their whole purpose in life, I guess, you know. But anyway, my mother had me; I think she must have been, I'm guessing about 22 or so at the time. She was born in 1914. The thing is that then of course, World War II came along and my father joined the Merchant Marines, not the army or navy so he was gone for the duration of the war. My mother worked in a munitions plant making ball bearings and stuff and I had after that, I had two brothers, Pat and Jim, who are my younger brothers. And now we get to something a little more interesting because we had very little money or none practically. It was really a pretty marginal kind of existence. JUDITH RICHARDS: Was this in downtown Chicago that you lived in? TOM BLACKWELL: This was—no, it was a neighborhood in Chicago called South Shore which was on the South Side of Chicago. Actually, now that I think about it, the South Shore must have been fairly close to where Grant Park is where of course, the [President Barack] Obama victory speech took place, that whole area, which I remember as a kid because we would a lot of times were able to walk to various museums. Like the Museum of Science and Industry and the Field Museum were there and various great museums were in that—or at least walkable for a kid, you know. So couldn't been too far. JUDITH RICHARDS: You said your grandfather was a watercolorer, your mother's father. TOM BLACKWELL: Correct. JUDITH RICHARDS: Is it correct that is he is the only—? TOM BLACKWELL: Artistic forebearer that I know about, yes JUDITH RICHARDS: It seems unusual that you were going to museums—did you family encourage it? Did your mother and father take you there? TOM BLACKWELL: No, I mean no, they never did. What happened was—and this is the great thing—so during the war, my mother, we were, you know, latchkey kids. My mother was working; my father was, of course, off in the Merchant Marines. So she had three kids, so of course they didn't have day care in those days—so what to do with the kids? Well, there was a private school in Chicago called the Ffoulkes School, F-F-O-U-L-K-E-S— Ffoulkes—it is pronounced Ffoulkes—which was a private school which was mostly you know, I mean, it was like the kids that went there were for the most part sort of upper-middle class Jewish kids who were very—you know, it was a kind of—I guess the equivalent today would be like a Montessori-type school, something like that. And I was the oldest of three brothers and I had a wonderful teacher in both pre-school and I think first and second grade. A woman by the name of Ms. Greenwald, Wald, Greenwald, W-A-L-D, who saw early on artistic ability and sort of a kind of precocity that I had, which I didn't even know about, but, you know, she saw it. One of the first really formative kind of things that I remember was we did a Hansel and Gretel play in which we had to act various parts and we had to make puppets for this and everybody got assigned a different character. I got the witch, and I made a witch and I made the most horrifying witch you ever saw with a big bent nose with warts on it and whiskers coming out and kind of greenish pallor and scary looking eyes and a fright wig for hair and stuff and a big pointy hat. And I got to play the witch in the play. So she was thrilled with both my puppet and my performance apparently and gave me a big kiss on the cheek— which I refused to wash that side of my face for a whole week, I think. It was sort of really—this was amazing to me and she seemed to recognize. JUDITH RICHARDS: Do you think she encouraged you to go to the museums? TOM BLACKWELL: Absolutely. She encouraged me to do everything, I think. I actually credit her with giving a whole different direction to my life than wouldn't have been the case otherwise, you know.