Oral history interview with June Wayne, 1970 August 4-6 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 tape-recorded interview with June Wayne on August 4, 1970. The interview took place in Los Angeles, CA, and was conducted by Paul Cummings for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Interview Tape 1, Side 1 PAUL CUMMINGS: It's August 4 - Paul Cummings talking to June Wayne in her studio. Well, how about some background. You were born in Chicago? JUNE WAYNE: Yes, I was. I understand I was born at the Lying-In Hospital on the Midway in Chicago. Right in the shadow of the University of Chicago. PAUL CUMMINGS: And then you went to Gary, Indiana? JUNE WAYNE: I went to Gary when I was an infant. I don't know whether I was a year old or two years old. I do know that I was back in Chicago by the time I was four or five. So my stay in Gary was very brief. Incidentally, I have memories of Gary, of the steel mills at night, those giant candles with the flutes of fire coming out of the stacks. I also remember very vividly picking black-eyed Susans along the railroad tracks of the Illinois Central in Gary. I must have lived somewhere nearby. My grandmother used to take me for walks along there. I can remember that very significantly. I have lots of memories of Gary. All the trains, the distant sounds of the trains, the steel mills. And a particularly poignant one of the waffle man. They used to have horse drawn wagons that sold popcorn and these tiny waffles that you cover with powdered sugar. I think they also sold ice cream cones. The waffle man would come at dusk but never predictably. So each day was a sort of anxiety, would he show? Wouldn't he show? And I used to sit on the curb and wait for him and when he came then there was a great problem of how you could be sure that the waffle would be well enough done. They were little things. I've never again had such waffles until I had them at the Hague in 1957. For me it was the madeleine cake of Proust. PAUL CUMMINGS: I didn't know they had vendors like that. JUNE WAYNE: Yes. He had a curious sort of gas jet ring that popped the corn. I can see it more than describe it. A whole constellation of dusk-like images about that time. That and the black-eyed Susans I expect will some day show up in my work because the black-eyed Susans had other associations to that period. Anyway, I do remember Gary very vividly. PAUL CUMMINGS: But you really grew up in Chicago? JUNE WAYNE: Yes. I'm really a Chicagoan. You see, my grandmother's family lived in Gary. My grandmother was one of eight siblings, a sister and six brothers, I believe it was. And some of those brothers and one sister lived in Gary. So that grandmother was always taking me by the hand and off we'd trundle on the Illinois Central to Gary to visit the relatives. And now of course Gary and Chicago are practically one city. But that whole industrial complex, the gas works, the big storage tanks of gasoline, the cracking plants, the gravel pits, railroads, factories of Hammond, South Chicago, they figured in my paintings of the 1930s. So that the landscape of cities is much more persuasive to me than the landscape of nature. And that period of course was terribly formative including its climate of the industrial times, of awareness of the working man. The blue collar life was something I was very aware of because we were moderately poor and the parts of the city where we lived (while certainly they were not slums) were in the working class district, they were really, primarily, blue and white collar workers who gave themselves airs. And the presence of the university would legitimize such elitism as might have crept in to the milieu. PAUL CUMMINGS: What was it like growing up in Chicago? What do you remember of the city and the people? JUNE WAYNE: Oh, I remember all about it. I remember it very well. I lived at 6228 Blackstone Avenue, almost at 63rd and Blackstone. Which was Stud Lonigan country. And later on I lived in Logan Square which is Saul Bellow's Augie March country. I never lived in Meyer Levine country - or city rather. But the images of those writers, both Bellow and James Farrell...One of my problems in reading Bellow's Augie March and Jim Farrell's Stud Lonigan group is that I could never tell for sure whether I was remembering it or actually reading it in the book. They blended. Our backyard on Blackstone Avenue was backed by the raised dike, as it were, of the Illinois Central tracks. So my memories of Chicago as a transportation center, the elevated on 63rd Street, the sidewalks, the occasional trees, the rather cindery backyard, all of that. There is a photograph that probably exists somewhere of me at the age of five or six in that same backyard surrounded by a bevy of toys and dolls which my grandmother took care of, which I never had the slightest interest in. And from time to time she would cause family photographs to be taken and she would also take these photographs of the appurtenances of my childhood, you know, as though this were somehow meaningful. So these are things that are fixed in my memory. My memories are curiously depersonalized in a way. They don't attach themselves very much to other children. I was an only child. As a child I didn't have a great many friends. PAUL CUMMINGS: What about early school and things? JUNE WAYNE: I wasn't going to school yet; I was pre-school when I lived on Blackstone Avenue; although that was a terribly important period in my memory. One of its images just showed up in a work that I did called Wave 1920. I called it that referring to the year 1920. My mother used to take me to the Lake Michigan waterfront near the Museum of Science and Industry on the South Side near the Midway. And I seem to remember some sort of strange little pergola, outdoor house, where I would sit on the floor of this thing, or was it on the grass - I don't know - and see the waves pounding in. My relationship to waves and water and so on I think was formulated at that time. I was probably scared by one of them. But I have all these strange feeling memories of that period. And being terribly cold on the Midway. You know, they used to skate on the Midway. And they had wooden sidewalks built across the ice at given places so people could cross. I think they probably still do. I remember once on Blackstone Avenue falling and hurting myself, badly cutting my nose. And my grandmother used to take me to the doctor across this wooden walkway across the Midway and I'd be just absolutely freezing. My mother felt it was much more attractive aesthetically for me to wear knee socks rather than stockings in winter so I grew up assuming that of course one was very hardy and that the aesthetic was more important than being comfortable. I remember to this minute the cold of the Chicago wind on my knees in winter crossing that damn Midway with my face in bandages. PAUL CUMMINGS: When did you start to school and what kind of school did you go to? JUNE WAYNE: I must have started to school in Logan Square, Chicago. The first school I went to was the Monroe - I guess it was called James Monroe School. It was one of these schools that went up to the sixth grade. I lived then on Spaulding Avenue, I believe it was 2624 Spaulding Avenue. I almost can remember the phone number. I think it was Belmont 9783, something like that. You see there were only four digits. And I used to walk to school. I was a very good student in grammar school although I think I suffered my first educational trauma there. I had a teacher there who said to me once - comparing me to another girl in the class - she said something like this, "You have a flash-in-the-pan brilliance. You answered right away. But you're not always right. It's Lillian who always has the exact fact." I never forgot that. It was a hell of a shock. and of course it was perfectly true. From that day to this a fact is something you go and get to fill in the concept. PAUL CUMMINGS: Right. It's the brick and not the architecture. JUNE WAYNE: Yes. Another thing I remember very well at that school was that we always had a piano going while the children marched to class in the morning. And somewhere along the line I was the person who played the piano. I could play by ear. PAUL CUMMINGS: Did the piano start at home or at school? JUNE WAYNE: Oh, I began playing the piano by ear when I was a little bit of a thing.