Silent Rise

By Rick H. Jones

The arts are a powerful change agent…

   …lives and communities can be transformed but the "fine arts" are not the key.

 

Putting the arts into the hearts and minds of everyday people can launch both personal and city-wide positive change. This author, a forty-year community arts veteran, argues that the elitism of the fine arts, the arts relegated to the upper class, excludes the vast majority of the middle and certainly lower class.

 

The city of Hamilton, Ohio was in decline in the 1990s. A low high school graduation rate, racial unrest, a declining economy—yet city and community leaders turned to an arts-for-the-people approach. They searched for the right person to lead this effort.

 

A blue-collar kid understands hard work. He also knows how to complete a task. When that kid decides to make his life in the arts, in the dichotomy of blue-collar and arts, he understands that "fine arts" will not be enough and will not be the best way to reach the ends his community hopes to achieve. He also knew that if success were to be had, the arts would have to be broadly defined as they were introduced to the public. The implementation of community arts for this author meant entrusting the arts to the hearts and minds of everyday people. The mission would be community excellence through the arts.

 

Hamilton was at the threshold of the town's bicentennial; a cultural plan increased their hope. They listened to the people and decided to build a community arts center. Would this courageous—and many thought dubious—decision work?

 

This memoir by the man who was brought to town to lead this twenty-five-year journey shows how a struggling city utilized the arts to ignite the renaissance the city is now experiencing. This story of challenge, transformation, and hope is an honest and straight-forward account of what is required to lead with authenticity and achieve amazing results.

 

"…Rick Jones shows us how this synthesis of arts and creative cities works. It's a message we need to heed now more than ever."  –Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class and The New Urban Crisis

 

"Silent Rise is a prophetic story of the power of community arts. This is not about the fine arts, it is about the ability of an arts center to cross divides. It also describes the role the business leaders can play in making a real difference in the cohesion and narrative of a city. One with all the history of class and social distance most of our urban areas are faced with. This should be a lead story from the evening news and central to the promises of our public servants. The arts are not a human interest, but a vehicle of transformation. This shows how the arts, in the hands of everyday citizens, with a little help from people like Rick, can bring us together again. Read the book."   –Peter Block, author of Flawless Consulting and Community.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Foggy Mountain Press
• Release date: Jun 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781736726419

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Call

It was late fall in 1990. I was sitting in my office on the main level of the old Walnut Street School in Wooster, Ohio, when my phone rang. This formerly abandoned and boarded up brick school building built in 1902 consisted of a large cube with square, spacious rooms in each corner on two levels. The worn hardwood floors, darkened with age, still had a bit of a shine. Tall, narrow windows provided light, while new gallery lighting enhanced the space. The ceilings were ten feet high with tall, double hung windows. In the gallery in one corner of the first floor, large four-by-eight-foot white panels hung vertically with chains from the ceiling and, appearing to float, provided wall space and helped break up the large room. The building had been purchased in 1984 by Rubbermaid Corporation, then headquartered in Wooster. They renovated it to create the Wayne Center for the Arts, of which I was executive director.

Entering the old school, you walked up some wide, worn limestone steps to the large wooden doors and immediately climbed a broad, wooden stairway to the main level, where a receptionist’s office sat across the foyer. At that level, the stairway splits after the first flight of stairs and there was a landing dwarfed by an enormous wooden three-section window known as a Palladian window. It consisted of a large arched window in the center and smaller side windows. Daylight spilled in and lit up the entire area. The old period maple floors and stairs creaked beneath you. Doorways in each corner led into the large rooms. My office was in the front right section of the building, in what used to be the old principal’s office.

The person calling that morning was Judy Chalker, then community arts coordinator at the Ohio Arts Council, a state agency in Columbus funding the arts. She wanted to know if I had heard what was happening down in Hamilton. I told her I had not. Judy worked closely with all of Ohio’s community arts organizations, advising them and readying them to apply for grants. I had worked with her discussing plans and grants beginning in 1979 when I first arrived in Wooster and the arts center, then called the Wooster Art Center, was housed in the basement of a College of Wooster building.

I asked her what was happening down in Hamilton. I had been in Wooster, located about an hour south of Cleveland, for about twelve years, having arrived there to direct their arts center after a teaching job in Missouri. She told me Hamilton was going through a bit of a transformation or was at least attempting to. The community had just completed a cultural planning process led by Ralph Burgard, and their plan was to build a new community arts center. She said she also understood they would be hiring a new director since the current one wanted to retire. She thought I should check it out and see if it was something I might be interested in pursuing. Judy reminded me it wouldn’t hurt to just take a look.

I told Judy I would think about it, but…an arts center in Hamilton? I wasn’t so sure it would work, based on my limited knowledge of Hamilton as a tough, blue-collar city. I would soon find out the conditions there were far worse than I had imagined.

A few days after Judy’s call, I was sitting in my office, working on a grant application, when my phone rang again. This time it was Ralph Burgard, who was, at the time, the leading national arts consultant. Like Judy, he asked me if I was aware of what was happening in Hamilton. I told him Judy Chalker had called a few days earlier and filled me in. Burgard was an acquaintance from previous arts conferences where we had met and spoken briefly. He was somehow aware of my years in Wooster, most likely from the folks at the Ohio Arts Council, and he suggested I take a close look at Hamilton. He said it was an interesting city about three times the size of Wooster, and a group of people—following the conclusion of a cultural plan—were excited about the potential of the arts and what they could do for the community. His calling me was a boost for my ego. After all, he was the top gun in cultural arts planning in the country. But soon after the call, my ego deflated again as I began to feel inadequate to take on such a challenge. I wondered if my experience in a small town for a little more than a decade qualified me.

Burgard was an interesting man. He was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1927. He began managing orchestras and created the Rhode Island Philharmonic three years later, a typical arts administration position requiring staff management, financial responsibilities, marketing, and more. He became one of the nation’s first full-time arts council directors in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, from 1955–57. After that, he was in St. Paul, Minnesota, from 1957–65 to direct the Saint Paul Council of Arts and Sciences. He also established the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. He began consulting during the same period. Burgard was a founding member of Community Arts Councils, Inc. in 1960 and served as the first director of the Arts Councils of America (now Americans for the Arts) from 1965–70.

His impressive list of early successes earned him the unofficial title Father of Community Arts. He had another even less official title in the field as well: The Pied Piper of the Arts. This related to his uncanny ability to lead communities to imagine what could happen if the arts were given a chance. In his 1968 book, Arts in the City,i Burgard argued decentralized, community-based arts organizations rooted in local history and traditions could play a transformative role in towns of all sizes. His argument was the arts should no longer be solely confined to major institutions in larger cities but should be presented from smaller organizations able to engage with the general population more fully. Burgard was familiar with the work of Robert Gard of Wisconsin in the ’40s and ’50s and agreed the arts should be democratized, and the smaller cities of the Midwest were best positioned to develop and present the arts by the people, for the people. This ideology was certainly in line with what I believed.

In his book, he maintained local cultural institutions rooted in local history and traditions could transform towns, cities, and neighborhoods in large urban areas, although that theory had not yet been fully tested. Concerned about the lack of arts education in poor neighborhoods and rural communities, Burgard also created the A+ school program. This program served as the model from which the Fitton Center’s nationally recognized arts education program would be developed. Many of us in community arts followed his lead. Was this my opportunity to put his teachings into action, I wondered.

During our phone call, I asked him if he had created the excitement in Hamilton. Humbly, he said he had, and they had invited him to lead their cultural planning process. He’d had the opportunity to work with over one hundred business and community leaders, artists, educators, elected officials, and citizens from both Hamilton and nearby Fairfield for eight months. He was a humble, intelligent man, and oozed class. I had great respect for him.

I assured him, I would take a closer look, since he seemed certain the Hamilton opportunity was a good fit for me. Despite his confidence, I didn’t sleep well after my phone conversation with Burgard, feeling I lacked the skills and tools needed to meet his expectations.

By 1990, it had become clear to me my career in community arts was my destiny. I had read Burgard’s book in the late ’70s and discovered helping communities define and utilize the arts as a tool for economic development, improving student performance, and building community was the path I wanted to take in life. Little did I know such a path was littered with unexpected challenges—like learning politics and fund development—and would force me to face obstacles including networks of conservative businessmen and elected officials uninformed about the power of the arts. Many considered the arts a luxury or frill. That attitude always grated my nerves and I had tried to use that emotional agitation to create ways to prove them wrong.

Chapter 2

The Background

My parents migrated from Kentucky to Dayton with thousands of others who moved northward from Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia in the late 1940s after the war to find work. They found work and liked Dayton so settled there. Mom and Dad came from eastern and southeastern Kentucky respectively. People have been stuck there for decades near coal country in an infinite loop of poverty at no fault of their own, especially with the coal industry slowly dying.

I still have relatives there today.

Throughout my childhood, I was exposed to the pessimism of family members quietly wondering would happen to me if I couldn’t find a way out of those circumstances. My parents didn’t get caught in that loop, but I heard them express sorrow for relatives and friends there who couldn’t get out, mostly due to lack of education and opportunity. Fortunately, it was few. What I don’t remember is any family members being drug addicts other than a few who turned to alcohol. Of course, this may be due to the fact that Lee City, close to where my mother and her siblings were born and raised, is so small it’s called an unincorporated community by the Census Bureau with a population only estimated as never reaching more than one hundred.

The only alcohol available there was moonshine, and a couple of my uncles knew the suppliers. In a recent discussion with a Kentucky family member who still resides near Lee City, just on the other side of the mountain, drugs have consumed the town now—or what’s left of it. The town is located in Wolfe County, still one of the poorest counties in the state. Granny and Papaw, names I gave my maternal grandparents, and their kids actually lived in a holler called Stamper Branch. Holler is a colloquialism for hollow, which refers to the narrow valleys reaching well into the mountains with dirt roads leading into them. It was common for a holler to be occupied by only one family spread throughout it. I found this interesting excerpt from an online article explaining the importance of hollers in eastern Kentucky:

There’s a lot more to be said about an Eastern Kentucky holler, but if I don’t tell you another thing, you need to know that a holler is more than a narrow isolated lane that runs between the hills. A holler takes you to the place where you have always been loved and where you’ll always be welcome. A holler takes you to the place where you can find comfort and peace and a sense of belonging. It takes you to your roots and to your family and to the truth of who you are. A holler takes you home.ii

What’s inspiring to me is that during those years after having lived dirt-poor, growing their own meat and food, finding sometimes frightful solutions to accidents and diseases, it was the women who kept the family healthy and together. Women like my mom and her eight sisters, born and raised among these strong women, recognized opportunity following the war and decided to get out and create a better life for themselves by moving north. What courage that must have taken. Mom's only brother did the same.

In the ’40s, my Kentucky family moved out of Stamper Branch and closer to town on the main road, Route 205, just a quarter mile from the town center. Basically a Y in the road, it was comprised then of a general store and a small shack across the road that served as the post office. That shack preceded the general merchandise store and sold tobacco products, candy, and soft drinks, and it had a potbelly stove in the center. One of my uncles would walk me there once in a while, usually on our trips to Granny’s for Christmas when I was about nine or ten. A few old timers would be sitting around that old stove in rickety wooden chairs, spitting tobacco juice on the hot surface. I wish I could remember the stories told around that stove, but they disappeared like so many of my early childhood memories.

Around the time my family, except Granny, had migrated north in the ’40s and ’50s, the population of Lee City dropped about ten percent after their departure. I cherished our visits there, getting to experience true old-time music on porch jams deep in a holler, working summers hanging tobacco, topping corn, baling hay, and slaughtering hogs over winter weekends. Something about being among those hills and working the land freed my spirit. But by the time I was in high school, I always felt an underlying doubt about the future of my family there. And it seemed I wasn’t the only one; the others would express misgivings of their own about the future as we did chores or sat at the dinner table.

J.D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy, in case you haven’t read it, shared his recollections of growing up in Jackson, Kentucky. He offers a personal look at his early life in an urban Appalachian neighborhood of Middletown, Ohio, of conditions leading to the great migration north, and of issues he feels are affecting people in the southeast part of Kentucky. A major problem with Vance's work is that not only do his experiences differ widely from most of us who had them, but many who are quite familiar with Appalachia have discredited the book as confusing genetics with culture and bordering on stereotyping. Vance attributes many negative traits like being aggressive, lazy, or repulsive to Appalachian character when, in reality, where such afflictions actually exist, most were likely caused by decades of imposed economic difficulties and systemic poverty. If you have read Vance, I would recommend you also read Appalachian Reckoning: A Response to Hillbilly