Thursday, July 20, 2006

Brothers of the Brush, Sisters of the Swish

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Barb's working on our geneology now, so I tried to help look up some old names and dates amongst the family albums. I use the term "albums" generically; they're really several big boxes with a few albums of prints, some old cardboard covered unframed portraits, and hundreds of loose photos jammed together without rhyme or reason. But while I rummaged through them, I ran across an old black and white photo that brought back some meaningful memories.

When I was nine, our Indiana hometown celebrated its centenial, and for a small town of only 14,000 or so, they put on quite a show. They hired a New York director to come to our small city for a couple of months and put on a pageant of our history, and the whole community got involved. The centenial celebration actually went on for about three months.

Far ahead of time the menfolk in town were asked not to shave, and contests were organized for the "Brothers of the Brush" who began to sprout everywhere around town to judge the best mustasches, sideburns, and beards. The women in turn were asked to make and wear oldtime costumes and bonnets, judged by others for their creativity and effect as the "Sisters of the Swish." And everyone, nearly, in the city got into the spirit of the thing. And for those few who resisted or tried to ignore the new/old looks, they did so at their peril. Mock trials were set up and conducted on Jefferson street sidewalk by the local circuit court bailiffs, sheriff, and judge, and men were stopped on the street if they were cleanshaven, tried immediately, and asked to serve "time" in mock public ridicule if found guilty (which all were). And if someone wanted to take it to a higher court, a stepladder was produced and the sentence repeated from a higher platform.

Within a few weeks, Huntington began to take on the look of a frontier town. A scripted dramatic history of the city was written. Parts were chosen and assigned to townspeople for the big pageant and parade culminating the celebration at Kriegbaum Field, and my brother, Roger, was excited to be one of the narrators. My dad was chosen to be a canal boat captain, and I was a frontier boy. I still have a picture of Daddy and me in our buckskins Mom made for us. Practises were held for several days beforehand, and it was no mean feat to organize as the cast of hundreds of local folks were put through our paces through the two-hour-plus show.

After a huge parade, in costume of course, the big show was finally produced at night, and it was really spectacular. It went off without a hitch, as I remember, despite the numbers involved and nonprofessional participants. As with school musicals, if you weren't yet "onstage," you were in the audience, and the audience groups were always coming and going to cue up for their scenes. I wish they had today's film and video technology back then, but no visual record of the 1948 pageant exists that I know of. Only newspaper photos and writeups preserve the flavor of those days. It was as if we stepped back in time one hundred years.

But perhaps the shock was greater when the celebration ended, and all the beards came off at one mass shave, and the women shed their 19th century bonnets and long skirts and suddenly began dressing in contemporary fashions. It was as if Brigadoon had disappeared back into the mist for another hundred years. The Brothers of the Brush and the Sisters of the Swish were gone in an instant.

I don't know if such an event would even be possible today. Certainly not in a large city. And it would only happen if people would support it. I'm not sure folks still have that much sense of community now in very many places, and it's kind of a shame I think. We don't know each other's names if we live more than a house or two apart, we interact through third parties of our employers or governments or church groups and clubs, and we have to lock our doors constantly against the rest of the "community" we don't even know. We didn't usually, then.

3 comments:

underwear ninja said...

i bet there's a lot of backstory to photos from back then. i think it'd have to be some kind of occasion to bring out a camera in those days. your dad looks a lot like you.

Carol Anne said...

We still have that kind of thing in the Chama Valley. The local radio station actually had the village of Chama singing "Happy Birthday" to the mayor last Friday.

But I will agree, this sort of small-town neighbor thing doesn't happen much any more.

krhuntoon said...

We found a button at a flea market recently that says "Dunkirk, Indiana Centennial June 14-20, 1953 100 Years of Progress Sisters of the Swish" and couldn't imagine what it was for. I found a souvenir program scanned online here http://www.archive.org/stream/mattoonmemoriess00matt/mattoonmemoriess00matt_djvu.txt for a similar event in Mattoon, IL. I'll send you images of the button if you like. Don't know what the origin could be for the Sisters of Swish. Katherine krhuntoon@gmail.com