Michener Museum here we come!

12 of us carpooled to the Michener in Doylestown PA. Always a pleasure to visit the Michener.

Here are my photos of this great art museum in the suburbs:

Oops, how did Grace Catherine Deming get in there?

Basil Antrobus, one of the security guards. A few years ago he told me about his home country Barbados and that's how I decided to take a trip there. All by myself. Steve Yarde was my taxi driver. We still correspond via Facebook.

Hadn't realized that James Michener was still alive when they opened the museum in his name. It used to be a men's prison and is a perfect example of intelligent recycling.

The Michener is in the "Cultural District" of Doylestown which also features the huge Bucks County Library and the Mercer Museum of tools and artifax of early America, the only museum my kids enjoyed.

We were visiting the Mercer when they were little and we saw out of an upper window some men playing volleyball at a building nearby.

Volleyball during the day? Aha. They were in the men's prison.

A Nakashima chair. The Japanese-American woodcarver was orig. trained as an architect but became known for his natural-style furniture. He and his family were locked up in internment camps during WW2.

Look at the contrast between the polished and the rough.

Some favorite paintings...






Behind locked doors is the Boardroom of the museum. Furniture by Robert Whitley.

These photos are from a photo exhibition originally shown at the Smithsonian Institute. Subject: Elvis Presley. Photographer is Alfred Wertheimer.

Elvis was just 21 when he burst onto the scene in racially divided America in 1956. He bought his clothes in a menswear store for blacks.

Elvis and mom.

Elvis and dad. Note cinderblock and hole w/ wood covering.

Elvis w/ his former high school sweetheart Katherine Hearne. Bye-bye love.

Now we move onto the other show of American icons: the great Muhammad Ali. Here he is fighting w/ George Foreman, I believe, tho I could be wrong. Ali's strategy was to tire out his opponent by letting him use all his energy to punch Ali against the ropes, a technique subsequently named Dope-a-Roping.

It's interesting how both of them came to a tragic end, Presley thru drugs (which, fortunately, the exhibit steered clear of) and Ali w/ his Parkinson's disease that rendered him speechless.

You can tell just by looking which phase of life Ali is in. Post-boxing.

Ali, the former Cassius Clay Jr, gained fame as an Olympic boxing champ.

Holding his daughter, who would later become a boxer, like my little Sarah became.

The late Gordon Parks of Life mag took this photo of Ali in training. The saying is that boxing is not won in the ring, but in the months and weeks before, when you're in training.

More Gordon Parks. Ali's self-confidence was wonderful for the entire black nation.



Ali and Caddy.

Horsin' around w/ dad, Cassius Clay Sr.

Mom serves fried chicken.

Thanks, Basil, for taking us into the Boardroom. We looked outside and he explained how the museum is expanding. They have extremely generous patrons.

Panaramic view of The Door.

Ah, now we enter the former office of James Michener himself. A local boy, he was adopted and lived in many places w/ his large family as they scraped out a living.

Note how steep the keyboard is of Michener's Olympia typewriter. I used to type on an Olympia, Hermes, Royal, Remington and Adler.

Correspondence w/ his publisher who suggested changes in his ms. Courteously, the published would say, "Might you change.....?"

I adopted this style myself and just began a query letter to a local florist saying, "May I write an article about you?"