Bill would sometimes join us at the Merritts’ house (Centennial House in Deer Isle, which is now Turtle Gallery). One of the times, Fran suggested recording a conversation with Bill, and we did it on 1 April 1987. (no fooling!) I wrote at the top of my typed (not digitalized) transcript: “Bill is a reticent, handsome man, recently moved to Stonington from New Hampshire, and the Merritts did all they could to help him feel welcome into the community….”
Fran, Bill and I conversed for about 90 minutes; it ended when the recording tape ran out on both sides. We did not do it again. Bill was already wearing a waist bag, suffering kidney failure, but was gracious and uncomplaining every time we saw him, and he got most enthusiastic when speaking about ideas and creating art works.
In the beginning of the recording I asked how Bill and Fran met.
Bill said, “I don’t know how we met; well, we were in the same classes…he lived in Reading [MA]; I lived in Cambridge.”
Bill said that when he began high school “we moved from New Jersey in 1926. I’d just begun high school in New Jersey. My father…worked for a printing firm in Hoboken, New Jersey, and some people in that firm, among them workers in the office and so on, and he was the foreman of the press crew. Some of the people wanted to start their own business…so there were people in Boston who wanted to do it, so they did.”
Bill described Cambridge as where he “met an art teacher who was quite good. Once I started taking his classes, he knew that I , when I started to work, in the class, I was just one of the group. He sort of encouraged me and a couple other kids who were interested and had talent, he gave a special class. …So I got interested. He was a watercolorist. …so it would be interesting.” He took college preparatory course in high school, “but I tried to squeeze in the art courses as in the four years course they tried to squeeze out the art. So finally in the last year I had to decide what to do…I more or less committed myself to the idea of going to art school.”
This was the beginning of their long friendship. Bill said, “Both Fran and I were in one of Richard Andrews’ classes; he was teaching painting. Two years. He was a very good draftsman. And a very down-to-earth kind of person. Took the work seriously, and took his teaching seriously. …When I look back on it now I think I respected his theorems. He was a comfortable teacher. But when I look back on it as of now, he skipped the whole business of expression.”
and on we went! The transcript, along with the actual tape cassette with our voices, is in the process of being donated to the UMO Special Collections library …
Here’s a snippet that Bill and Fran mentioned (and I can find nothing online about this fellow “Tur Vengtz” as Bill spelled it out for me.):
Bill to Fran: “I was telling Alana that before, after I experimented a lot in Cambridge [with lithography], then I bought the press and all, my father did pretty well; I thought many I’d do better working in a factory. My father’s place. I thought I’d get a job teaching something I know how to do. That might be, ah, I went to Mass Art. They couldn’t get interested in it. Then I went over to the Museum School and talked with Tur Vengtz, and I showed him things, and I thought it was a great medium, pretty excited. He said, ‘Oh, nobody makes lithographs now.” Which was true. I said, ‘I think we ought to get started.’ ’No, not that stuff.’ So I needed, so I turned the other way. So I guess I gave up the idea. Then the job up in New Hampshire turned up, and I took it.”
Fran Merritt: “But eventually he did set up shop.”
WH: “Oh sure! The next year. He must have thought about it after I left. I guess he thought he might as well do it himself.”
FM: “Oh, yes. [laughter]
WH: “I don’t know how he heard about it, but he obviously started experimenting. So I guess he thought it was a great medium. Then I went to NH. I guess I left my press in Cambridge, at my father’s house. Then Fran moved to New Hampshire. We got together again, and I had some artist friend who lived near. It was a comfort. At the academy there was hardly interest in art. So we got together and I said, I’ll move my press up here.”
AV: “He had a nice house.”
WH: “He had a big house. And so we got the press up and set it up and then I don’t know what the first time was that we did it. …
FM: “That was probably the first time, the summer of 1940.”
The two of them tried to recapture their year of experimenting on the litho press and invite students to join them (a few did), but the war intervened and Fran sold his litho press (he’d bought one for himself and Bill and Fran worked together in the Merritts’ barn) and Bill said, “Anyway, after the war, it was in Charlie Chuck’s house. I remember printing on it. You were there.” Meaning Fran, naturally.
I [AV] asked Bill: “Were you painting also, continuing that as well?”
Bill said, “I was painting also. Lithography continues to be an interesting medium, [he paused] I only spent two years at the university [in Florida], then I came to Colby, in 1948.”
Then the conversation went into the part about them splitting (Merritts went to Michigan and Bill to Florida) and coming back to New England and we began talking about Haystack school and how Fran asked Bill to teach lithography at Haystack—quite a feat and rare for an art/craft school to offer lithography as an art medium at that time.