Chapter 3 - A Budding Artist & Korean War Recall

Somewhere on the long bus ride back across the country, Meneeley woke up with numbness in his arm.  Don’t panic, he thought, as scenes of hospital gurneys sprang to mind. Sit straight and let the blood bring back life…

          

To memory, the adventures the young Navy medic found along the road could be summed up to a single surreal night walking the Las Vegas strip alone.  The rest of time passed in a haze of shifting landscapes. Sand, switch grass, verdant fields, nowhere towns and endless roads.

            

No longer a boy, the medic was going home. Near Pittsburgh the thought caused him to wretch out an open window. 

            

When his bus finally pulled into Wilkes-Barre, he shouldered his duffel and began walking. He hadn’t seen his family in four years. Stopping off at an old friend’s house, he was given a lift the rest of the way.

           

In the last shuffle of Meneeley’s discharge, communication with his family had become difficult. During this period, his grandfather passed away.
        

Uncle Paul, newly married, received the Halter home as a wedding present.  By proxy, Ed’s father absorbed his son's portion of what would have been his mother’s inheritance and upgraded the family house. After hugs and welcome home’s all around, Edward was shown around the new home, pleased to discover the property had a little shed out back he could later convert to a studio.

            

The novelty of the son returned-from-war was exhilarating, but as the energy of reunion began to fade, tension with his step-mother seeped in to fill its place.  Once Meneeley exhausted his neighborhood rounds reconnecting with old friends and collecting the parcels shipped back from California, he began researching art schools intent on cashing in on his first installment of the G.I. Bill, and once again, escape life at home.

           

“My step-mother saw me as a considerable threat,” Meneeley recalls. “There was no denying it.”

           

Joseph Halter

             2

Carpentry came easily to junior as Ed and his father worked on fixing up the new family home. Once the house was up to par, Ed began fixing up the small shed in the yard, his relationship with his step-mother still workable as he unwrapped his parcels of brushes, oils and rolled canvases sent ahead from Riverside.
          

In terms of colleges, there was the safe, easy choice: Kutztown Teacher’s College, a well-regarded rural university and after 30 years teaching, retirement.  Marriage. Children. White picket fence. 

           

Ed's first studio, photo taken in 2010

The way his step-mother made herself at ease among the spoils of his grandfather Halter's deaths, acting as though it was something she “deserved” irked Ed, making him want to escape.  All must have know his stay would be temporary as he takes a room downstairs with a big bay window as far away as possible from the others. But that doesn't stop his aunt from making her way down to him one night from her upstairs bedroom to come on to him. 

           

"I cared about Gloria and Beverly," he recalls, "But I eventually had to blow the whistle. The next day I shouted at my parents about running a whorehouse!”

           

Intent on a second escape, Ed listened with delight to a radio advertisement of an experimental school opening in Wilkes-Barre, The Murray School of Art, a platform of exposure to the cultural transformations taking place a couple of hours by train in Greenwich Village.  

         






     3

           

Enrolling in the Murray School, Ed began feeling comfortable and productive for the first time since departing his last patients in California.  At home, conditions with his step-mother continued to deteriorate.  After a while, he and Rose began directing their conversations through others again or would sit in silence and wait for someone else to buffer their vitriol. 

Gloria, please tell Edward not to wear his filthy shoes in this house, she command her daughter through clenched teeth.

But before his step-sister could grunt a protest, Ed fired back, dear sister, please tell your mother that if it weren’t for the nude model waiting in my life drawing class I would be obliged to shove my foot in a place where the sun refuses to shine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aktzeichnen.jpg

It went on like this for weeks before Meneeley finally found the courage to confront his father. Finding him largely unsupportive, Edward began renting an old grocery store front on Madison Street in Wilkes-Barre. Borrowing his Uncle’s truck, he moved his studio equipment and began selling jazz records to supplement his income.  It was the only place in town with a supply of “race records,” and Ed kept an open door policy with musicians.  At any time one could walk in to the sounds of Charlie Parker’s far out jazz playing on the phonograph or hear the house band of his close friend, Dave Christian, a jazz drummer who often performed at local clubs, practicing late into the night between gigs. 

During performances, Meneeley inevitably went along to listen and dance. At the hometown shows he often encountered Viola, Dave’s younger girlfriend whom Ed first met after basic training before shipping out West.  Together they would drive to see concerts, motoring to Philadelphia for a brief stretch to see Laurence Olivier in Hamlet eight times. 

Back in Wilkes-Barre, Ed painted designs around the store’s display windows with tempered paint. When it rained the gutter filled up with colored water. Inside he’d laugh amusedly as people side-stepped the paint running down the sidewalk into the street. 

At the Murray School, Ed’s paintings became more radical, piquing the interest of his instructor John Cabor, whose girlfriend worked for the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader.  Often if Cabor saw something of Ed’s he liked, he would just pick it up and walk away with it.  Such targeted attention did little to ease relations with other students in his classes.  An illustrative example happened once Meneeley left his easel during a class to use the bathroom. In his absence, some of the other students threw paint on his work to mess it up.  Noticing the insult, Meneeley kicked the easel across the room, frightening the model enough to run out.

“I don’t know which one of you fuckers did this but that’s the last time I work in this fucking space!” he yelled, before returning with his signature smirk. “But you’re still going to see me everyday.”

           

         








                    4

As classes progressed, students responsible for their own materials felt the pinch.  For Meneeley, money was tight.  Aside from paints and canvases, heating coal was expensive, so he began ordering it and charging it to his family to stay warm.  Record sales were weak and private lessons, more of a summer activity, dried up in winter.  Worst of all, his GI Bill was running out. 

Luckily for Edward, the founder of the school, Alexander Murray, began showing an interest in him.  Despite Ed's brash methods, the prevailing attitude of the faculty expressed a confidence that Meneeley might actually become an artist, a concept Edward didn’t quite understand. 

Alexander Murray, brother of Senator Murray from Montana, did his best to recruit artists from the Arts Students League in New York for lectures.  While Meneeley produced most of his work at home, during school hours he was free to chat up the school’s secretaries and eventually got a job running art supplies as Mr. Murray’s driver between Wilkes-Barre and Scranton. Finding the young lad’s spirit uplifting, Murray later invited Meneeley to accompany him on buying trips to New York.

On his first night in the city at the St. Moritz on Central Park South, in a room of his very own he closed the door to the amazement of seeing his whole self reflected back at him. The entire back of door was a mirror. His first completely narcissistic experience, he tore off his clothes and began dancing around like a clown.

Many other aspects of New York caught his attention, like a lesbian bar in Greenwich Village adorned all in red velvet he mistakenly stumbled into where he couldn’t tell who was male or female. 

His first trip to MoMA, Ed walked right past Guernica in awe into the permanent collection—Mondrian, Russian Constructivists and Russian Suprematists, sensing a religious psyche behind their work

At first Mondrian and Malevitch enrage him. Later they become major influences.

“A white canvas with a white square floating in it...at first I thought, Oh God, fuck it, that’s not art! I was angry. There was nothing there. Just a funny little square on a rectangle.  Why should I care about it?”

Kazimir Malevich
'Supremetist Composition White on White'
 MoMA 1917

 “Later, I thought, why am I still thinking about it? Why can’t I get it out of my mind? Because it was a crackerjack work of composition!  As I began to read and learn more, I slowly realized I was being influenced.  It was about culture. After a lot of thought, I realized the square wasn’t on the canvas but was rather with the canvas. It turns on the entire rectangle and totally energizes the canvas. A person seeing this can’t eat pieces of it, but rather, is forced to swallow the whole thing.

            

“Suddenly I woke to the fact that art was not about making paintings, it was about revealing some kind of cultural energy.  Each time—30s, 40s, 50s, etc.—has its own energy. Art was slowly changing the view of humanity. And I certainly was no longer as idealistic as I once was.”

           

                     








               5

After three years at the Murray School, Meneeley began flirting with a move to NY.  His instructor’s girlfriend wrote a story on him for the newspaper and he began to get publicity.

            

“I felt terrific about the piece,” Ed recalled. “What impact it had on my family, I have no idea. Certainly, though, in the community, it took me from being an anonymous student to becoming a known entity.”

            

Locally, Meneeley discovered a large Jewish population in Wilkes-Barre enjoyed hosting art shows.  In many cases works were done on canvas board, and Meneeley recalls watching a man hanging a show by pounding a nail right through the picture. 

            

Slowly, he began selling some work and patrons invited him into their homes. Just like his first stunt in the military, Meneeley couldn’t believe the food. He began to appreciate Jewish people because they seemed to care about culture whether through financing the orchestra or reserving a row of seats in the theatre. 

            

Just as momentum built in his life as an artist, he received papers recalling him for the Korean War.  Full of dates about reentry and exams written in legalese, Ed didn’t pay much attention to them. He was too busy cavorting with an older woman, a jazz buff, who spent her money lavishly on him with trips into the city for a weekend. They ate well and stayed in nice hotels, witnessed Dizzy Gillespie perform at Birdland, followed by the German play “Enemy of the People” the next.

            

At the end of the play, people stood up and applauded. Meneeley stood with them, caught up in the enthusiasm, but he still wasn’t quite sure what it all meant.

            

Anita Oday

Together they listened to Sarah Vaughan performing live.  Another night, Anita Oday singing with her back to crowd, her body an instrument, expressing to the audience it shouldn’t matter if she felt like smiling or not.

            

One Monday morning, Meneeley reported to take his Navy exams under the impression he still had 30 days to straighten up his affairs, but he had misread the summons.  Once he arrived he couldn’t go back.

            

Panicked, he found a telephone and was forced to plea with the operator for a connection home so he could have his friends take care of closing the store.  In just a few minutes he would enter the next building and thrust officially into war. 

           

                        6

            “Welcome Aboard.”

Philadelphia Naval Yard

From New York, Meneeley was quickly transferred to the Navy Yard in South Philadelphia where the master-at-arms sent him to get outfitted and report the next morning to ambulance duty. His first job was to pick up a Vet suspected with pneumonia. Meneeley was given keys to the medicine cabinet, but after picking up the patient, he didn't recognize any of the drugs.  He hadn't had the time to be brought up to speed, so he shouted for the driver to turn up the heat and get back as quickly as possible. 

Back at the hospital, Meneeley blew his top.

"How was I supposed to know penicillin was given up for ampicillin? I was never given instructions on dosages…these are human beings!”

            

His insubordination was tolerated, he recalls, mostly because medics outnumbered regular military.  Medical needed to be fast and efficient. “Fuck saluting or wearing all of your uniform, it didn’t matter once you got the job done,” Meneeley recalled.  “After that I took a walk to cool off, then decided to try to understand what type of beast I was now a part of, so I went into the hospital elevator and got off at every floor to see what was going on.”

Philadelphia Naval Yard

            Psychosis.

            Orthopedics.

            Easels? 

“You’ve got artists here?” he asked.

"Yes,” Chief Petty Officer responded.

“Need another one?”

“No.”

Defeated, Meneeley turned to go.

“Know anything about photography?” the CPO asked.

Meneeley’s quick pivot and outstretched arm caught the door before it sealed in front of him.     

Off to the right was a photography studio, with much of the same equipment as his grandfather’s darkroom—his uncle’s camera, chemicals, fixers, trays, rolls of film.      

“We need somebody who can make prints.”

            

Meneeley took a breath. 

            

“Do you know what this is?”

            

“A negative,” Meneeley responded.

            

“Well then go on. There’s the darkroom. Make me a print.”

            

Inside the slick curtained doors, the world was totally blacked out but for the red light and the sting of chemical odors.  On a table rested a motorized system above trays to facilitate the process.

            

“It even rocked itself!” Meneeley exclaimed.

            

The print still wet in the tray, he showed the officer, who immediately picked up the phone and had him transferred. 

           

A career in photography had begun.

           

                        7

After earning the respect of his colleagues, Meneeley’s duties began to expand and eventually he would work on the in-house newspaper circulated throughout the hospital. Obsessed with his new toys, he began practically living in his photo studio, teaching himself to master the equipment, eventually developing an efficient system for developing and recording prints.

            

Another aspect of his job involved taking photos at officers’ parties.  On his first assignment, Ed forgot his flash, so he never loaded any film and pretended. As the night wore on, Meneeley began paying attention to a particular officer eagerly intent on a much younger woman.  Suspicious of having been documented with a woman other than his wife, the officer responded angrily and insisted the film be ruined. 

            

Overall the majority of medics were from WWII. Relaxed veterans, some refused to wear Navy clothes or salute.  “We did the job,” Ed recalled, “but we didn’t always adhere to Navy protocol.”

            

Most photography assignment consisted of documenting dead people from surgery.  Specimens were shot in Koda-Chrome. During these depressing months, Meneeley and others spoke of how they’d been suckered back into a war in which they only witnessed the death and diseased. 

            

“Everybody who had taken advantage of Federal money was brought back into it.  There was no draft. For the doctors and full-time nurses a medical education was expensive, so there was a seemingly unlimited amount of money for photography.” 

           

Before a wall painted with a black measurement grid, Meneeley snapped pictures of naked patients displaying infections, many frostbitten with gangrene, as research materials.  Later documentation would provide the answer to questions like Does the body slink lower after surgery, etc.? The ships coming home were full of educational material, most awaiting amputations and already addicted to morphine, delivered from Korea to South Philly. 

nurses caring for amputee soldiers

            

Meneeley expressed the public’s limited awareness of the war.  “Soldiers came back and no one seemed to know what they were talking about.  That is why it was so hard for them. It wasn’t an official war so banks could foreclose on the homes of Doctors who had been shipped overseas at drastically reduced wages. They would come home to wives put out on the street and many couldn’t handle the pressure. Because the war was more of a police action, the same types of protection weren’t there for them.” 

            

One of the most interesting assignments for Meneeley was to photograph a patient’s who had died aside a steam pipe after wandering off and getting lost in the bowels of the hospital.  Arriving to witness a body blown open and skin peeling off, Meneeley described the corpse like a person wrapped in lace, with remnants of his skin hanging delicately on the surrounding pipes.

            

“It was like Mrs. Habersham, living full of decadence with a dining room table covered in moss. Table is always set. Rats running around. She hires a little boy to play with her niece, and later tells him she’ll break his heart when done. It was that kind of atmosphere.”

            

Every now and then, while sipping coffee on his floor’s common area, a body would fall past the window.  

            

Suicides. 

            

In this depressing environment, Ed recalls the prevailing attitude as “Why respect the establishment when the establishment didn’t respect you?”

           

That in mind, he began to hoard supplies with the intention to create art.

            . 

               
                8

            

After his first year, Meneeley was transferred to a civilian hospital outside the base where most military operations took place.  Being the headquarters of the district, they had their own illustration team responsible for propaganda posters and other graphic materials.

            

Ed was one of few enlisted men in this new hospital. The rest were psychologists, scientists, chemists, physicists, etc.  Since they had no photography department, Meneeley felt his move was due to his perceived work ethic, though most of the time he was creating his own experimental photographs unbeknownst to the others.

            

His first assignment: create a poster to elicit concern about the amount of food being wasted.  It would be put on every sub, ship, etc. Meneeley was told they had gone through a lot of trouble to get him and they hoped he would be part of the team. 

            

After thinking about it for a while, Meneeley created a poster of a stainless steel chow tray. As a metallic frame, it could get a lot of contrast. Despite its ubiquity, the tray was not an unattractive object.  He then scrounged around the library for information on malnutrition and found images of starving children.  On the tray, instead of food, in the various sections he inserted images of starving children and submitted it.  No words. No statistics. The whole thing was totally graphic. The makings of a photographer as printmaker. 

            

The equivalent of the art director thought it was terrific, but many who saw it over the course of a weekend complained.  Monday morning, a group of Meneeley’s superiors recanted. “This has been successful and is very moving, but it’s upsetting to people. It offended the cooks.  But we still want to use it. Can you just change some of the images and put some lettering on it?”

            

“You can do whatever you want with it,” he responded, “but I won’t touch it.”

            

They were confused. “Why can’t you just…?”

            

Ignoring their pleas, Ed started on another poster. 

            

His superiors fumed. 

           

When he left to use the bathroom, a group cornered him. “Why are you being a radical son of a bitch?”

            

“Look, I didn’t ask to be here. All you have to do is transfer me back.”

           

Forty-eight hours later he was back at his old position on the contingent he would still perform their assignments part-time.

           

             

                  9

Back to working before/after surgery shots on a tripod, Meneeley photographed hundreds of naked gangrene amputations. 

           

“Somewhere along the line a mistake had been made. Someone thought of Korea as a tropical country and ordered the wrong gear. Soldiers often stood too long without rotation and were coming down with frostbite.  Toes and fingertips went black.  By the time they got back stateside, gangrene had often set in.  It felt like we were running a surreal portrait studio, shouting at little kiddies and wedding couples except so many were amputees, and we were recording their last portrait before limbs were lost.”

            

In some instances, Ed photographed during surgery. One stinging memory dealt with a person having their face peeled off to remove cancer from their lip. Surgeons took the jawbone out, wired it temporarily while casting a piece of the removed jaw.

            

“It’s pretty amazing to see a person’s personality removed like that!”  

            

Meneeley continued the surreal work of morgue research photographer.  Assignments had him shoot close-ups to be later used as educational materials. He remembered the sound of cut ribs resembling a xylophone.  Beneath the skin and bones, he recalled, “colors are amazing, particularly the organs of smokers which made the colors enhanced.”

            

At the same time, Meneeley was gaining experience with the best equipment and technology available. Ecktokrome took a long time to develop, yet it was possible to get the processing performed locally.  Kodachrome remained under control of Eastman Kodak, and had to all be sent Rochester, New York.  This knowledge would later come to be of great use in his career as an art archivalist. 

            

The experimental equipment lab still kept him on as a consultant.  The rest of the workers, mostly civilians, left after their 9-5, so many weekends and evenings he had the place to himself and all its equipment and materials. During this time, he began producing sculptures out of Plexiglas cubes, and later, linear constructions made of welded Pyrex tubing, which would be the subject of is first solo show on Rittenhouse Square.

            

As his time during the Korean War Recall wound down, he set out on a mine-sweeper mission around Cape May.  There, erosion had washed in an entire street. Watching from the deck, it was the culminating moment compounding the surrealistic experiences of the past few years.

            

“Today, advertising has blown the back end off of surrealism! At the time it looked to me as though Pompeii had erupted. It forced me to attempt to understand human evolution through all of this.”

           

During his free time, Meneeley took to painting from the hospital roof. Looking north, he could see all the quasi-huts filled with morphine addicts. 

           

“From my vantage point, it was easy to visualize the amount of morphine addicts about to be dumped on American society. The market was right in front of me.”

            

Anticipating his discharge, Meneeley began mailing photographic equipment to friends on the outside to keep it safe until he arrived.

       

                    10

            

Finally discharged, Meneeley remained in Philadelphia working as a shipping clerk at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals. While still in the Navy, on weekend leave he began migrating back and forth to Wilkes-Barre, hoping to persuade Viola to move with him.

            

In 1952, Ed showed the Pyrex sculptures as his first solo exhibition at the Donovan Gallery on Rittenhause Square run by a University of Pennsylvania professor and his wife. The show consisted mainly of the sculptures created in the experimental lab produced out of the new glass and plastic materials in the Constructivist idiom with Mondrianesque geometry.

            

Opening night is a disaster.

           

A terrible snow blanketed the guests’ heavy coats. Many, mistaking the sculptures for coat racks; threw their damp, heavy wools over the transparent sculptures. Two-thirds of the show was destroyed, including one huge piece Meneeley had just carried across town. 

            

His second two shows at Donovan consisted of wooden structures and paintings. Meneeley recalled the work “unlike the spare, linear style of the sculptures. The paintings used a heavy palette knife technique, exploiting the subservient texture and color of the material, determinedly expressionist and gestural – reminiscent in the quieter works of Tobey, and in more communicative ones of Frankenthaler and DeKooning.” 

            

Later accounts recall it was a loosening up in his character as he began to find his way both artistically and personally.

           

Parma Gallery Poster

“Emotionally, at this time, I needed more range.”

At about the same time, Ed learned his old anatomy instructor at the Murray School, John Cabor, was now working at the School of Visual Art on 23^rd Street in Manhattan. 

            

Soon after his third show at Donovan, the gallery closed. Recognizing more opportunities existed in New York, Meneeley plotted a course to take advantage of his second installment of the GI Bill. 

            

During his first few visits he witnessed how Abstract Expressionism began exploding onto the scene, receiving both critical and popular attention.  Seemingly divided into two schools, Action Painting and Color Field, this new breed of painter sought to take in worldly impulses, confront them with the powers of the unconscious, and leave the imprint of raw emotion on the bare canvas.  Paintings that dove below the surface details of the world. The aftermath of legendary battles of spirit.

              

Viola in tow, Meneeley boarded a train without looking back.