CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER
By Bruce Alves III
Art for me has always been about the process of discovery, taking the “what ifs” and making them a reality. At no point in a person’s life are the “what ifs“ more prevalent than in the imaginative mind of a child. A single stick in a child’s hand can be anything from a wizard’s wand, to a snake, to a divining stick to Atlantis. Currently the work I create revisits that time in my life when anything was possible and the rules of reality did not seem to limit what you could do.
Continuing what I began in my last couple semesters of graduate school, I would like to continue my research on play. I would like to take my work and go beyond just the object, I would like to create an experience that brings the audience back to the last moment they thought, “What if?”
www.brucealvesiii.com
Taking old rusty parts I find in junkyards, flea markets or stumble upon while walking, I try to give them a new purpose by combining them with ceramic forms to create my own hybrid ‘toys’. Old cogs become wheels, a cast iron stove leg becomes a seat or a sprinkler head becomes an exhaust pipe. When looking for parts to make these toys, I ignore their original purpose. I want to be a naïve child again, looking at something for the first time and making it what I need it to be. These ‘toys’ signify for me that time in my life when life was carefree and I did not have a million e-mails to read or meetings to attend. The only thing that mattered was deciding what toy I was going to play with next. Bruce Alves III, Burnout, (image courtesy of the artist)
COMMUNITY VOICES
MASTERS OF THE TRACK By Robert Morrissey
Stan Masters (1922-2005) often quipped, “I'm not from the wrong side of the tracks, I'm from between the tracks”. The son and grandson of railroad laborers, Masters was born and raised in the noisy, hardscrabble world of steel rails and creosote ties. His grandfather, Grant Masters, began working for the Missouri Pacific Railroad in the 1890s as a 'section hand' near Sullivan, Missouri. Railroads, which by this time spanned the Continent and stitched the coasts together, were organized into sections, each roughly 10 miles long, depending on the location. Each section had a foreman who was responsible for maintenance of the track and right-of-way. They oversaw the section hands, who in addition to keeping the tracks clear of brush 17 ALLTHEARTSTL.COM SUMMER 2017
and debris, performed the grueling work of replacing the worn out 39’ steel tracks. Grant eventually worked his way up to section foreman and moved to Kirkwood, where he lived in the section house owned by the railroad. A two-room clapboard affair with a tin roof, the Kirkwood section house, located at 301 Leffingwell, just east of the Kirkwood Station, was painted MoPac (Missouri Pacific) yellow and brown. It had electricity but no running water. Behind it stood an austere one-room bunk house measuring 10' x 14' to house seasonal, itinerant laborers. A coal bin and water pump serviced both buildings. Situated at the confluence of three sets of tracks, one set coming within 6' of the front porch, it was a COMMUNITY VOICES
dirty, noisy compound with an estimated 75-100 trains passing by every week. The squeal of the wheels must have been excruciating as the trains slowed to approach the station. Grant and Louisa had 12 children there, six of whom survived to adulthood. The oldest, John, grew up to be the angry, belligerent father of Stan. John drifted from job to job, eventually raising his family in the bunk house. Stan was born on the 4th of July in 1922, the oldest of four children of John and Margurite (née Klamberg, the daughter of a Kirkwood plasterer). Stan recalled times when all the family had to eat was a can of soup. Once for Christmas, his aunt gave him a bar of soap. Trains are filthy beasts, and Margurite was