 Welcome. I'm Ginny Callan. I'm the director here at the T.W. Wood Gallery for about another month or so. And the gallery does a lot of things with art, and we are really excited to be hosting Delia Robinson tonight with the Orphan Train. I'll just tell you, after the show, wander around. And in the other room, the green room is the Works Progress Administration Works in the 1930s and 40s. During the Depression when Roosevelt was trying to create jobs in many different ways, including paying artists to paint. But I'm not going to say more than that because we have a wonderful artist here with us tonight. Delia Robinson and she is going to show us the story of the Orphan Train, talk about it, show us her cranky. Mark's going to play a little music and we're in for a wonderful night. So thank you for coming and supporting Community Art. Thank you. I'll put these on. I actually will be able to see my notes. I'm going to take you down a meandering path, but I intend to get to where we're going eventually. With the trains, you can't really very much where you go because you've got a track. The track is here in the form of notes. Okay. There was a Thomas Hart Benton painting up there. Please imagine it. It's him. It shows a folk scene with people playing music and singing. And because that was chosen because tonight is predominantly about a ballad. Ballads are story songs. And this particular ballad, as you know, is Orphan Train. And the ballad is pretty straightforward in the telling of it and dawn. And like many ballads, it's based on real events. And the hot topics of ballads usually are murders, catastrophes of all sorts, and calamities in love. But they usually really are actually based on real events. And regardless of the subject, ballads often evoke strangely deep emotions in their listeners. In our collective paths, when there were no radios and no movies and no TVs and no books, ballads were the evening's entertainment. And a ballad would be sung down the years again and again and again. Nobody got tired of it apparently. And the details would shift as it traveled by word of mouth to new locations. So if a ballad was about the town of Oxford and you move, it becomes the town that you move to. It's now about Martinsville. And they just pack in those words to fit the situation of their lives. And when I first heard tonight's ballad, the Orphan Train, it was about the largest redistribution of children in the United States history. And it caught my attention. And I went right to work to dig out the story behind this. And the Orphan Train, it tells of a massive social experiment and exaggeration of what is nowadays called Greyhound Therapy. And if you've ever heard of that, you know what it is. But if you don't know, it's when homeless people are put on buses and they're just sent anywhere. It's let them become someone else's problem. It's the thinking behind Greyhound Therapy. And it's still done. And I suspect that some of the thinking behind the Orphan Train concept was just get these kids out of town. And by the tens of thousands, children simply vanished into the West. And except for those children who vanished into snow banks, because there were occasional deliveries of Orphan Trains coming up here to bring unpaid workers for the dairy farms. Little boys who looked like they could be dairy farms, boys. Okay. So is the dairy boy up there? Thank you. Okay. To me, this child's seizing has a certain familiarity with recent events. And that puts me into dangerous political territory, which I'm really not going to go into. But now, while I sort of get a grip on myself, I'm going to talk about crankies. And then we can go back to the trains in a minute. Like the children on the Orphan Trains, the crankies have a similar lost history. A cranky is a pre-industrial viewing box in which a scroll is rolled past a window with or without narrative or music. And discovering the history of crankies is kind of like learning the history of a potato masher. No one documented when we gave up using a stone to mash a potato. Some events are just too ordinary to notice. And that's how it is with potato masher. And it's how it was for crankies. Okay. Crankies are often used as an apparatus for story songs. And in the dim reaches of the past, similar theatrical effects were made without the cranky box to contain the story. For instance, Aboriginal Australians and the people, because they were found late by the Europeans, things that people living in those conditions did were documented. And so they were found to make story sequences on tree bark or on rock faces or in caves. And then they repeated the same motifs on their bodies. They painted their bodies so that as they sang or retold the old tales, they could merge fully with them. And I'm very sorry I didn't do that for you tonight. But they could move their arm out. And if there was a tree in the painting, their arm would become part of that tree. And I don't know what you're seeing there, but I imagine you're seeing a beautiful rock painting. Good. And so innumerable other cultures created equally complex sequential illustrations of nature. They did them in nature and they did them on scrolls and on picture cards and on large paintings, like the story sequence from Java, which I didn't underline. If you can figure out the story in that, you're way ahead of me. But it's a very beautiful work, I think. Every language seems to have had a descriptive word for this kind of illustrated story singing. And today most everyone seems to have settled on the word cantistoria, which is singing stories. But if your child's teacher says they're studying Japanese kamishibai, you don't need to get real nervous because it's just a cranky cousin. It sounds more dramatic than it is. And in that the puppet master or the master of the story clicks those sticks together and that tells the crowd to gather. And then they start the story and they pull cardboard pictures out of their stack and they pull them out and on to the next. And it's kind of interesting to see how children in old scenes of Japan on YouTube, they're as excited as if they were watching a story that was in a continued narrative. They don't mind the pictures coming out and neither did I. Okay, in almost every case, social anthropologists initially considered these sort of pictures to be only artifacts. They were just pretty pictures. But of course it turns out that they're storytelling devices. In many places, like India, this remains an active tradition. Such pictures might be hand-held as in this picture where it's being rolled by two people and the man is singing and as a story rolls and it tells stories. They also have painters in India and Bengali painters who are very, very famous for their stories, scrolls, or painted on as a large picture. And now in India they're putting those up in train stations and stuff around the top so that people who are waiting for the train can enjoy a story that they themselves must know already. Okay, then the next slide shows a ballad singer from its Dutch and it demonstrates the function of the pointer. It's still used today in certain kinds of pentastoria and the pointer is held by the professor. And an art expert said, to increase the tension are not arranged in chronological order but the singer points out the truth with a stick. Well, that's a good way to get to the truth, I guess. All over Europe, in Northern Europe they were called bench singers because they'd stand in the marketplaces on benches so they could be up high and be seen. And they hung out in marketplaces from the Middle Ages right up to 1940. That's a long stretch of most human kind history. And in 1940 the Nazis outlawed this kind of story singing. And interestingly enough, Bertolt Brexmack the Knife is a surviving German cantistoria that was written for the three-penny opera but it's a scary sort of blood soaked hats off sort of to the old ballads. The man or woman singing it holds these little bloody pictures and it's pretty bloody, you know, it's scary. Various versions of cantistoria are used by bread and puppet all the time. And by 1800 in Europe and in America these illustrations got assembled into a timeline and they glued them together and made a long scroll. Around then Goya sketched a peep-show cranky. You see this naughty picture. But largely the presentations, the larger presentations were already being shown in theaters. They were called moving panoramas and they became immensely popular everywhere. And whether they were alone or whether they were incorporated with the theatrical performance. Some of them were book-sized and this one in the picture is from around 1864 and it shows the soldiering life during a war between the states. So sitting around the campfire having a wonderful time I'm sure. And the next day they get some big battles if you turn the little knobs you get to see what happened next. And some were tiny like this little palm-sized English cranky of the Boer War and that was 1899 to 1902 and I guess wars were a popular cranky theme for these little ones. But that held right in somebody's hand that tiny little thing with the little knobs at the top. And some of them were huge. In 1848 Artist Frederick Church began to work with a group of romantic landscape painters and they created an 800 foot massive panorama of Pilgrim's progress which somehow doesn't sound exciting anymore but apparently it was because it toured for years and it finally was abandoned in a basement for a century. And then it was recently rediscovered or restored and people say oh it was in a barn, it was in a basement. It was found on the back of the truck on the way to the dump. All kinds of wonderful stories but in any case it was found and it was restored and it occasionally is showed in Sako Main Gallery there owns it. During most of the orphan train years you could go into theaters and you'd enjoy adventures that were delivered on massive crankies, massive. And here's the life of Garibaldi painted in watercolor in 1860 and other shows, I mean the life of Garibaldi, I don't think I would be tempted but you could go up or down the Nile that sounds bad or you could go up or down the Mississippi and the up or down part is you'd go to a show and it would be up the Mississippi and the next show would be down the Mississippi because nobody wanted to rewind that massive thing between shows. And then the whaling voyage which is in the whaling museum in Bedford, New Mass is just my idea of gorgeous, you get a whole year of whaling in on this now it's stretched out I guess miles of it but it looks beautiful to me but by the early 1900s these entertainments were vanishing they've been conquered by the onset of the film industry and oddly enough some of the first cinema efforts involved setting a camera on a tripod with a rotating top and then you could just turn the camera so that you could get a great big lovely panoramic view and I thought that was really funny because they're trying to recreate what they already knew which was a panoramic view and then they caught on that they had other options. Okay Peter and Alka Shuman of Bread and Puppet revived the concept in the early 60s and they renamed the device a cranky because it cranks that was Peter I think. They also gave crankies a new role in protest and street theater and that is it's very handy for that purpose because you can have a little fold-up kind of theater box and when the if the police come you just whoop and you're gone and there's no evidence that you were ever there. So they gave crankies that role and then some mainstream artists got involved but not very many. Here's Red Groom's cranky from a 60s show. He didn't even know that crankies were called crankies yet. He just had seen what they were doing and he made this a wonderful looking thing and it was been shown in a recent art exhibit which is how I knew about it and then there's a here's a massive recent scroll from someone called the a group called the Beehive Collective and Machias Main or Machias. Machias? Yeah and I think that their work looks just beautiful and it's all black and white because it photographs well and they're keeping everything copyright free so people are allowed to take their images and put them in posters or whatever and it's interesting. As for cranky vermoners, as you know there are many cranky vermoners and that includes the cranky emeritus Tom Azarian. His first two crankies, cranky scrolls were painted by Mary Azarian and then after that he took over the job and I'd love to see any of all of them and the remarkable Claire Dolan who works with Brad and Puppet and has the wonderful Museum of Ordinary Everyday Objects she's wearing a cantistoria skirt and she's holding that pointer so she can show you that increasing the tension, right? And I think that's a lovely picture and she just recently was written up in the New York Times which is a really sunny day for crankiest everywhere. Alright, you must wonder possibly why I'm involved with crankies much less singing to them. It's really not seemly for an old lady to sing in public but here I go later on. And some of you know that painting and making clay whistles a craft my mother taught me had been major in my life and singing old music. There's my sister Charlotte singing, we're singing a harmony together and she's waiting to come in and you put that into the mix and that's me. Except for books. I'm painting crankies because I like forgotten things and also because of a book I'm currently working on. I love anything about books even making them and that's my first public book in this next slide being admired by my dog maybe. And she's quite the reader. And my current book was supposed to be about ballads illustrated with dozens of clay whistles. I made dozens and dozens and dozens of clay whistles and I was awfully pleased with them but then my publishers I was captured by the crankies and in an inspired moment he suggested we venture into some strange ground that would be a book illustrated with crankies. They've all been photographed now so a cranky book is on the way. Now you're all qualified now to receive your Ph.D. in crankies. Very good for you and it's time to head back toward the orphan train. All the scrolls I've ever painted are for ancient ballads except the orphan train. It's not an ancient ballad at all. It's not even old. Utah Phillips wrote it and he didn't even notice the date he said. He said maybe in the 90s. And a labor organizer, a folk singer, a songwriter, a poet, and a man of conscience it said he chanced upon a group enjoying a picnic and he talked to them. Apparently he did talk to most everybody and he learned that they were orphan train alumni having a reunion and their stories appealed to him and out of their conversations this song grew. Utah Phillips had attachments into Vermont when he was recording at Philo Records in North Fairsburg he lived in a caboose on the premises and I like to say he composed orphan train in that caboose but it's not true. The dates don't work. I also dreamed up my hope that he'd approve of his song being sung to a cranky and we'll never find out. And I also suspect that if he were alive today he'd already have written another song one about the children at our southern border because those two stories have many, many parallels and now I've got to get me away from that again and on to our final chapter which is a story behind the orphan train. Like crankies and the potato masher the orphan train also embodies a largely hidden history. It's often considered a dark chapter in social reform. The concept emerged in New York City in 1853. Within a year the trains began pulling out the stations loaded with children and they rolled for 75 years. These trains were mostly forgotten until a TV miniseries in 1978. It gave them the catchy name of orphan trains. Over 100 years ago these shipments were called mercy trains or baby trains and they were for the placing out it was called the placing out of unwanted children. They were not orphan trains because they really weren't more than half the children on the trains had one living parent and over a quarter of them had two living parents who for some reason had been deemed incapable but talk about incapable on the very first train some children were handed off to strangers along the way without a backward look no documentation, no nothing, they were just gone and that sort of carelessness was the bane of this program and it makes an accurate history next to impossible one can't even be sure how many children were involved 100,000 children, 200,000 children you'll even hear 300,000 children or more depending on which historian is writing this but their heaps of lost paperwork and mountains of uncertainty and all they knew was how many trains rolled somebody kept account of that by the train station but how many kids were on those trains the survivors of the orphan train experienced the children who grew up said there were many more children than people say, many, many more the trains ran during the years when thousands of impoverished families were arriving in New York City and Boston and Philadelphia each week, mostly they were arriving by ship from Europe and take this family they're probably poor they know little or no English and they have skills that might not adapt to their new home and if anything happened to the two adults there's no safety net for these children and at that time untold numbers of children lived in hovels or on the streets and they survived any way they could epidemics of infectious disease opium and alcohol addiction and hunger decimated the slum-dwelling families and countless children were left without parents there were no child labor laws and that's a string bean factory you're looking at now it's probably one of the nicer jobs that was available to those children they're probably preparing string beans for restaurants I never was able to find out exactly what they were doing to the string beans but even very young children were used for all sorts of dirty and sometimes dangerous work when the orphan train programs began upwards of 30,000 homeless children were roaming the streets of New York City being victimized by gangs and forced into begging and they were scavenging for food or for places to sleep or they were snared into criminal activities hoping to save these children several charitable institutions joined with Charles Loring Brace who devised the orphan train scheme he thought it up he was a minister and he knew from his congregations the problems that happened to families if anything happened to adults and so he was a well-intentioned man and he disliked orphanages he noticed that the children and orphanages were hungry and cold and barely educated and they often were cruelly mistreated he believed that if children were raised in families far from the cities they'd be healthier and they'd learn to become productive adults he envisioned trains carrying these children to a better life and he made this dream this dream became his life's work he quit his job and did nothing but these orphan trains for the rest of his life with the Children's Aid Society that he created out of his belief huge social reforms were initiated and paid for by wealthy donors and here's how it worked neglected, truen or homeless children ranging from infants to adolescents were rounded up that's where the word foundling comes from they found them they took them to crowded orphanages and remember half of them had living parents over half and many of those parents wanted to keep their children but once they got snatched they never got them back there was no getting back they were gone and the children were scrubbed and given haircuts and dressed in clean clothes they were also donated and they were given a lesson in manners and how to say grace at meals and in most cases siblings were separated the idea was that they'd be more controllable if they did not have somebody there who they loved there are stories of children who insistently clung to their brothers or sisters and they were allowed to begin their travels together but I'm sad to say they were seldom adopted into the same homes groups of 30 to 45 children says the Children's Aid Society but groups like this one in the picture were put on trains and you see from that picture there's a baby in a baby carriage and they're teenagers they're all ages of children they were put on trains with just a couple of handlers to manage them on the journeys and the handlers were also supposed to on subsequent journeys to see what had happened to the ones that had been placed out but they were too busy and only one woman actually did that in a dedicated way and she took many of the photographs of children that show them in their home environments but it was very unusual for anyone to look after anybody as far as the Children's Aid or anything else so there they are with their handlers going off on this journey one man of 99 years old he recalled that as a 10 year old he'd been handed a baby Juanita was her name and he held her on his lap from New York City to Texas now can you imagine this is before disposable diapers how did they manage that it must have been very soggy and stinky on that train and so she was adopted in a nearby town and he kept in touch with her for the rest of his life and that's a long time to bond from New York City to Texas but the early trains were rough and they had primitive toilet facilities and wooden benches that they sat on and they also slept on those benches the trains stopped at depots and stations and the children were dressed in their nice outfits then and sort of probably scrubbed up a little bit and their hair combed and they lined them up on the platform or they marched them into some hall in town if it was a better place than the depot and they stood before the crowd and anyone who wanted a child could come up and choose one that was all there was to it sometimes money changed hands if several people wanted the same child there might be some bartering going on but years then passed and finally a farmer in Texas accidentally happened upon a child give away in the local depot and he was moved by the way these little frightened brothers clung together and they had been on three often trained crossings already and they had come out of a very unhappy situation and they were really frightened and he took them both, not meaning to he just felt so bad for them that he took both those little boys home to the astonishment of his wife and daughters when he got close to his farm he had told them to lie down in the back and put a blanket over them and then he said, I'm going to go in my house and tell my daughters to come out and bring in the groceries and they'll lift up the blankets and there you'll be and that's how the daughters found out that they now had two little brothers who were scared out of their minds but their stories are typical of the time their fathers lungs had been destroyed by mustard gas in World War I and he was bedridden and he couldn't support his family anymore at all and welfare didn't exist in any way yet and the family was in desperate circumstances and the mother died of TB and the children ended up on the orphan train and thanks to this farmer who took them in they grew up loved and cared for and their pictures of their lives from those first little pictures of the scared boys of them growing up through school and learning, starting smiling and their eyes sparkling and looking healthy and finally his old men standing by a tree that they were photographed by when it was a sapling and they were little boys and the farmer finally after they were adults he helped them find their birth father who was still alive but was still an invalid and they had a wonderful reunion with him and so that kind of story are the ones that were told because there really were both joyful stories and horrific stories emerging out of this mass relocations of children some of them were shockingly abused stories that really don't bear repeating and many were neglected or worked as slave labor and others found real homes but if they knew their own names they were encouraged to give them up and leave the past behind that was the mantra leave the past behind and sort of hang on to what you've got there's a woman in our town whose grandfather rode the orphan train as a toddler and he was taken by a Missouri family but his papers had all been lost and he was only two years old or so and he was too young to know his own name and so the man who took him home he already had six sons and so he obviously isn't going for farm labor with his two year old but he took him home and they called him Bailey because that was the name written on the locomotive that brought him to them and she said that he also had a loving home Susan Ross Grimaldi whose grandfather was on the train some of you might know her but she said he had a loving home and a good life but the children who weren't chosen went back on the trains and they were lined up again in the next town and in the next town and after three or four trips then they were sent back to a life in the orphanages which were apparently pretty horrible many selection stories were predictably weird or sad children objected to dirty fingers being put in their mouths to check their teeth like they were livestock and children cried when they were taken away by grubby men who smelled like alcohol and some fought to get away from people who they felt were dangerous to them and many people only wanted unpaid farm or domestic workers and that was distressing for many of the children but there were lucky children there's a picture here of a little boy who got a family and a car and one woman said that she chose the boy she took home because his hair was neatly combed she thought that meant he could be controlled and this picture by Norman Rockwell is owned now by Steven Spielberg and it typifies orphan-trained art which is usually terrible and very sentimental but it expresses the public dream of precious clean affection at little darlings and nobody thinks oh street-wise little monsters and little street urchins they just didn't think that but surprisingly enough only one out of ten children were rejected and sent back I think one out of ten is high the children's aid society thought that was really good and they also said there weren't all that many complaints about children but as you might suspect 80% of the placement complaints were about 14-year-old boys they were the most likely to act out to jump off the trains or to gamble or do other activities that were frowned upon or to just flee from wherever they were placed especially farms they were striking out for home and some of them made it back to New York City all the way from Texas or wherever they were left finally there are two other worrying issues that were raised by the transports race and religion in towns with orphan-trained history murals are often painted on town walls or in the defunct passenger depots community art and this slide shows a mural from Duwajiak, Michigan which where they were the recipients of that first orphan train where children were handed out along the way to anybody but that shows in the mural a mixing of races and that's a hopefulness that was contradicted by fact an ardent abolitionist the founder Charles Brace refused to send children south he just wouldn't let it happen but he also decreed that only Caucasian children would be accepted on the trains now there's a little bit of fudging on that you know if you've looked white enough they didn't notice too much but he said he made this rule because he didn't want to upset the rich donors another group of people du-gooders who put together a briefly run orphan train that traveled up and down the eastern seaboard and it was just for black children but in general children of other races were on their own second thorny problem, religion this picture shows Annie Harrison put on the train train at age two and a half after her parents died in New York City she was taken in by a childless, intensely Christian couple who had no children of their own and they never told her where she came from or her true name and she didn't remember any of the orphan train experience and so as an adult she accidentally discovered that she was an orphan train child and she discovered that her birth name was Mabel Rubin she was Jewish and she said that was okay by her because now she had both the old and the new testaments working for her but others were not so accepting of this kind of disregard of basic histories there was a growing ill will that was voiced by the Irish and Italian communities originally they were the largest and most impoverished groups of new immigrants and they were treated very badly as immigrants particularly the Irish and over time they increasingly felt that the organizers of the trains specifically targeted Catholic children abducting them they said to place them in Protestant homes also familiar it was seen as a form of social eradication and gradually as the immigrants assimilated and moved into positions of more power and society they were instrumental in shaping public opinion and gradually public opinion turned against the trains in an effort to right the wrongs one religious order formed transports this was nuns that formed these transports just for Catholic children to send them just to Catholic homes and this worked very well they took them down to Louisiana where there were a lot of Catholics down in the Bayou country and that worked fine but the organizers were horrified then when they went to the southwest because the people who came to claim their little blond Irish children were Hispanic and they were horrified they had not thought that the Catholics in that part of the country would not appear to be Irish and so this resulted in anger and lawsuits that went on for a long time in 1929 the Great Depression was upon the nation and farmers were hard pressed to feed their own families much less taken more children as a consequence the federal government became involved in child welfare and states made some provisions to take care of needy children and their families as the depression deepened the orphan trains were discontinued in 1929 today Charles Brace's Children's Aid Society is still active and it provides free school lunches educational and medical services and daycare services for children of working parents and that's time for the cranky so we'll get set up now for the cranky this whistle was a gift from Van Connick who went to Mexico and brought it and then he said I'm so sorry I've been tricked I brought you a whistle that doesn't whistle that sounds better than that it makes the sounds of storms and of trains boy what are you doing what what how does have the orphan train do you try and find someone to take us in take us in I've been home I've been in take us in for someone to take us in I have stolen from the poor box I have taken the city streets I've swapped the party boards looking for my teeth With my daddy's old green jacket and some rags upon my teeth I'm looking for someone to take me in Take us in, I need a home, I need a maid Take us in, want to take us in Children's home they gathered us to sit quietly until the meal was blessed Then they put us all on the north and straight and sent us way out west To try to find some hope for someone to take us in Well, the farmers and their families, they came miles around They gathered all the platforms at each station in each town And one by one we parted like some human lost and found And one by one we all attended We're looking for someone to take us in Our kin, we're looking for someone to take us in We're looking for someone to take us in Our mother taught me how to do it Nona once made a beautiful whistle that she'd never do that again And I didn't feel that way, I really like making whistles And I learned a lot about my brain from doing them Because they're very strange things One that is so odd, it's a woman holding her tiny husband He's struggling to get down, he's called the unruly husband He's fighting to get away and he's moving so fast he's a bit of a blur But I make them just, I don't really know what I'm working on when I make them And they just come off my fingers and this is women Who dress up like little militia women and they're going to save the world And they're all, they're probably five whistles on this one And they, little teeny ones that go, that's the littlest probably And there are three birds that sing and there's a monster back here that And the little women And they must have a note somewhere over here that Nope, there's a bear in the front, he sings So I just go mad and when I wake up, like hours later I've made some very strange things And some of them, you have to play them with a friend Because there's one here and one here Who wants to do that And the baby on top is too little to hold a whistle Or I would have And this one, I've got my thumb on the note Anyway, that's what they are And if you want to buy one you can And I price them by how long they took me to make And sometimes by how much I love them Or don't like them And the little necklace ones are always twenty dollars Unless I don't like them They're fifteen And they make nice little They hang around your neck like that And they go Sometimes one way, sometimes another They all sound like birds So there's a way old that will sound exactly like a bird Pretty good And the great big ones Make great big ones that not very much Because they're really hard, you have to have a gallery That really knows how to throw them like Abel I'm going to pull that up for my old age That's the ocean It's going down, this is Mount Ararat And then the little arc up here has a little voice And it's loaded with animals And I'm sure they all whistle But they're too small for real life humans to know And then there's this famous book That my dog likes so much It's really sort of a graphic novel About a man who lives here in this town Whose grandfather owned the shirt waste factory And he was asked He knew the story, all his life But was never allowed to It was like being given a poison inheritance You have to carry this But you're not allowed to tell anybody And over the years I knew him I never knew this And then one day he told me this story And I didn't I'd been drawing the story of his life Because it was such hilarious stories It's so different from my own park avenue And stuff like that And you know here we were little Kids growing up like weeds in the country And so I drew all these pictures And I drew pictures of what I thought The places his grandfather came from would look like Because he arrived in 1896 Pennyless from somewhere In the pale of Russia And ten years later he owned The largest sweatshop in the world And my friend said, I wonder how he did that And he bears mentioning that when I first saw Your stories of that shirt waste factory You had them on something very small They were much littler They were tiny little things that you would draw I like a book It's true, I like to draw small And then when they get blown up a little bit You see all the hesitation marks on all the errors And I really thought of that And then when it was published The publisher had to make them bigger I just gave them a little image And they blew them up to page size Because I wanted them to fill the page But I knew what would happen when you do that Cartoonists draw big and then they haven't shrunk down Because all your mistakes vanish But I like to go the other way Because I really like mistakes Obviously from my life So it's invited into two parts It's got the parts that are just pictures Of the places and the people that they would have known And then there are the cartoons of my friend's life And I never intended to publish it And then finally one day He said that he didn't disapprove of that And it ends with pictures of the people Who died in the fire Who had photographs of themselves And most people who died in the fire Have never been photographed Or if it wasn't available to the public So this was, it got published And I said, why did you change your mind And he said, because all the old people had died And he made a little effort to find out his own family history And he didn't find out very much So he wanted, he thought this is close to a Biography as he'll ever get Because it's really about him and his adjustment His adjustment of that He became an artist who specializes in Things that are badly camouflaged So he was raised in a family that was Jewish But that said took fiscal schools And didn't mention that they were Jewish And he had a family secret that they couldn't mention About where their wealth came from And now he does art that looks like a tree But it's got bark from another tree on it It's sewn on, birch bark It's sewn onto a maple or something They're very interesting stuff But it has a lot to do with what he experienced And that took us far from the orphan sale Do you know if there was any connection Between the orphan chains and the Lowell Bringing the kids up from Lowell Right, was there any, did anyone make that connection? I don't know that the trains that brought those children Were just regular trains I've never heard there was any connection But that kind of getting kids away from danger Was a big, a big I wasn't thinking specifically those trains But it was the idea that anyone Identified that idea as something that was In the happening that they could adapt to Yes, they were more interested people Than we are that any stranger is better Than having your children starve Or be hungry Any stranger? Any stranger? I'd want a little bit more Careful And even then, there were never enough Even if they did, even nowadays Where they do very thorough searches For places to place children They still make horrible mistakes It's just the nature of this dangerous game I guess And there never are enough homes For all the orphans now And there's nothing like the number of orphans now Right after the Civil War, for instance With so many men killed or whatever Yep I love your talk about the orphans It was fabulous. I've read books about this And I have mixed feelings And I'm wondering what mixed feelings You have about this Whether this is all bad Or not all good But where are you coming from? Because I'm not sure where I'm coming from I'm not ever All good or bad for a person And everything, I'm afraid I see too many sides on everything But this one really hurt In a lot of ways, also because of the intentions Of the people doing it were so positive But the potential The faces of the two little boys Who were clinging to each other Heart-breaking for me to see that look In their eyes, they're just so wounded They've been through so terribly much Before they ended up on safe turf And they rose with children watching other children Be taken away who were not going And children recognize when someone's not safe Even if the grown-ups didn't But I don't... That's part of why this is such a heart-breaking situation It's not like what's going on now Where there's no pretense that there's any niceness to it It's just children that are disappearing But there's no claim that we're doing A good and kind deed Where these people really did believe That Charles Brace was a good man He believed that he was doing the best possible thing For these children And it's true that the conditions they were living in Were grisly and horrific And so I don't know a solution I don't think that's the best solution But I wouldn't know a solution If I were living then, yeah The horror just that no one knew Nobody knew what became of most of these children Nobody knew what happened They knew how many they shipped out But then they really didn't even know that Because if the number is between 100,000 and 350,000 Well, that's a lot of lost children And we have no record of how many died within a year Or how many were punished To death in the first two years No, you mostly just teach the ones that survived And I think people didn't talk about physical abuse In those days of sexual abuse That wouldn't have been mentioned I know that many towns didn't like the orphan The people in the towns didn't want those orphans there That they were bad influence on the other kids Because they knew the world And so they were often treated badly Wherever they ended up Your drawings are beautiful Thank you It went too fast I had the crank Were all the children from the East Or were they picking up kids as they went along And depositing them somewhere else? The collection points were Boston, Philadelphia, New York and Chicago The biggest cities I think that if you were up I don't think they collected children from anywhere else And I don't know It was hard to find out who exactly was collecting The place for dragging them in But who else was collecting And some of the children were just delivered by parents Who were in despair to orphanages Or to the priests Also, there was a precedent for this in England Our parent countries So they just collected children And sent them Uninventured Well, to many ports here We have a friend who Checked the records in Annapolis, Maryland At the Kennedy House There were like thousands that came in Over a hundred years That were just given out Uninventured In other words, you are a slave You're a white slave Is that what happened To sending all those kids to Australia? Probably, I don't even know the history The British idols Was I think probably I think probably First shipping Their unwanted people of any description Any age, elsewhere And Canada got an enormous Load of orphans Right on through World War II And what they got in Great Britain Apparently Were children that were Found unaccompanied By an adult on the street They were taken without children That was how this worked, too And I can't imagine what the parents Spared They went through to have their children not come home Whenever expected to be home At the time for bed and they didn't come back The kid was going down to the grocery store Right What can we do to make ourselves happy? You better sing again There are only two orphan trained songs I think that are popular Of one of Lovely, but this The Utah Phillips one really won my heart Can you sing us just a verse of the other one? To sock up that one? I don't know it It's a singer-songwriter With his name Dave Like Massen Gill only That's a douche, isn't it? That's his name He wrote that song and he sings it very beautifully But I somehow thought it was It took a certain kind of voice The thing that he had Yeah That was fantastic Since Edie mentioned Bread and Puppet Bread and Puppet will be at the old labor hall In Barry on Sunday at 5pm With Diagonal Man Come and find out what that means And leave trying to figure out what it meant A sliding scale Donation Bread Puppet Bread and Puppet 5pm at the old labor hall In Barry