Warren chase merritt biography of donald

Rockwell recounts tales of growing up in Mamaroneck from when he was 9 or 10 and into his teens in Norman Rockwell: Adventures of an Illustrator.

He and two friends came upon the scene of seeming body snatching from the Delancey family graveyard on Palmer Avenue – ‘Then there came a dull thud from the grave and the two men tossed their shovels onto the pile of dirt and climbed out…Finally, up came a dark moldy brown skull.” It turned out the disinterment had been authorized: ‘The remains of a colonial figure” were being moved “to a more decent graveyard.”

He sang in the St. Thomas Episcopal Church choir, and there was a “wayward girls’ home” nearby, presumably St. Michael’s Home, where the police station is now. “After services on Sunday four or five of us would climb up into the belfry of the church in our black cassocks and white surplices and yell across at the wayward girls, teasing them. One day the sexton locked us in the belfry by mistake. For two hours we shouted and waved our surplices at the passers-by in the street below. They glanced up and waved back. A dog came along and barked at us. Finally someone understood and let us out.”

Young Norman was not a good student “even in art,” he recalled, “but I led the class in, of all things, algebra. Nobody could understand it.” But his “favorite memory of those days is of Miss Julia M. Smith, my eighth-grade teacher….I remember her mostly because she encouraged me in my drawing; every year she asked me to draw a Christmas picture on the blackboard in colored chalks; in history class I drew Revolutionary soldiers and covered wagons; in science, birds, lions, fish, elephants. That meant a lot to me; it was sort of a public recognition of my ability.”

Celebrity worlds collided when Norman was hired to take a wealthy lady and her friend out sketching. The friend was actress Ethel Barrymore, who also lived in Mamaroneck. “So I spent every Saturday afernoon that summer sketching with Ethel Barrymore….and her friend….We would paddle out in a canoe to Hen Island or some deserted beach, where I’d set up the easels in a sheltered spot and show the ladies how to hold the brushes or mix the paints…That must have been a sight – me, a long gawky kid bending over the graceful Ethel Barrymore, guiding her shapely hand across the paper.”

Sources:

• Norman Rockwell: My Adventures of an Illustrator, as told to Tom Rockwell, originally published 1960, republished 1988.

• Journal News column on Rockwell’s Mamaroneck home, Sept. 15, 2014.