A new book of 25 essays, Dreams of Fields: Memory Traces of Iowa’s Past, by frequent Iowa Source contributor Roy R. Behrens, was published earlier this year by Ice Cube Press. Behrens is an Iowa-born designer, teacher, and historian, who, in over 50 years, has published hundreds of articles in various journals and magazines.
In his grade school years, Professor Behrens was an aspiring ventriloquist. He frequently gave performances to neighborhood audiences in which he bantered jokingly with a so-called ventriloquist’s dummy named Mitch Mahoney. Coincident with the publication of Dreams of Fields, we asked the aging Mahoney (who insists on being described as a “showbiz sidekick”) to conduct a sit-down interview with the book’s author. While we were not present during the exchange, we have been assured that, throughout the interview, Behrens did not move his lips.
Congratulations on your new book. This is your ninth book, and one of three that have to do with Iowa, the state which you grew up in, and which you moved back to in 1990.
Yes, most of my books have not been about Iowa, but about art, design, and the history of camouflage. But I did publish two earlier Iowa books, one about an expatriate artist from Independence named William Edwards Cook and another on Iowa buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright.
So what motivated you to produce this book?
Over the years, I’ve published hundreds of essays on a range of subjects. I’ve even written one on ventriloquism. At the same time, I have had a great fondness for Iowa, as a real or partly fictional place. It goes back to my childhood, and, as I explain in the book, it has less to do with “fields of dreams” than with what I refer to as “dreams of fields.” The fields in my dreams are partly real: I live on an acreage, surrounded by fields. At my own peril, I breathe in crop dust daily, while at the same time I try to provide a five-acre less hazardous zone for the few surviving types of birds, butterflies, and other forms of animal life. The Iowa of my childhood, which is the one I dream of and the one I emphasize in the book, was a land of milk and honey, one in which bees could expect to survive. In this book, I try to share some of its folklore.
Generally, what are the essays about?
Iowa readers will be well-acquainted with some of the subjects. They already know about Grant Wood, Frank Lloyd Wright, Buffalo Bill, and Salvador Dali, all of whom have Iowa ties. Even then, I talk about those people in ways that may be surprising. I also include other people who are less well-known but deserve to share the spotlight, in view of the things they accomplished. To mention a few: Gertrude Käsebier from Des Moines was an acknowledged pioneer in modern photography. Arts and Crafts philosopher Elbert Hubbard often spoke in Iowa, and I was completely taken aback by his close connections to Davenport chiropractor B. J. Palmer. There are humorous eyewitness accounts of Salvador Dali’s Iowa visit in 1952. And there are accounts of Iowa visits by Oscar Wilde, Houdini, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Thomas, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who walked across the ice-covered Mississippi River in order to speak in Iowa. I find it so amazing to think that I might now be standing where those remarkable people also stood.
Are the subjects from throughout the state?
The range of locations is purposely broad. Among the featured Iowa towns are Creston, Keokuk, Marshalltown, Independence, Belle Plaine, Bentonsport, Tipton, Webster City, Ottumwa, Oskaloosa, McGregor, Mount Ayr, Iowa City, Manchester, and Mason City, along with other cities like Waterloo, Cedar Falls, Sioux City, Des Moines, and Davenport—it’s almost a statewide tour.
Did you find any personal links to the subjects in the book?
Yes, more than one might imagine. For example, I grew up in Independence, and from an early age I heard about the rich history of that city when it was a nationally known horse racing center at the close of the 19th century. That is detailed in the book, as is the story of artist William Edwards Cook, also from Independence, who was a close friend of Gertrude Stein as well as a client of architect Le Corbusier, who designed a Cubist-styled home for Cook on the outskirts of Paris.
Beyond that, my father grew up on a farm near Ossian. His father was killed in a threshing machine accident in 1919, and my grandmother and her seven children were left penniless and homeless. At that time, the old army barracks at Fort Atkinson was privately owned, and she and her family had to resort to living in the ruins of the fort for a year.
But I also discovered stories about my mother’s ancestors, who were from Manchester, Iowa. A full account is in the book, but suffice to say that some of my great aunts settled in New Mexico, where they and their husbands owned trading posts on the Navajo reservation. They promoted indigenous arts and wrote books about Navajo life. One of them was an authority on sand painting.
Just curious: Did you find any connections between these Iowa stories and your own earlier research?
Yes, I suppose that was inevitable. During years of researching and writing about art and camouflage—which requires the study of vision—I was delighted to find that various Iowa artists, Grant Wood among them, served as camouflage experts. In this book there are two essays that document the stories of Iowa-born camouflage artists, one of whom, Sherry Edmundson Fry, was born in Creston and sculpted the statue of Chief Mahaska in the Oskaloosa town square. The second one was a prominent theater designer from Ottumwa, Carol Sax, who designed “dazzle camouflage” for ships. There were others also—but I’ll save those for future books.
Editor’s note: Dreams of Fields makes a perfect gift for family, friends, and former Iowans who live elsewhere but remember what the state used to be like. Dreams of Fields can be purchased at IceCubePress.com.
Roy Behrens will read at Design Ranch, 1131 S. Gilbert Street, Suite 7, Iowa City on Thursday, November 6, at 5:30 p.m.