“I’ve saved all of my dad’s tools, projects, memorabilia, and collections for all these years,” the woman said. “Will you construct a memorial to my father?”
There was this guy.
After serving in the United States Navy during WWII, he married and settled in Chicago. He was of Lithuanian descent and, as a postwar American civilian, he trained to become a construction worker in the bustling city.
Early in his career he joined Local 73 of the Sheet Metal Workers Union and raised a family in one of Chicago’s west side Eastern European neighborhoods. He lived his life loving two countries: celebrating his old-world heritage, while embracing modern Ameri-can patriotism.
Family was at his center. He had a daughter. They collected rocks, took camping trips, bowled, and learned the harmonica together.
He tinkered—always had a project going—and filled his home with handmade furnishings.
Weekly televised singalongs with Lawrence Welk and Mitch Miller were never missed. By all indications he was a good-looking, strong, hardworking, honest, responsible member of his community.
In 1967, he survived a terrible construction-site accident. It left him disabled for the rest of his life. He died in 1993.
I never met him.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of Al Racevice’s death. No part of his story had affected me until I received a phone call last spring. It was Al’s daughter:
“I would like you to construct a memorial to my father. I have all his stuff. That’s what you do, right, make art from gathered and found materials? I saw your work in a gallery near my house, and it all made sense. I’ve saved all of my dad’s tools, projects, memorabilia, and collections for all these years. Will you make a memorial sculpture using his objects as your inspiration? You’re the guy that can do it.”
The thought was daunting, but she was right. My creative work does involve collecting and recombining discarded or otherwise discovered materials. But I’m usually the one who chooses the materials and has the freedom to alter or modify the stuff in order to create my own narrative. I didn’t know Al Racevice. How could I tell his story?
I said yes.
Al’s daughter Joan and her mother, Al’s widow, visited my studio. In tow were the material remnants of Al Racevice’s passions, accomplishments, and memories. I listened to stories as we unpacked the objects and I began to realize the challenge before me. The items were both a varied collection of strikingly patinaed colors, textures, and shapes, and the iconic representations of the man I never knew. How would I bring together my aesthetics and Al’s narrative?
I had an immediate reaction to certain objects because they were so very familiar to me—a level, a harmonica, a coffee can filled with hard-ware. As I pored over the boxes of instruments, photographs, medals, and tools, I began to wonder: What kind of man builds his own toolboxes? Who saves rivets? Where had these things spent the past 20 years?
What can anyone deduce about someone who collects levels, plumb bobs, chalk lines, and squares? Years ago, I had titled a sculpture Square, Level, and Plumb. I wondered if my pile of personal effects 20 years post-humous would look like this.
I began to understand the man based on his anthology; I watched as Al Racevice appeared on my studio table. So many of his belongings seemed to fit him and him alone: He’d retrofitted his tools with custom grips, and even mass-produced objects were personalized with paint, engravings, or tape, color-coded for reasons that are still a mystery. Some items had been reinvented to serve completely new purposes. Military medals, tools, souvenirs, and photographs of family were protected in cases and labeled like objects of devotion.
Those objects spoke.
My early decisions for the design of the piece came quickly.
I dissected Al’s toolbox and transformed it into the altar’s main structure. I added a drawer. Additional boxes served as reliquaries and held cross sections of his life—geodes, snapshots, nametags combined to create the bricolage that was Al.
Or was it me? I had embellished Al’s collection, added an object or two of my own the way I always do when just the right piece of the puzzle seems to be missing. A few days into the process I lost track of the difference between his stuff and mine. Did his daughter bring this leather-tooling hammer or is that one of mine?
Tucked deep inside one of Al’s books I discovered a dried, pressed leaf that had gone undetected there for 30 years. When I called Joan to ask her about it, she paused, as if trying to make sense of the discovery. Then she recalled moments—for the first time in years, she said—hiking in the woods and collecting leaves with her father. Even as she spoke I was remembering my own hikes collecting leaves and helping my son with his collection. Al’s objects (and histories) were merging with my own.
As I worked through a surprisingly emotional studio process, I wondered which objects predated Al’s accident. How had he changed as a result of that worksite tragedy? His dented hardhat called to me over and over from its place on the table, but in the end I found it too difficult to use. I imagined his pain, and felt my own. We all have catastrophes. Had I been strong enough to face mine? I envied his determination and compassion that I perceived from the well-cared-for condition of his belongings. Al’s desire to create a life was so obvious in his relics. Did I have what Al, spread out on my studio table, seemed so clearly to possess? In the face of adversity, could
I have continued to live and love as he did, so completely and without malice?
Al Racevice could have been my friend, but we missed the chance to talk, over a beer, about living life fully. Instead, my life was enriched by creating a memorial to a friend I never knew.
Doug Calisch is Professor and Chair of the Department of Art at Wabash. In addition to his commissioned pieces and furniture, Calisch’s sculpture was most recently exhibited last fall in “Tossed and Found—Mining the Material Stream,” at Antioch College.