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The
Martha's Vineyard Times is a weekly publication.
April 28 - May 4, 2005 Edition
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Print Smelling the hay April 28, 2005 By Whit Griswold
Time and again I've thought of asking an elderly friend or relative to sit down with me and a tape recorder and look back over their lives. But the present has always intruded, plans got postponed, and the next thing I knew they were gone, and I'm left with an empty notebook and an empty heart. There went an invaluable, irreplaceable resource - poof! Thankfully, Kristen Kingsbury Henshaw had the time and the good sense to record the memories - real, unreal, and surreal - of her father, Craig Kingsbury, in the years leading up to his death at age 89 on the next to last day of August, 2002. The result is “Craig Kingsbury Talkin',” a wonderful volume devoted to the life and times, the high points and some of the lows, of an outsized, outspoken, often outrageous Island character. It's a stew like Craig himself might have cooked, with a wild variety of ingredients, some identifiable, some of which you'd just as soon not identify. It's a mix of recollections and reconstructions, of ramblings and rants and tall tales - many apocryphal, no doubt - blended with a healthy dose of nearly forgotten truths that we'd all do better remembering and honoring, even applying to our current lives. And by the way, in the hands of a master story-teller, truth can become more abstract than absolute. Ms. Henshaw read from the book and swapped Craig stories with a lively audience at the Katharine Cornell Theatre on Friday night, as part of the Bunch of Grapes Bookstore's author's program. The collection of anecdotes and quotes that Kristy Henshaw has assembled makes for herky-jerky reading at times, but it's really the only way to tell Craig Kingsbury's story. His life didn't lend itself to straight biography. He did what he wanted when he wanted and in his own way. A linear narrative would fill thousands of pages, and would most likely induce sleep. Luckily, Ms. Henshaw understood that his life was more effectively recounted not only in nips and sniffs and tidbits, as he lived it, but also in his own words. Too coarse to quote The language he used was often too coarse to quote in a family newspaper. Too bad, because paraphrasing doesn't hold up with a true color commentator like Craig Kingsbury. Salty or not, his words are alive and convincing. Born and raised in New Jersey, Craig came to the Island first as an infant, visiting relatives in summertime. Early photos show him dressed like a proper young bourgeoisie wannabe, but that didn't last past his mid-teens when he and a pal went to sea. His sister, Anne, who became a Methodist minister, recalled, “In his teen years, Craig was mischievous, but never malicious, a benevolent trickster and very convincing teller of what amounted to tall tales. This continued into his later years, when he could tell a story about the same event in about seven different ways, and each would be believed as the unvarnished truth.” He was married at 20 and living in New Hampshire, but the sea and the Vineyard called, and he responded. In 1937, with his second wife, he settled into the farm on State Road about half a mile southwest of the Tashmoo overlook, where he spent the rest of his life, and where, with his third wife, Gertrude “Turk” Tereski, he would raise four children. Craig of all trades Among other things, Craig worked as a fisherman, trapper, rum-runner, hunter, farmer, dump-picker, butcher, stonemason, caretaker, and landscaper. In the 1930s, you had to have your wits about you to survive on the Island. Flexibility and a loose respect for the law helped: “Back in 1931,when I was a tender lad of nineteen years, I lived for about a year and a half in a shack at South Beach [which] in those days was a highway for bootleggers. They'd bring cargo ashore on calm nights, when the surf wasn't too high. I wasn't alone out there. Other shiftless independent souls, stumblebums and knights of the road were roosting in shacks all along South Beach.” Off duty, Craig was a dump picker, yarn spinner, practical joker, and political and social hell-raiser. He was also a teacher, happy to pass along the intricacies of making a stink bomb, skinning a skunk, or growing pigs and potatoes bigger and juicier. And he showed how to slow down and learn to live with what's right at hand without careening around acquiring and conquering. Barefoot in December Craig Kingsbury was a presence, whether walking around barefoot in all four seasons, or driving at an aggressively slow pace in a pickup so battered and crooked it looked like it had been through a war or two and maybe a flood. From my vantage point - that of a sheltered, snot-nosed summer brat - he looked like the crudest kind of hick, and he was held up as an example of what I was expected not to become. But as I learned more about him, it seemed like he was on to something, and I was intrigued. His pace and his sense of humor and his scrapes with the authorities were legendary around the Island, but he also stood out as someone who knew the natural world inside and out, which seemed to arm him with a deep confidence and sense of connection. Above all, though, he could tell a story. Listen: “I spent some time back in New York City back in '35, and was pals with a fella with some hotshot connections. He was invited to a top-shelf New Year's Eve party in this ritzy hotel. I was in my early twenties, and raring to go. I met a frisky dame with some good ideas, and we took off together. Down in the lobby, she spots this grandfather clock on a pedestal. It's maybe four feet tall. Says she likes it. 'What a beautiful clock,' she says. 'You want it, Baby? C'mon, let's go.' I picked it up, loaded it on my shoulder and we left the hotel. Had some trouble in the revolving door, created quite a bit of excitement.” Fact or fiction? Like so many larger-than-life characters, it's often hard to know where the facts leave off, and the fiction begins. And a natural-born showman like Craig Kingsbury is not going to help define the line between the two. In fact, he'll usually blur it. But in spite of the high-wire hyperbole of the man, Craig never became a caricature of the true character he was. Why? Probably because he was authentic, in the end. After all, there was enough substance there to convince the voters of Tisbury to elect him selectman twice in the 1970s. Craig's whimsical line drawings of squirrels, fish, cats and various other critters - some even human - are sprinkled generously through Ms. Henshaw's book, and with just the right light touch, a la James Thurber. Several dozen photos capture Craig from the crib to the wheelchair. Many of them will remind the reader of what the Vineyard looked like 40, 50, 60 years ago. Also included in and on the cover of the book are nine paintings of Craig by his granddaughter, Elizabeth Henshaw, who created them as part of an independent senior project at Smith College in 2003. Oil on wood, they are large, like their subject; several are three feet by two, and one of them is five feet tall. In the book they are tiny, of course, but they still jump out. In the flesh at the Katharine Cornell Theatre last Friday night, they were stunning - full of life and color and artistic maturity. They capture the sincerity and complexity of their subject, not an easy trick with any subject, but especially not with someone as impossible to pigeonhole as Craig Kingsbury. I'll leave the last word to Craig's son, Bill Kingsbury: “My father thought the 20th century would ruin the environment, and he was right, so he didn't join up, and I didn't join either. So we lived in whatever century we lived in, but it was long time ago. When kids from town would come up [to the farm], they would smell the manure, but Dad taught me to smell the hay.” |
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