My copy of his 1962 Doubleday classic is a bit dog-eared…
Don Branham was a Hallmark cartoonist, writer and artist of some note back in the sixties and a very funny man. He was one of a loose herd of Kansas City stars who were attracting attention nationwide, tumbling out of the strictures and straits of the Ike years and daring to have fun with the mores of the time.
He lived in a comfortable stone home off Rockhill Rd. near The Country Club Plaza; it was one of a line of homes, perhaps a block or two, that were built by the WPA in the thirties. I’d not really noticed them until he moved into one of them and now they’re etched in my mind as part of a time that held exciting possibilities for me and the arts community. For reasons I can’t recall I’d been summoned to Don’s home that sparkling Saturday afternoon, and when I arrived it was to a chaotic scene.
Workmen were installing something on the front porch which stretched across the front of the house and it seemed to involve mirrors. Two workmen were doubled over with laughter and Branham was shouting directions from the front door. I believe he was wearing a colorful surf-themed bathrobe and PF Flyers but that old liar, memory, may be embellishing. As I approached he shouted for me to hurry and see this assemblage of approximately three foot diameter convex and concave mirrors mounted on the porch pillars and the ceiling of the porch.
“Non, non, mes amis, the mirrors must be higher!”
Between bursts of laughter the workmen were conferring over several more mirrors laying in the yard. Sorry, but I cannot explain any of this. The best I can do is Branham told me that if I looked through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars he handed me, directly into the first convex mirror I would understand. It had something to do with an early warning device to see people coming to the house from the sidewalk out front. We drank a lot of beer that day and when I left I was convinced that Don was a genius on the order of Copernicus but with a sense of humor. I still am.
About this time, I had done a collage at the Art Institute and Lou Greeley smuggled the piece into The Nelson Gallery between two stretched blank canvases. Canvi? We were painting from original masters in a supervised setting. The collage was a nice piece on cardboard and Lou affixed doubled tape to four corners and placed it on a wall between two Manets. It remained there for over a week. So, thanks to Greeley’s rogue curation I was in The Nelson-Atkins in KC. Limited time engagement.
I may still have this recording. The phantom races could occur again, but in Resume Speed, Kansas…
We had a small second floor apartment on the Plaza and two honking large speakers, which, when coupled with a Garrard turntable and Missouri bourbon, were capable of magnetically sucking the landlord and various howling tenants to our door in a frantic knot of jabbering savagery. James Brown at the Apollo on the turntable would mobilize these malcontents in seconds. It was easy for them to determine the source, until one night Lou and I played a 33rpm record called Racing Cars by Fortissimo, a compilation of hog-snorting Mercedes groundshakers.
The record was made up of nerve-jarring revs and shrieks of various supercharged beasts of the raceways. An odd feature was the needle was placed near the center of the red vinyl record and it moved outward. The explanation was that absolute fidelity could be achieved by this. And you could just about smell the exhaust, fuel mixtures and burnt rubber as these rocket sleds gunned for a while, then took off.
We placed the speakers in the open windows facing outward to the street, cut the lights, dropped the needle at the record’s center and cranked the sound up to brain jelly. It was maybe eleven pm. Lights snapped on up and down the street. People emerged. The KCPD cruised by. The soundscape-splitting boom of race cars seemed everywhere. People were in the street searching for the source of the freakish noise but when the shrill sound of burning rubber hit the air, they leaped back onto the sidewalks and hugged building fronts. The demon noise was bouncing off every surface from there to Ward Parkway. There was no way to trace it and it was terrifying.
We turned off the sound and strolled among the throng. The story we got after salting it a bit was that LeMans racers were using Plaza streets for practice.
Firebreathers at LeMans in the 1950’s…
One man who claimed to have seen one of them swore it was a Ferrari. And we did have a Ferrari-driving LeMans racer in KC, Masten Gregory, so we added him to the tale. Two more nights of the Fortissimo LP, and photo-journalists were stationed at strategic locations, as were some beefed-up police interceptors, motors running.
It never happened again, but the rumor was be ready at 2am, Friday or Saturday night. The phantom drivers never appeared. Masten Gregory’s alibi was solid; he was in Monaco on the nights of the Plaza practice runs. And Greeley and I were with him.
Amping up the pranks, so to speak, after that, caused us to cross various lines, commit felonies, become drop-forged case-hardened criminals, of course. And the man you see today is just a shell of his former fun-loving self. But I learned to weld in the joint and am now a law-abiding sculptor. Greeley was selling played-out Alaskan uranium claims in Amsterdam last anyone heard. And a Van Gogh is missing in the Netherlands.
More soon. Enjoy the holidays! (Covid—think of it as house arrest, a breather from Uncle Larry’s political analyses)