Mass Motifs

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Blyth Hazen & Ruth Bauer Create

BIG SKY

Story by
Bette
Keva

Photos by
Blyth
Hazen

Artists Blyth Hazen and Ruth Bauer are “escaped Texans” whose deep roots in the state brought them together to collaborate on Big Sky, a mesmerizing stop action animation capturing a formative chunk of time in their youth.

When the pair met teaching at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, their shared histories gave birth to the project that has consumed them and scores of their students for the past four years. They’ve just completed “Big Sky Episode 1,” a remarkable feat of animation they released at Montserrat’s first floor gallery on Cabot Street in Beverly in mid-April.

The six-minute video opens with Lil’ Ruth, seven- or eight-years old, with strawberry pig tails, speaking to the camera while a hazy tree in the background gradually comes into focus with her words. Lil’ Ruth’s large, expressive eyes are peering through over-sized glasses. She relates how her new pair of glasses has revealed the world to her, including leaves on trees which, before glasses, was a big green blob and are now seen as individual lush, green leaves. It’s a beautiful new world that she is eager to explore out doors, but first, she must accompany her mother while she gets regular beauty treatments at Edna’s Hair Salon.

Hiking Willowdale on the Ipswich River

By Richard Frenkel

Bradley Palmer State Park has a place in my personal history, but like every stomping ground around Boston has a rich history of its own. Decades ago, when I first started walking at Bradley Palmer, there were still regular “fox hunts” through the forest complete with a pack of hounds and riders in red riding habits racing along a scent “drag.” Pedestrian and pet dog safety did not seem a high priority. The fox hunts are gone but Bradley Palmer is still a “horsey” place, one is passed sometimes by polite riders, the horse jumping obstacles are kept up but seem unused.

More recently I’ve become interested in the histories of the places I visit. Who was Bradley Palmer? What was this area like before it became a park of woods and meadows?

The town of Ipswich, which sits downriver from Bradley Palmer, was an economic powerhouse in early colonial times. The river is tidal and broad in its lower reaches, and the town was established a couple of miles in from the ocean to accommodate the sailing vessels of the times. Great Cove, a wide pond-like curve in the river, now a bucolic waterfront, was home to many wharves and warehouses, a distillery and later a tannery.

Further up the Ipswich, just south of Bradley Palmer, a dam was built to power a saw mill with a woolen mill, Willowdale Mill, being added later. A large stone boarding house, shown in the photo below, was added to the complex in 1834 to house the mill workers. As you can see in the photo, there is no sign of the extensive forests that one finds today on the hills of Bradley Palmer park.

Bobby, The Sailor Man

Story and Art by Linda Bourke

Late 1950s. I have just turned eight. My mother wrote out a short grocery list, packed my baby brother into the stroller and sent us to the store.

“Breathe in deeply! And DO NOT dilly-dally,” she said as we headed down the driveway.

The stroller faced forward, so I couldn’t see Bobby’s face. He was less than a year old—no recognizable vocabulary, but we had a call and response, based on his passion for Popeye.

I would sing, “I’m Popeye the Sailorman!”

And he would answer in a high-pitched voice, “Boop-boop!”—mimicking the sound of Popeye blowing little puffs of cartoon smoke from his pipe. We walked down Warren Road, me singing, him boop-booping all the way.

King’s grocery store was about a half mile away, in the Auburn Plaza, a small strip mall, consisting of a cluster of shops—W. T. Grants, Plaza Pizza, Angie’s Nail Salon and Friendly’s Ice Cream. We had to cross Route 12, a four-lane highway with no crosswalks. Wait… Wait… When the coast looked clear enough we would dash across. Bobby loved to go fast and squealed with delight. I was just relieved we made it.

In the grocery store, people stopped to coo about how cute Bobby was and laughed out loud at his boop-booping as we searched for everything on the list. If they had arranged the store by colors, we could have found everything in the White Aisle: Wonder Bread, Marshmallow Fluff, mayonnaise, powdered milk, and, slightly off-white, Bisquick.