James Dissette

At the Visionary Art Museum with Founder Rebecca Hoffberger by Jim Dissette

January 21, 2020 by James Dissette Leave a Comment

Recently, the Spy crew trekked to Baltimore in search of a pigeon skeleton. Yes, really. But there was a method to our madness: the skeleton was on loan from Chestertown resident Pat Trams Hollingsworth and placed as an iconic symbol greeting visitors to the new environmental exhibit at The American Visionary Art Museum.

American Visionary Art Museum Founder and Director, Rebecca Hoffberger noticed the skeleton while visiting Hollingsworth’s home in Chestertown and knew instantly that she wanted it to be part of the new 25th annual exhibition she was curating.

“Rebecca saw the bird skeleton —a learning tool I once used to prepare for a dreaded veterinary tech exam—and off she went with it. It was one of those eureka moments, and she has lots of them. I was fascinated with how she was going to include it,” Hollingsworth says.

The Spy team found the bleached and brittle armature accompanied by a porcelain pigeon in a glass case installed along the entry corridor to the amazing American Visionary Art Museum. The placard above it recalled Hamlet’s existential question, “To Be or Not to Be, That is the Question”, an elegant choice given that AVAM’s new exhibit, “The Secret Life of Earth: Alive! Awake! and (Possibly Really Angry!),” challenges visitors to engage in critical questions about our relationship to the environment that sustains life on Earth.

Chestertown’s Trams Hollingsworth’s pigeon skeleton to illustrate the core message of the new environmental exhibit.

But first: if you have never visited the American Visionary Art Museum, it’s unlike any museum you’ve experienced. You won’t find the trained classicists or hear the reverential whisperings of art admirers. Instead, AVAM is dedicated to art that is rowdy, poignant, haunting and joyous, a collection of unschooled masterpieces from the hearts and minds of individuals who worked out their visions with materials at hand. For example, a centerpiece for the permanent collection has a detailed 15 ft. replica of the Lusitania made out of 200,000 toothpicks as two human figures shaped out of hundreds of wood and felt piano hammers convene silently together.

Johanna Burke’s “Another Green World” mixed media of dry plants, seeds, beads and glass was originally designed for a window at Bergdorf Goodman’s New York store and donated to AVAM.

However, the new environmental exhibit is not a bludgeon wielded by political or environmental activists. It is a collection of personal visions by individuals who would not even consider themselves artists, using materials at hand. It is an invitation to explore our environment through alternative perspectives and along the way to muse over the simple scientific facts of the challenges we face if we continue to ignore the ecological emergencies at hand. Even the ramp to the exhibit begs a fundamental question—hundreds of plastic items collected from a single beach in California are suspended from the corridor ceiling. On the wall, a text panel history of plastic. How will we deal with with an ocean choked by discarded plastic and drinking water suffused with hidden threat microplastics now being detected in humans all over the world?

The Spy was lucky to have as their guide Founder, Director and curator of the exhibit, Rebecca Hoffberger whose knowledge about each of the “artists” and their works reveal the depth of her dedication to the exhibit at hand and the overall mission of AVAM. Hoffberger led us through the labyrinth of exhibits describing their origin, the artist, and how she felt it shaped the conversation we must have about our environmental crisis.

But what are we looking at when we see giant green gorillas fashioned from fiberglass, beads, and plants, or a wax rubbing of a crosscut of a tree compared with a human fingerprint, and why does it move us so different from the art spaces of other museums?

Understanding AVAM’s mission is to understand Hoffberger’s original interest in creating a space for art created outside the classical world of classically trained artists. In her mission statement, she wrote, “Visionary art as defined for the purposes of the American Visionary art Museum refers to art produced by self-taught individuals, usually without formal training, whose works arise from an innate personal vision that revels foremost in the creative act itself.”

In the mid-eighties, Hoffberger was employed as the Development Director of People Encouraging People, a program of the Department of Psychiatry at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, and it was there she became impressed with patients’ elaborate imaginations. She wondered how she could showcase these alternative visions, not as an illness but as a strength. Were there galleries or museums showcasing this kind of personal vision? She and her future husband and museum co-founder LeRoy E. Hoffberger decided to visit French artist Jean Dubuffet’s Art Brut Museum in Switzerland where the largest collection of anti-cultural Art Brut (raw art) was exhibited, including the intense and intricate work of psychiatric patient Adolf Wolfli. Impressed with the collection and its simple exhibition style, the two returned with ideas for a museum that would widen and redefine the “outsider’ genre to include “intuitive creative invention and grassroots genius.”

Adolf Wolfli’s “General view of the island Neveranger,” 1911. Wolfli, a psychiatric patient for most of his life was championed by French painter Jean Dubuffet and became one of the first artists associated with the Art Brut or “outsider art.”

Intense fundraising efforts were begun. The City of Baltimore helped with acquiring a place, Senators Barbara Mikulski and Bob Dole were early supporters of the effort including getting a Congressional resolution designating the museum as America’s official national museum. The museum design was created by architect Rebecca Swanston and artist and designer Alex Castro who later became Director of Washington College’s SandBox project in Chestertown. AVAM held its grand opening in 1995 and the accolades have poured in ever since. CNN described the museum as “…one of the most fantastic museums anywhere in America…”

“The Secret Life of Earth” exhibit of 88 artists is a perfect manifestation of AVAM’s mission. Johanna Burke’s mixed-media “Another Green World” shares equal billing with every other artist from Brian Pardini’s found driftwood sculptures to Santiago Navila’s video installation “Untitled” and Julia Butterfly Hill’s journal entries from her 738 consecutive days perched in a California redwood tree to defy a lumber company and its threat to clear cut old-growth redwoods. There is no promotion of gender, race or ethnicity, and Hoffberger is adamant about keeping it that way.

The Spy found the delicate pigeon skeleton from Chestertown and it pointed the way to an extraordinary and personal journey guided by visionaries whose directness and self-taught raw talent stunned us into a visceral connection to the primal network of life we threaten with our abuse and denial.

Pioneer in time-lapse cinematography Louis Schwartzberg once said that “beauty and seduction, I believe is nature’s tool for survival, because we will protect what we fall in love with.” The American Visionary Art Museum’s “The Secret Life of Earth” exhibit is no less than an illuminated path to the heart of our environmental dilemmas. It’s a braid of science and raw vision without sermonizing and dedicated to the awakening of all who long to curate, protect, and love the world we need to survive.

James Dissette a contributor to the Chestertown Spy and Talbot Spy, a Washington College graduate, and was awarded the school’s Sophie Kerr Prize for Literature in 1971.

“The Secret Life of Earth” special exhibit will be available until September 6, 2020 For hours, ticket prices and more information about The American Visionary Art Museum, see their website here. The Spy and the Academy Art Museum will host a lecture by Rebecca Hoffberger on February 21th starting at 6 pm. For ticket information please go here.

Cloaks, Daggers and the Eastern Shore (Part 2) by Jim Dissette

October 23, 2019 by James Dissette 2 Comments

Locust Hill Farm near Galena is a mid-18th century 2-story brick farmhouse typical of the Delaware Valley architecture of that era. Remote in the late 1940s, it became the vacation house and part-time residence of one of the most complex US intelligence chiefs this side of James Jesus Angleton.

It was here that Frank Wisner, former Deputy Director of the CIA’s Counter-Espionage Department spent many holidays and vacations away from the buzz of DC with his family. It was here also that in 1965, after recurring bouts of depression, the “father of covert activities” took his own life.

Frank Wisner, photo from Arlington Cemetery.

The melancholy history of Frank Wisner, like so many in the intelligence services whose lives are necessarily cloaked in secrecy, misinformation, along with myths and spy parables, is not easily constructed. But enough is known to describe a man who was driven tooth and nail to counter Soviet aggression in Eastern Europe at the end of WW2 and during the Cold War of the 1950s when he pled unsuccessfully with the US to recognize the impending formation of Soviet ruled eastern bloc countries.

The scion of a Mississippi industrialist, Wisner became a Wall Street lawyer who ditched the torte laws and equity contracts of Wall Street for the more “colorful” life of the US. Navy—six months before Pearl Harbor. Within months he found his way to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA, and in 1944 was assigned to Romania to spy on Russian activities in the region. It was in Bucharest that Wisner witnessed key government people in Eastern European countries being replaced by communists and the point he raised the alarm of a coming confrontation with Moscow.

Wisner has been described by some as genteel, brilliant, and imaginative, while others claim he was an anti-communist zealot. Arthur Schlesinger, an OSS sergeant serving in Germany at the time, claimed Wisner, “was already mobilizing for the cold war. I myself was no great admirer of the Soviet Union, and I certainly had no expectation of harmonious relations after the war. But Frank was a little excessive, even for me.”

The Wisner farmhouse, Galena, Kent County deeds.

In 1947—the year he bought the Galena house—Wisner was back in Washington where he hob-knobbed with the political and publishing elite including George Kennan, Joseph Alsop, Clark Clifford, James Angleton, William Averell Harriman, James Reston, Allen W. Dulles, and Phil and Katharine Graham, to name a few. Dubbed “the Georgetown Set,” much US policy was concocted over Sunday night martinis in an intimate Washington long gone to a fractious and very public blizzard of policy arguments via social media. This coterie of blue-blooded, Ivy-educated publishers, lawyers, and spymasters would set the tone of the 1950s perception of the US-Soviet contest, the Vietnam War, and the Watergate era. Greg Herken in his 2014 book The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington, quoted Henry Kissinger as saying “The hand that mixes the Georgetown martini is time and again the hand that guides the destiny of the Western world.”

It was during this time that Wisner appealed to the Secretary of Defense James Forrestal to create a special branch of the CIA called the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This became the espionage and counterintelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. He wanted nothing less than to shape the US and European perspectives on Soviet influences in the region.

One of the least documented and long repudiated programs initiated by Wisner’s office and overseen by CIA Director Allen Dulles, was the alleged “Operation Mockingbird,” an alliance between the CIA and major media outlets brought together to “course correct” the news by feeding CIA-vetted opinion to the public, embed agents in news organizations, pay news stringers to place or write stories around CIA messaging, and to recruit others to do the same.

A long piece about Mockingbird by Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein appeared in the 1977 Rolling Stone Magazine where he wrote about the Washington Post columnist Joseph Alsop by saying “Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty‑five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There were cooperation, accommodation, and overlap.” By some accounts, some 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts. Much of the relationship between the CIA and its relationship with the media was investigated after the Watergate scandal, most famously in the Church Committee which concluded in 1976 that “Approximately 50 of the [Agency] assets are individual American journalists or employees of U.S. media organizations. Of these, fewer than half are “accredited” by U.S. media organizations … The remaining individuals are non-accredited freelance contributors and media representatives abroad … More than a dozen United States news organizations and commercial publishing houses formerly provided cover for CIA agents abroad. A few of these organizations were unaware that they provided this cover.”

Wisner’s star rose and fell during the height of the Cold War. After his Romanian assignment which witnessed the US’s disregard for the imminent collapse of King Michael’s government, Wisner took a stronger role in advancing US policy with an active interest in toppling governments perceived as roadblocks to US interests, ideologically or otherwise. Later, in 1956, the failed Hungarian uprising and the US’s denial of support, except for Eisenhower’s “thoughts and prayers” sentiment, would add to Wisner’s growing depressive state and mounting mental anguish. Wisner thought the whole point was to support anti-communist rebellions. Otherwise, why bother?

President Eisenhower consults with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, green-lighting the CIA backed coup of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz. John Foster Dulles was CIA Director Allen Dulles’ brother. Both had financial stakes in the United Fruit Company. 40 years of civil wars would follow, including the genocide of the Maya peoples. Photo from Wiki.

The “otherwise” came into play with the CIA toppling of the Iranian and Guatemalan governments, both “framed” as threats to US policy. Wisner was the point man in both coups d’etats ending democratically elected presidents (Mossadegh in Iran (yes, it was about BP oil) in 1953 and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala,) In Guatemala, the multinational United Fruit Company, forced to end its exploitive labor practices appealed to the CIA for help. Easy enough. Both CIA Allen Dulles and his brother Secretary of State John Foster Dulles were on the UFC payroll for 38 years. Casting the democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz as Communist, he was replaced by the right-wing Carlos Armas and the beginning of four decades of military dictatorships, countless thousands of lives and the Maya genocide. It wouldn’t be far afield to note that many of the immigrants fleeing Guatemala today are responding to the US installation of Armas 63 years ago.

The failure of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 may have been the last straw for Wisner’s emotional investment in his war against communism. Surprised by US, British, and Russian intelligence services alike, the uprising against the communist Hungarian People’s Republic collapsed under the weight of the Soviet army. Wisner felt responsible. He had been encouraging rebellions against Communism throughout eastern Europe through Radio Free Europe and other propaganda networks, leading the people to believe the US would lend a hand. “All these people are getting killed and we weren’t doing anything, we were ignoring it,” he told Clare Boothe Luce, then the Ambassador to Italy.

Suffering gravely from manic depression, the spymaster suffered a breakdown many said was triggered by the ill-fated uprising in Hungary. After treatment, he served several more years in the Agency where he resigned in 1962. Three years later 1965 his illness finally led him back to the familiarity of his brick farmhouse in Galena where he took his own life.

Wisner’s work with the CIA was prodigious, and much of it can be found in public records and even the CIA website (mostly through reviews of books about the Agency, by the Agency). Most records, of course, are under wraps in the Agency archives.

•••

Except for Pete Seviss, who spent most of his adult life on the Eastern Shore, most of the those mentioned above are linked by temporary residence; vacation homes and debriefings.

But one spy stands out as a true child of the Shore: Harriet Tubman.

Araminta Ross, “Harriet Tubman, circa 1885. Photograph by Horatio Seymour Squyer now in National Portrait Gallery.

Despite differing accounts of her life, embellishments and conjecture, disputes over quotes attributed to her, and debates about the interpretive bent of Tubman’s first biographer Sarah Elizabeth Hopkins, enough of her life shines through to bolster her legacy as one the world’s leading political activists who dedicated her life to freeing the oppressed.

Her flight to freedom from Dorchester County to Philadelphia in 1849; her 11-19 dangerous trips (varies by biography) back to Dorchester county to free family members and up to 300 slaves and lead them north via the Underground Railroad; her nursing the sick and wounded in Union camps during the Civil War; she was a protegee of John Brown and Frederick Douglass; and her work as a suffragette later in life finds her working alongside Susan B. Anthony.

But her life as a Union Spy is no less valorous.

Despite a life-long impairment resulting from a head wound received during an altercation between an angry slave-master and a runaway, Tubman developed through hardship and innate intelligence a perfect acumen for espionage. She was canny, had an astounding memory for detail, and could employ disguises and acting to gather intelligence for the Union. Bound together by raw courage, she was a force to be reckoned with.

In 1862, a year into the Civil War, Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew asked Tubman to help work with slaves fleeing from plantations to already overburdened Union camps. There, Maj. Gen. David Hunter provided her a written “pass” that ordered Union troops to provide her with transportation whenever needed. According to accounts of her life, she gave her rations away to those in need and started a washing house where she employed escaped slaves, slowly building a network of nine trusted spies—mostly river pilots— to gather information on Confederate troop movement and ordinance. Tubman’s scouts provided intelligence helpful in raids as far-reaching as Jacksonville, Florida.

But Tubman’s most extraordinary moment as a spy occurred along the marshes of South Carolina’s Combahee River where she learned a large group of fugitive slaves was being held. Under the command of Col. James Montgomery, who had just formed the African American 2^nd South Carolina Volunteer Regiment with Tubman’s help—famously depicted in the movie “Glory”— Tubman and her team sailed up the river on a reconnaissance mission and mapped out mine locations while gathering information from slaves, offering them freedom and sometimes cash in return. Later, two gunboats with Tubman, her spies, and Union raiders made its way up the river to free 700 slaves. It was a devastating affront to South Carolina slaveholders. 100 of the freed slaves would join the Union army. By any measure, the raid was a success. But it was also distinctive in more ways than one.

Paul Donnelly wrote in the June 7, 2013, NYT, “…the Combahee raid was planned and executed primarily as a liberation raid, to find and free those who were unable or unwilling to take the enormous risks to reach Union lines on their own. That’s how Tubman conceived of it. That, too, is unique, because for the first and only time in the Civil War, or for that matter any American conflict before this century, a woman (and a civilian at that) played a decisive role in planning and carrying out a military operation.”

In an 1868 letter to Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass wrote, “Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day – you in the night.”

•••

There are other stories of intrigue and spymasters related to the Eastern Shore Some are wrapped in accusations like the Alger Hiss case (see article in Chestertown Spy) and many articles have been written about Pioneer Point, the Russian compound that for decades operated in Centreville and was closed by President Obama in 2016. After all, we are just one tinted window Chevy Suburban drive from some of the largest intelligence agencies in the world. (I’m sure someone the NSA is reading this, having a coffee while watching the sunset over the Tred Avon River.)

These profiles are but truncated highlights of “spies” who have intersected with the Eastern Shore and are incomplete at best. By its own definition, clandestine intelligence work leaves behind scare histories. One can only think that the few spies mentioned here are only the ones we know about.

Spies and spy rings are as old as the hills and as old as our republic. During the American Revolution, Agent 711 and his Culper Ring created a sophisticated and large network of military and civilian spies whose information was instrumental in the war’s success, including the unmasking of Benedict Arnold, Agent 711 was George Washington. “Washington did not really outfight the British. He simply out-spied us,” wrote a British intelligence officer after the war.

Cloak, Dagger and the Chesapeake: Spies of the Eastern Shore

October 9, 2019 by James Dissette 1 Comment

An autumn morning. The sun burns up the eastern horizon to dissolve the scarf of fog draped across the Choptank River. The crunch of frost as two men walk along the shore of riprap and river weed, their break-open shotguns cradled across their forearms. They drift from hunting pheasant to talking about the Phillies’ last-place losing season, then speak in lower octaves about Soviet leader Khrushchev’s “secret speech” denouncing Stalinism to a closed session Communist Party Congress three years before.

Ashford Farm, a CIA “safe house” used for debriefing Russian and Eastern bloc defectors. Its cover was blown in 1962 when news reporters picked up on a rumor that Francis Gary Powers was there.

One man is a Russian naval officer recently defected to the West, the other is an ex-major league pitcher and now the Director of the CIA’s Alien Branch, a “safe house” at Ashford Farms, a Tudor-style mansion in Talbot County’s Royal Oak, just west of Easton. It is 1959, the height of the Cold War, and Nicholas Shadrin and Pete Sivess have become friends after the many debriefing sessions that provided the CIA with valuable information about the Russian Navy. They would remain friends for another 15 years.

Peter Sivess

Sivess was born to a Russian-speaking Lithuanian family in New Jersey. A natural athlete, he excelled in high school baseball (1932 All-State) and went on to Dickinson College, where he set the record for strikeouts—243 by the end of his senior year. Scouted and signed by the Philadelphia Phillies, he was placed on the roster right away. They say he had a blazing fastball and was billed as the next “Dizzy Dean.” Unfortunately, his offseason job as a stevedore began to take a toll on his arm, and he was traded around in the majors until he landed in Baltimore with the Orioles where, after changing his pitching technique to sidearm, had one of his better seasons. After a few more trades and an impending war, Sivess left baseball for good, worked for a Grumman Aircraft in 1942, and a year later joined the Navy.

Working for the chief of naval operations, Sivess was assigned to help train the Russian Navy, our allies during the war. He would continue his service by working in Romania and Czechoslovakia, developing a perfect resume for the CIA. He joined them in 1948, one year after the Agency’s inception. Three years later he was in Easton, designing a program to help debrief eastern bloc defectors. Sivess retired to St. Michaels in 1972. According to Jack Morris, in an article for the Society of American Baseball Research, Sivess granted an interview to the Baltimore News-American in 1984. Circumspect about his time in the clandestine service, Sivess preferred to talk baseball, closing with “I always thought I was every bit as good as the players I was facing,” said Sivess. “But I honestly wasn’t enamored with baseball. That’s just the way I am. The game was just a phase of my life.”

Nicholas Shadrin walked a more fateful path. One of the most valuable defectors of the time, Shadrin and his soon to be wife Ewa, a Pole, whose family’s anti-communist leanings would block any future marriage, defected to the West in a daring sea escape to Sweden, then through a network of countries to the US and eventually his debriefing in Easton. His information was “worth its weight in gold,” and for his cooperation, both he and Ewa were rewarded with education opportunities. Shadrin completed his Master’s Degree and Ph.D. in engineering. Ewa, whose training was underwritten by the CIA, became a dentist.

In the mid-60s, Shadrin was contacted by the KGB and was supposedly blessed by the CIA to work in counter-espionage. But soon, his value was depleted, and his jobs for the Agency became more mundane. Until 1975. Contacted again by the KGB, the CIA and FBI wanted to run Shadrin as a double-agent. Various sources point at US intelligence agencies for advocating the perilous arrangement. Shadrin had already been outed during an open Congressional committee meeting, but the CIA-FBI still felt they could exploit the opportunity presented with the KGB contacts. His second meeting with the KGB was the last time he was seen.

Some years later, after his wife sued and pled with the government for information about her missing husband, KGB Major General Oleg D. Kolug told US intelligence that Shadrin had died of a heart attack during the kidnapping. Others say he died from chloroform used during his abduction. A public 1985 CIA document stated that Shadrin had been tried by Russia in-absentia and that the Vienna trip (ostensibly to help cover a highly placed Soviet spy) was, in fact, an elaborate KGB scheme to catch him. The CIA report states that he was executed the same day he was kidnapped. Letters to President Jimmy Carter and to Senator Alan Cranston from (author redacted)—probably Ewa Shadrin’s wife—are posted on the CIA website here.

Pete Sivess lost a good friend, and the Agency lost a man who risked everything for his adopted country.

Many other defectors would be debriefed in the safe house, most famously, Francis Gary Powers, the U2 pilot shot down over Russia in 1959. The prisoner exchange—Powers and US student Frederic Prior for KGB Rudolph Abel—was dramatized in the 2015 historical drama, “Bridge of Spies.”

The house at Royal Oak still stands and has been on and off the market for years.

Part Two begins next week.

Getting In by Jamie Kirkpatrick

March 19, 2019 by James Dissette 1 Comment

This is not the Musing I had planned to write this week. I’m not even sure it’s the Musing I want to write this week. But it is the Musing I have to write this week. You’ll see why.

For more than twenty years, I was the Director of College Counseling at one of metropolitan Washington’s best independent schools. Since “retiring” (that word always lives within quotes in my mind) from that school a few years ago, I have also worked as an interim college counselor or consultant at four other highly regarded independent schools. My task was always a simple one: to help students and their families navigate the mysterious maze of the college admissions process. In so doing, I’ve seen both elation and disappointment. I’ve watched the pressure of college admissions bring out the best in some people and the worst in others. I’ve been aware of questionable decisions by both families and academic institutions. But until last week, I’ve never seen outright fraud and corruption taint the college admissions process. Am I shocked? No; just bitterly disappointed.

The playing field of the college admissions process has never been completely level. There are a myriad of institutional priorities that come into play when colleges make admissions decisions. There are faculties to pay; buildings to build or to maintain; alumni to please. The ivory tower looms over a highly competitive marketplace and those institutions who do not pay attention to all their various constituencies will ultimately sail over the edge of the world. The football team needs a quarterback. The orchestra needs a bassoonist. Endowments have to grow. A competing institution has a new student union building so we need to break ground for a state-of-the-art science lab. We need more people of color. We need more men. We need more women. You get the picture.

Natural selection will ultimately determine which institutions will thrive and which will fail. College admissions officers are given the Herculean task of identifying those candidates who will best “fit” within their institution’s Board-driven priorities. It’s not easy to build a community year after year, but admissions officers do their best. They look at objective measures of an applicant’s worth—academic performance, rigor of curriculum, and yes, standardized test scores. They also must weigh a variety of subjective measures like leadership potential, commitment to service, legacy, ethnicity, special talents, writing ability, ability to pay, and perhaps most important of all, the ephemeral quality to naturally become a part of, and contribute to, a greater whole.

The doorway to higher education is exceedingly narrow these days and unlikely to get any wider. Some of the most highly competitive colleges and universities now accept fewer than 8% of their highly qualified applicants. Globalization and technology have made the college admissions process more demanding than ever. Students from all over the world apply to American institutions and many of them do not require any financial aid. Paper is a thing of the past: all college applications are submitted electronically now which means (among other things) there are a lot more applicants swimming in the admissions pool. And that’s what drives some people to do unspeakable things.

Parents always want the best for their children, but in the maelstrom of today’s competitive college admissions process, many have lost their way. People of substantial means with imposing reputations now think it’s worth risking it all to get a child into a top-tier school. Pay a specialist to document a specious learning disability allowing for extended time on standardized tests. Find someone to proctor an exam who will look the other way or even correct a test-taker’s answer sheet. Dangle a major gift in front of a prestigious but cash-hungry institution. Bribe a coach. This is a whole new world, one devoid of a moral core or any ethical standards. Sound familiar? Sad!

Colleges and universities must push back. In a recent Op Ed piece in The Baltimore Sun, Washington College President Kurt Landgraf wrote about his institution’s mandate to seek out underserved and underfunded applicants from low-income zip codes for whom a college education will be a life-changing passage. This is right and good but not enough. Colleges also have to drain the swamp, become even more vigilant, and set a clear, transparent, and higher standard in their admissions practices.

I’m not vindictive by nature, but I hope all those people who have become tangled up in this dreadful net go to jail. That admissions process should be a no-brainer.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer with homes in Chestertown and Bethesda. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy magazine. “A Place to Stand,” a book of photographs and essays about Landon School, was published by the Chester River Press in 2015. A collection of his essays titled “Musing Right Along” was published in May 2017; a second volume of Musings entitled “I’ll Be Right Back” was released in June 2018. Jamie’s website is www.musingjamie.com

The Beauty of Making a Mosaic with KCHS Students

April 16, 2018 by James Dissette

There’s a lot of cutting glass this week at Kent County High School. That’s glass, with a “g.”

Throughout the week students have been cutting and gluing pieces of colored glass, mirror, and other material together to complete a complex glass mosaic with the hope of expressing a sense of place in their personal lives and the greater culture and beauty of the natural environment of Kent County.

The 6’ x 10’ mosaic, with a central tree motif with roots and branching limbs, is surrounded by clusters of images symbolizing elements that invigorate life on our part of the Eastern Shore. A blue crab, the white sails of Sultana, a winding river are just a few of the images that appear in the glinting formation.

“The roots of the tree represent our rich past, and the branches express our sense of all the possibilities life offers,” Spencer said.

The project idea was discussed two years ago by KCHS Fine Arts Department Chair and Visual Arts Teacher Stephanie Spencer and art advocate Tom McHugh during a period when the school system was enduring systemic changes in the county and looking for programs to underscore the positive. Never losing sight of wanting the project to happen, Spencer sought and received a state grant to cover half the cost. Along with fundraising help from Sultana’s “Evening With the Arts” and other school groups, the mosaic was finally greenlighted.

Sue Stockman and Stephanie Spencer and students

Spencer looked to practicing artist and arts advocate Sue Stockman to oversee the project. Stockman, an accomplished artist in her own right, has overseen over two-dozen mosaic projects throughout the state from Baltimore’s inner city to rural Talbot County and St. Michaels high schools, and to each, she brings a special sensibility of inclusion, equality, and respect of each other. She knows first-hand the therapeutic quality and joy of collaborative artistic endeavors having worked on mosaic projects in schools where students have suffered trauma from violence. The creative projects also give the students a space to come together and share in a mutual accomplishment far away from the white-noise of social media and anxiety of 24/7 news cycles.

“We start each session talking about our lives and the project. Everyone gets to speak as we try to create a culture of kindness so that we can begin to work together helping and encouraging each other along the way,” Stockman says. “I’m passionate about wanting to bring a sense of aesthetics into schools, to cut through some of the institutional coldness of them.”

As students circled the mosaic—another way of including everyone in the creative effort—they clipped and cut the jigsaw pieces of glass needed to follow Stockman’s underlying design. Each student was drawn to different aspects of the design, but all took part in the overall drive to complete it.

Well into its sixth day Thursday, the image was almost complete, but work was still needed to meet their 8 pm deadline and help, they hoped, would arrive from community members answering their invitation.

The mosaic will eventually be placed on the exterior of the building as a sparkling example of what can be accomplished by students unified by a common artistic goal. Hopefully, they will carry the spirit of collaboration with them.

The project was funded through the support of the Maryland State Arts Council and the Kent County Arts Council.

Until I Am By James Dissette

January 4, 2018 by James Dissette

James Dissette is the founder of monthly community newspapers in Oregon, Michigan and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. He is the 1971 winner of the Sophie Kerr Award for Creative Writing, and most recently published Fierce Blessings, a collection of poems in 2008. He is a partner at Chester River Press and recently designed their current publication, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as translated by Alexander Pope and is currently working on his book, A Hungry Moon. He is a contributing editor for the Chestertown Spy and Talbot Spy

Vincestock: Remembering a Friend and Celebrating Life

June 20, 2017 by James Dissette

Editor’s Note: Chestertown and Spy special friend Vince Raimond would have turned 95 years old today. In honor of his memory, we have reposted Jim Dissette’s story of the first annual “Vincestock” from last year.

For those of us who knew Vince Raimond, Saturday’s First Annual Vincestock gathering was a sweet way to remember an old friend and to renew acquaintances with his large constellation of family and friends.

The evening progressed toward a sunset Solstice toast with an amazing assortment of music from Tom McHugh’s blues harp to Karen Sommerville’s acapella, along with anecdotes and a poignant story about rediscovering his long lost family as told by his daughter, Checkie.

I knew Vince from my earliest days in Chestertown. In 1968 he was my girlfriend’s landlord —wasn’t he everyone’s landlord one time or another? But I knew him most as the person who introduced me to a lifelong love for the theatre arts. I’d wager to say that Chestertown would not have the presence it does today for the performing arts. He and his wife Leslie launched, curated and nursed a fledgling theatre group along for 30 years and his spirit is still present in the Garfield’s performances.

Vince was not an “all things to all people” kind of guy. Part of his charisma was his strong set of values, and he’d announce his take on life at the drop of a hat. Agree or disagree you always knew where he stood, and if he was a friend, I knew it never to waver.

One summer, I think 1969, I was looking for part-time work, Vince hired me to do some copywriting for a brochure advertising some of his real-estate properties. And as I was an english and creative writing major at Washington College, I saw it as the perfect opportunity to flex my poetic muscles, such as they were, and embroidered each property description with an over-abundance of adjectives hinting at colonial charm where none existed, breathtaking value where there was little more than a “starter house”, and impeccable landscaping where there might have been one withered rose-bush. I proudly turned my copy in at the end of the week and awaited his glee. He sat at his desk in a short sleeved shirt looking like a Roman wrestler on vacation from the Coliseum. In fact, the first time I saw Vince I thought, “Damn, Spartacus lives in Chestertown.”

He looked up from my copy sheets, shrugged and said, “Dissette, these are just houses.” And so began my interest in non-fiction.

What struck me most about Saturday’s gathering was how our matrix of friendships, new or generationally, link us to each other in unexpected and long-lasting ways. With stories and celebration, we not only pay tribute to a friend who is no longer with us, but rekindle the qualities that most attracted us to that person and by sharing them keep that person among us, not as a shadow of the lost, but internalized as someone who breathes and walks among us.

You’re still with us, Vince.

Finding Voices: “The Way We Worked” at Sumner Hall

April 17, 2017 by James Dissette

I visited Sumner Hall the other day to look at the new Smithsonian exhibit, “The Way We Worked” and its allied display, “The Black Labor Experience in Kent County: Free and Enslaved; Founders and Soldiers; Tools of the Trades and Contemporary Work Stories.

I wanted a break from the interminable news about chemical warfare, battle armadas and the ever-widening divisions between countries, political groups, ethnicities and the kaleidoscope of social classifications that make up the human race.

It was quiet that afternoon in the small building on Queen Street as I walked among the artifacts on the first floor, looking at tools of the trade and read about the lives of some of Kent County African Americans who had succeeded as ex-slaves to build businesses and lives, many within a few hundred feet of Sumner Hall’s location on Queen Street.

I tried to imagine even the faintest outline of the black experience in America. It’s easy to read history or watch documentaries about the past, but easier for that experience to lack a connection to the core of our empathy. If we have it at all. After all, what has the past have to do with us? But a continuum of time and its events is still part of the whole and the voice of the American and world narrative is still being spoken—at least today—in every human activity from Johannesburg to Cincinnati.

It’s there in ‘imagining’ that for me a kind of discordance begins. It starts with the geophysical, sitting in a building restored to honor free blacks and slaves who fought and died for the North during the Civil War, on a block of town that for generations had been the home of African American families, a town that held slave auctions overlooking a river often teeming with sailboats. I doubt a black man or woman in the 18th century would delight as much seeing a white sail on the horizon. We are a long way from the kidnappings in Senegal and the depravity of the middle passage. Or are we? If 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation human bondage is no longer the coin of the realm, its consequences—the constant re-igniting of discrimination against “the other”—still poisons us.

But what is the dissonance, the clattering of voices—not only ours, but the ones we inherited—that keep me listening as if to locate by some magical sonar a clear narrative about the things that divide us and make our lives smaller by suffocating us with prejudice, fear and disdain?

I see my father sitting at a desk in the corner of the room but it’s 50 years ago. He is in his Navy Captain’s uniform and I hear laughter around him as he tells a racist joke. The party fades, the laughter dissolves.

The two exhibits at Sumner Hall are related but different in their scope. The first floor personalizes the black work experience with names and excerpts of historical records of their lives. The second floor is a lens pulled back to a panoramic shot of the wider American work experience. Here, a labyrinth of photo panels has been set up, each panel depicting people at work—black, white, Asian, men, women—all doing their jobs: women switchboard operators and train mechanics, astronauts, watermen. While it is impossible to overlook the photograph of an African-American waiter entering a train dining car filled with well-dressed white passengers, it does not close my self-enquiry.

The Smithsonian, by deftly widening the scope shared work, has invited local organizations to share in some of the historical heavy lifting, at least as far as the sharper focus on the African American experience and although the stories reveal many successes of overcoming harsh indignities it should not be lost upon us that, like a good photographic image, negative space defines it.

And there is my father, sitting at his desk behind one of the Smithsonian panels. It is 1965, 20 years after submarine combat in the Pacific and he is opening a letter, reading it, thinking about it. “It’s from one of my torpedoman, thanking me for saving his life. One of the best damn black torpedo man’s mate in the g’dam Navy,” he says. But ‘black’ is not the word he uses.

I’m confused. Praise, derision, and contempt are a bewildering choir of messages. How do we unlearn the voices within us? And where did they come from?

Like a primitive abacus, the brain calculates and classifies the differences: other, not other, good, bad, less than, equal. The book of natural selection and adaption explaining the difference in skin color and nutritional metabolism, tribalism, and in-group trust. The human genome project even points back as far as the Pleistocene era as a marker for human discrimination between the loved in-group and the feared out-group. We have to look no farther than the recent immigration ban to feel the ancient sting of fear of otherness.

For the two exhibits at Sumner Hall to work synchronously, to walk back and forth in our minds between a 19th-century ex-slave and a white woman astronaut—Sally Ride is displayed—is to enter the cardinal inquiry. For a few minutes we can begin to sense that in our endeavor to survive we are the same, building things with our hands, working as mechanics and farmers, physicians and taxi drivers, whatever it takes to get along, to succeed, to advance, Walt Whitman’s universal man.I walk through the gauntlet of the Smithsonian installation and stare into the faces of people at work. They are us. Working to live.

It is 1954, my father, mother and I are driving to Florida. At a rest stop, there is an African American, old to my 6 years. On his bicycle, he has all his worldly possessions wrapped in cloth. My father gets out of the car, talks to the man for some minutes, reaches into his pocket and gives the man some money. He returns, says the man migrates to Florida every year in his bicycle.

Tomorrow he will tell a racist joke but for a moment I saw an act of kindness override his inherited attitude. It gets complicated like that and it’s up to us sort through and re-evaluate our own biases and open our minds to the understanding that we are all passengers. Otherwise, we continue to throw fuel onto the burning cross.

The Smithsonian and Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience exhibit give us a place to have this kind of meditation. It’s a serious gift and Sumner Hall is the perfect place to unwrap it.

“The Way We Worked” exhibit will be at Sumner Hall through May 20th. For the many lectures, exhibits, musical performance and dramatic performances related to the event, go here.

Benchworks, The Peoples Bank, Silver Hill Farm, Phoenix Initiatives, Chesapeake Bank and Trust, The Finishing Touch, Grasmick Lumber and Shrewsbury Church are sponsors of these events. Without this kind of community and local business support, exhibits like these would never give us the opportunity to discover our shared passage of life, the commonality rather than the differences.

I remind everyone that Sumner Hall is now a self-funding private non-profit. We must work together to keep its doors open. For more information, please go here

Profiles in Recovery: Vincent Douglas

April 6, 2017 by James Dissette

It took Vincent Douglas a near-death experience to reevaluate his life and while that event would rock most of us into a self-assessment mode, for Douglas it required a life or death decision: did he want to die as a heroin addict or work toward a life of recovery.

The Spy caught up with the 28-year-old at the A.F. Whitsitt Center’s Recovery in Motion (RIM) 18 months after making his decision to live and talked with us about his pathway to a new life and his dedication as a peer counselor to carry a message of hope to others suffering from addiction.

Reflecting on his past, Douglas says, “I didn’t sign up for the lifestyle I lived. It happened and now I use that as a tool to help others. When I came here, I had nothing, I was nothing, so I had nothing to lose and everything to gain.”

As a peer counselor at RIM, his experience as an addict paired with his own recovery program opens the door for communicating with those suffering from the disease of addiction. Speaking a common language is the centerpiece of establishing trust in a peer recovery environment.

Recovery in Motion (RIM) “Offers a wide range of services that provide our community with the tools to increase their well-being. Support includes individual & group counseling, behavioral health education/prevention, peer support and care coordination to assist persons in recovery with behavior and addiction issues.”

This video is approximately 7 minutes in length. More about A.F. Whitsitt Center in Kent County may be found here.

Follow Us