The Seward Origins of My Mom's Religious Revolt

My mother, Ruth (née Maier) Sylwester died on May 12, 2016, at the age of 83. She enjoyed a long, happy life. She gave birth to and raised seven children, all of whom are still alive. She died peacefully, of natural causes.

Ruth Sylwester at about the age of 80

I am the first of her seven children, born in 1952. The seventh was born in 1961, so she gave birth to seven children in about nine years. She gave birth to three boys in a row, then to one girl, and then to three more boys in a row. (Mike, Steve, Tim, Tricia, Larry, Peter, Andy)

My Mom and Dad visited my family in New Jersey in 2008.
Here we are in the dressing room of a Manhattan fashion show
where my daughter Luka (on the left) appeared as a model.

She was an intelligent, attentive, loving, encouraging, tolerant, calm mother. She remained married to Robert Sylwester to the end.

Ruth Maier at about the age of 18.

She grew up as a "PK" -- a "preacher's kid". Her father served as the pastor of Grace Lutheran Church in Eugene, Oregon, for about a quarter century. He was the pastor at her marriage ceremony in that church. One of her brothers, Don, became a Lutheran pastor.

While attending high school, she served as the yearbook editor, she was inducted into the National Honor Society, and she was awarded a scholarship to attend the University of Oregon.

She dropped out of her first university semester to get married, when she was barely 19 years old. My Dad was 24 years old and was the one-person staff -- teacher, bus driver and janitor -- of a Lutheran elementary school in Vancouver, Washington.

Dad still was working at that school when I was born ten months later. Mom remained home as a housewife for the next two decades.

After her youngest child, Andy, began attending school, Mom resumed her college education and eventually earned two Masters Degrees -- in 1) Library Science.and 2) Secondary Education. Subsequently, she worked as a school librarian and finally as a bookstore owner. She read avidly and filled our home with books and periodicals.

She filled our home also with antiques and art. Our home was decorated beautifully. She well could have become an artist. For a couple years she wove artistic fabrics on a loom.

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A key development in my Mom's intellectual life was her rejection of the Lutheran Church. In about 1970, a couple years after our family moved from Nebraska to Oregon, she stopped attending church services. The church that she stopped attending was the church she had attended as a child, where her father had served as pastor.

My Dad objected to her decision, and they argued about attending church practically every weekend for a couple of years. Sometimes there was yelling, and always there was at least angry tension. He argued for staying and trying to reform the Church. This weekly drama traumatized our family.

My Dad continued to attend church services without her. The children had to attend with him, but they too stopped attending church as soon as they could get away with it.

I myself was rather critical of my Mom's refusal to attend church. I thought that her marriage obligated her to deal with her religious change in a more compromising, gradual manner. Her refusal to attend church embarrassed her family, especially my Dad. In the weekly arguments at home, she often lost her temper and sometimes made anti-male comments, which upset me.

She emphasized her complaint that our Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod (LCMS) adhered to a doctrine of forbidding women to serve in positions of authority. More generally, however, she had lost her belief in Christianity.

Gradually this argument between my parents dwindled. Dad continued to attend church, and Mom continued to stay home. All the children went through confirmation (Steve and I already had done so in Seward), and the youngest Andy was confirmed in about 1974. Perhaps that final confirmation marked the end of that family trouble.

After Mom rejected Christianity, she developed a personal religion, which featured reincarnation. She believed she had lived other lives in the past and would live other lives in the future. She believed in a spiritual world and in divine beings. She believed in spiritual mediums and sometimes visited fortune-tellers. Ironically, Mom became much more spiritual than Dad, who was quite a rationalist.

I respect Mom's rebellion from Christianity. My Mom made a difficult intellectual decision and upheld it in the face of disapproval. Her apostasy upset her retired-pastor father and other Lutheran relatives.

I myself have evolved far from Christian doctrine. I attend church only rarely, and then I usually attend a local Roman Catholic church. My religious evolution was not, however, affected significantly by my Mom's rebellion.

Now that my Mom has died and I reminisce about her life, I consider her religious rebellion to be an important turning-point in my perception of her personality. She became significantly more self-assertive, intellectually independent and argumentative.

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After Mom died, I discussed her religious rebellion with my godmother Marion, who grew up with her, almost as a sister. Marion told me that already in adolescence my Mom resented her father's patriarchal attitudes. He had in his home library a book titled Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives and Women Preachers, which criticized uppity females. At some point Mom angrily stole that book from his library and eventually gave it to her daughter Tricia as a relic -- according to Marion.

I do not remember my Mom ever saying anything negative about Christianity while we lived in Seward. I suppose she made some snide remarks about the Lutheran Church's discrimination against women, but any such remarks did not impress me as serious. I did not perceive any portents that she would quit the church angrily a couple years later.

Now as I look back now, though, I think that her religious rebellion began, under the surface, already in Seward. I regret now that I did not question my Mom about this when she still was alive. Now I have to speculate a lot as I write this article.

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We lived in Seward from 1959 to 1968 -- when I was age six to 15.

Our family had a photograph album that had many photographs of our Seward years, but the album has been lost. Until the album is found, I have practically no Seward photographs of our family to put into this blog.

The below photograph was taken at about the beginning of 1958. My Mom had recently turned 25 years old and already had four children. She is wearing a maternity dress for her fifth child, Larry, who was born in February 1958. About a year-and-a-half later, our family moved from Eugene to Seward.

Family of Robert and Ruth Sylwester in about 1958 in Eugene, Oregon.
(Left to right) Ruth, Tricia, Mike, Steve, Tim, Robert.
(Ruth was obviously pregnant with Larry.)

During that last year-and-a-half in Eugene, my Dad was studying for his doctorate at the University of Oregon (UO). We lived in a small apartment that the university owned and provided for married graduate students. Baby Larry slept in a dresser drawer.

Until my Dad became a graduate student, he had attended only Lutheran parochial schools for his entire life. He attended Lutheran elementary and high schools in Portland, Oregon, and then attended Concordia College in Seward, Nebraska. Then he taught at a Lutheran elementary school in Vancouver, Washington, for several years before enrolling in the UO doctoral program. When my Dad finished his doctoral work, he became eligible to fill a faculty position at Concordia College in Seward.

So, except for that couple of years as a UO graduate student, my Dad attended and taught at Lutheran schools. Although my Mom had grown up as a Lutheran preacher's kid, she attended only public schools, because Eugene did not have any Lutheran schools. My Mom's first experience with Lutheran schools happened after she married my Dad and became the wife of a a teacher at a Lutheran elementary school.

Since my Dad was the school's only staff member, there were no other staff members' wives who might have socialized as peers with my Mom. I suppose that she was isolated somewhat from the society of Christian education, even though she was married to a Christian educator.

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Concordia College provided housing to its faculty members, but when our family arrived in 1959, there was no house available in Seward that was large enough for our seven-member family. Therefore, our family was assigned to live in a large house that was located in Middle Creek, several miles outside of Seward. Our house was surrounded by farmland. Our house stood next to a church and a one-room school that served the area's farmers.

We lived in Middle Creek for a year. I loved attending second grade in the one-room school so much that I felt sad to move away to Seward. I described our Middle Creek year in a previous article of this blog.

When we moved into our Middle Creek home, my Mom was 26 years old, the mother of five young children and pregnant with her sixth. (Peter was born in the middle of our year there.)

Our house in Middle Creek was infested with insects, especially boxelder bugs. I remember the day we moved into the house, when I was horrified by seeing many of them crawling around everywhere.

The house was infested by moths, and we had to put mothballs in all our clothes closets. The house was infested also with mice, so we set mousetraps in the kitchen, and every morning we threw a dead mouse or two into the garbage.

So, Mom suffered a bad start in our Nebraska years. Our Nebraska house was infested. Mom had no nearby Nebraska neighbors in Middle Creek and did not have the free time to travel into Seward to socialize with other Nebraska faculty wives there. Probably Mom's first Nebraska winter was cold, windy and snowy.

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After we had lived for a year in Middle Creek, our family was assigned to our home in Seward, on Faculty Lane. There we were surrounded by other faculty families. Each family had many children who attended the nearby Lutheran elementary school. Mom socialized with the neighboring faculty wives. The children's extracurricular activities -- sports, plays, concerts, field trips, swimming lessons, etc. -- brought the parents together. During the summers, big picnics took place on the campus for all the faculty families.

In our last couple of years in Seward, many of the faculty married couples got together for volleyball games in the gymnasium, and Mom really enjoyed that social activity.

Mom enjoyed many happy times in Seward, but I think she always felt somewhat alienated. Her heart was back in Oregon. She did not want to participate actively in whatever clubs, activities and projects that were available for Concordia's or Seward's women. Her large family always gave her an excuse to avoid participating. She basically was an introvert, and her life in Seward reinforced her introversion. She stayed mostly within her immediate family.

The Seward Concordia experience probably socialized my Mom less than it socialized other faculty wives.

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A hobby that Mom developed and enjoyed in our early Seward years was buying and restoring antique furniture. She bought the furniture mostly at farm-household auctions. Today we would call them "estate sales". The farm parents grew too old to operate the family farm, and the children did not want to take over the farm. The family sold the farm and home and all its stuff. The farm family hired a professional auctioneer to come to the farm and to auction everything away during a Saturday.

Mom began going to these auctions soon after we moved onto Faculty Lane. We now had a big house but little furniture. She began by buying basic furniture -- beds, dressers, tables, chairs. She soon learned how to improve the furniture's quality by stripping off the old paint or varnish, sandpapering the surfaces smooth and then brushing on new paint or varnish. I remember seeing her spend hours restoring furniture pieces for hours on our Faculty Lane driveway. She did this work outside because of the turpentine, sand papering, varnish, paint, etc.

She continued going to these auctions whenever she could. Sometimes another faculty wife would accompany her -- Betty Stelmachowicz became a rare close friend this way -- but Mom would go alone if necessary. Sometimes she traveled rather long distances. My brother Steve went along with her sometimes. I myself went to one auction, where I bought a television set for my bedroom.

The near solitude of these activities -- the traveling to the auctions, the selecting and bidding at the auctions, the restoring of the furniture, and the decorating of the home -- fit well with Mom's introverted personality. When she did these activities, she might be accompanied by one or two other persons or she might do them completely alone. She was happy doing them alone. Mom loved the artistry of these activities too -- making plain things beautiful.

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Dad had much talent in the visual arts. As a child, he had taught himself origami, and he folded beautiful paper decorations for our home every Christmas. As an elementary-school teacher, he had learned many school crafts -- silk-screening, papier-mâché, and so forth. While we lived in Middle Creek, he painted a plain wood hutch as illustrating the song The Twelve Days of Christmas.

Part of a family portrait. On the left side is a wooden hutch
that my Dad painted while we were living in Middle Creek, Nebraska.

Eventually Dad focused all his free time on writing and abandoned the visual arts, except for our origami decorations during the Christmas season.

Eventually Mom became our family's visual artist. Her main medium was auction purchases, and her gallery was our home's interior.

By the time we moved away from Seward, our home was full of antiques and art. Soon after we moved back to Eugene, all those antiques and artworks were destroyed in a warehouse fire. My Mom started over and eventually decorated our Eugene home just as beautifully.

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Dad's Concordia office was in Weller Hall's basement, right next to the studios where the art classes were conducted. Dad became close friends with the chief art professor, Reinhold Marxhausen, and then with other art professors such as William Wolfram and Richard Wiegman.

In general, my parents socialized mostly with the the faculty members who were involved in the arts -- the visual arts, theater and music -- rather than, say, theology or history. For the purpose of this article, I will characterize the art-specialty faculty members as rather malcontent. Whenever their church art was criticized by Lutheran philistines, the art professors griped about the criticism. For example, I remember Marxhausen griping about criticism he had heard about some cloth banners he had made to decorate some church services. Also, the visual-art professors received outside income for their artworks and therefore could consider quitting their Concordia positions.

My parents' close social interactions with the art professors influenced my Mom. Their particular discontent about the Lutheran church rubbed off on her, especially since she herself had become active in visual arts.

Especially Reinhold Marxhausen inspired Mom's interest in the visual arts. He preached that we always are surrounded by beautiful things if we simply learn to recognize them. He preached that we can easily turn ordinary or found objects artistically into decorative objects. He decorated his own home with such objects, and he also gave a lot of public, slide-show lectures, demonstrating his ideas and found-object art.

Mom admired also his wife Dorris's jolly humor and social confidence. Dorris participated actively in Nebraska state politics. Mom admired Dorris for being a secular activist away from Concordia College.

During the summer of 1964, while our house was being moved from Faculty Lane to North Columbia Avenue, our Sylwester family lived in a dormitory across the street from the Marxhausen home. In this blog, I have written an earlier article about being summer neighbors of the Marxhausen family. This was a time when Mom got to know the Marxhausen family especially well and was influenced by their rather unconventional (for Concordia) lifestyle.

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Our family subscribed to two newspapers -- The Omaha World-Herald and The Lincoln Star -- and to a large number of magazines -- Look, Life, Saturday Evening Post, Saturday Review, Readers Digest and so forth. In our early Seward years, Mom did not have time to read books, but she read newspapers and periodicals -- and all the subscriptions were purchased by her.

She also bought book sets for children. For example, our grocery store sold a multi-volume Golden Encyclopedia set -- one volume every month. In general, our family had much more reading material coming into our home than other families.

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In a previous article, I wrote about Mom's parents and her oldest brother Bill serving as missionaries in Africa. Uncle Bill and his family returned from Africa to the USA in 1963 or 1964, while our family still was living on Faculty Lane. Uncle Bill's family stayed with us for about a week and then moved to Oklahoma City. We Sylwesters visited them in Oklahoma City for about a week.

Uncle Bill became very critical of the Lutheran Church while he was working as a medical missionary. As I understand, he felt that his doctor skills were not being used effectively and that his family was not supported adequately. So, when he returned to the USA, he spent much of his energy bad-mouthing the Lutheran Church. Eventually he quit the Church completely.

On one occasion, my godmother Marion visited us in Seward, and she and Mom drove together from Seward down to Oklahoma City to visit Uncle Bill and his family for a few days. On Sunday morning, that family did not go to church, but one of the children was watching a religious program on television. Uncle Bill angrily ordered the child to stop watching the program.

My godmother Marion told me that memory recently. She added that Bill was resentful because his father had forbidden him to attend social dances while he was in high school, because he was a pastor's son.

Anyway, I assume that my Mom was influenced significantly by her brother Bill's criticism of the Lutheran Church, of Christianity, and of missionary work in foreign countries. I think she was proud and interested that her parents served as missionaries, but she came to think that missionary work was generally arrogant and chauvinistic.

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When our family's youngest child Andy began attending school, Mom began attending classes at Concordia College. This happened during our last two years in Seward, when Mom was about 34-36 years old. Mom's auction-buddy and neighbor Betty Stelmachowicz was attending college classes about the same time, Mom and Betty spent a lot of time talking with each other after classes.

One of the first classes that Mom took was an art class, and I think that subject interested her most. She learned how to mix oil-paint colors and to make mosaics. I think she realized early that she did not have the time, patience and discipline to become proficient in illustrative arts. Eventually she came to prefer collages, weaving, stamping and other such non-illustrative arts.

She also took courses in literature, history and sociology. In these courses she began to read books for the first time in about 15 years. I remember that in her literature course she read a William Faulkner novel.

I remember a particular incident involving her history course. She read about how Ivan the Terrible had used the Christian religion to justify a horrendous massacre of Russian aristocrats. She was seriously upset by the religious hypocrisy of that historical event.

I think that Mom did not take any Concordia classes about Christianity -- about theology, church history or any other religious focus. Instead, she seemed eager to study secular subjects.

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Mom read Betty Friedan's book The Feminist Mystique while we lived in Seward. The book was published in 1963, but I think Mom read it a few years later.

The book proclaimed that many women found themselves feeling intellectually stunted in mid-life, after marrying young and then spending many years working only as housewives. Mom recognized herself as just such a woman.

The book inspired Mom to resume her education and to begin a career outside her home. The book caused Mom to much more critically re-examine her own life and the conventions that had influenced her younger decisions. In her own case, her decisions had been influenced strongly by the Lutheran Church.

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The years 1967 and 1968 were socially volatile throughout the USA. People were re-thinking and challenging many social conventions -- in politics, racial relations, music, art, fashions and so forth.

During those two years, when Mom was attending Concordia College classes, a major controversy about doctrine was developing in the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod. I wrote about this in a previous article. The culmination of his controversy during those years was part of the overall social ferment. Some Lutherans were challenging the conventions, and some Lutherans were pushing back against those challenges.

I don't remember my Mom saying anything about this controversy, but I am sure that she sympathized reflexively with all the Lutheran teachers who were being attacked as heretics.

I don't remember Mom expressing any opinions about that controversy while we lived in Seward -- except to make some snide remarks about the Lutheran Church's discrimination against women. Mom did not express any criticisms of other Lutheran doctrines. In retrospect, I think that she did have strong opinions but that she refrained from voicing them in the presence of us children while we lived in Seward. She herself was losing her faith, but she did not want to cause us children to lose our faiths. (She never tried to turn any of her children against Christianity or whatever religious or philosophical beliefs they maintained. She thought each person should decide such beliefs for himself.)

While we lived in Seward, I never had any idea that Mom would quit the Church. Only after -- long after -- she did quit the Church have I considered that her loss of faith probably began already in Seward.

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During our last two years in Seward, I attended Concordia High School. Although our family received a faculty discount, attending this parochial school cost money. Paying for a series of seven children to attend Concordia High School and then to attend Lutheran colleges would have been financially ruinous for our family.

My brother Steve remembers overhearing a conversation between my parents in Seward. Mom suggested to Dad that all we children should attend Seward's public high school instead of Concordia High School.

When Dad received an offer to become a professor at the University of Oregon, Mom was eager to move away from Seward Concordia as soon as possible. This was a big step up in Dad's academic career, and he would be earning much better money and benefits. Mom's parents and most of her siblings were living in Oregon. She looked forward to making a new beginning in her life.

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Mom enjoyed many happy times in Nebraska. Although she was socially isolated, her solitude facilitated her artistic development. She did have a few good friends among the faculty families, and some of them influenced her well. When she returned to college in her mid-30s, Concordia College was a relatively comfortable place for her to begin. Seward was a place where a major intellectual development in her life began.

Most of all, she wanted to be a good wife and mother, and Seward was a good place to do so. The town was safe, and she let us kids roam around freely, as long as we showed up on time for dinner.

Providing a Christian education to her children was important to her during most -- perhaps all -- of the period when our family lived in Seward. If she indeed did begin to leave Christianity there, that happened only during the last couple years of the eleven years that we lived there.

The attending-church battle between my parents was waged openly for only a couple of years -- during about 1970-1972. Perhaps during that period Mom made some angry statements about Seward Concordia. I really don't remember that she did, but she did make a lot of angry statements during the weekly arguments.

After those battles ended, more than four decades passed. Mom did not bad-mouth Seward or Concordia College, at least that I ever heard about. On the contrary, she discussed that period of our lives positively. As I wrote at the beginning of this article, Mom was an intelligent and calm person. She looked back on that period with a correct perspective, which included an appreciation of that environment's many good qualities, which fostered her family's development and her own personal development.

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My Dad's response:

My perspectives of Mom differ slightly from yours on occasion Mike, but this is your perspective, not mine.

For what it's worth, though, Mom's background led her to believe that movies and social dancing were wrong, so I got her to go to movies and to learn how to dance and that it was fine for us to go out to dinner and have a life independent of our family. She subsequently embraced all of these eagerly and found them to be yet another great joy in her life -- going to Salishan, to Ashland, to the theater, traveling to conferences with me, etc.

Relative to religious differences. We actually agreed far more than we disagreed. I thought that the LCMS had been on its way towards a positive theological moderation but got sidetracked by a rabid right -- but that it had values worth preserving. Mom's religious background had been more rigid than mine, so she disagreed. It had nothing worth saving. We had always considered our perspectives as more of an intellectual interaction, and in the end, both of us gave each other the right to our own opinion (something we had also given to each of our children).

Mom was her own self -- private, quiet, and unassuming for the most path. I think she saw me as more gregarious and outgoing. A good balance. We each gave each other a different perspective of life., and that provided the balance and a good marriage and parenting needs.

Two errors, Mike:

1. Mom read Betty Fiedan's The Feminine Mystique during our Seward years. It was a genuinely important book in her life. [This passage in the above article is now fixed.]

2. Mom returned to school librarianship after owning her bookstore for four years. During those final years in her professional career she moved from school to school to reorient libraries -- when teachers went on sabbaticals and things like that -- into beautiful new facilities.

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My sister Tricia's response:

I was heavily influenced by Mom's decision to leave the church, and I am thankful for that. Mom was a great role model for me.

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My brother Andy's response:

I was struck by two passages:

I myself was rather critical of my Mom's refusal to attend church. I thought that her marriage obligated her to deal with her religious change in a more compromising, gradual manner. Her refusal to attend church embarrassed her family, especially my Dad. In the weekly arguments at home, she often lost her temper and sometimes made anti-male comments, which upset me.

…I myself have evolved far from Christian doctrine. I attend church only rarely, and then I usually attend a local Roman Catholic church. My religious evolution was not, however, affected significantly by my Mom's rebellion.

Everyone who lived in that house was affected by this dispute. I don’t recall us ever talking about how it affected us, beyond the fact that it gave us each an argument to stop going to church. But I was taken aback a bit by Mike’s reminisce, because it is so polar opposite from mine.

First, I never felt embarrassed by Mom’s decision, nor was I ever critical. I felt embarrassed by having to walk down the center aisle when we arrived late, because it felt ‘showy’. This could all be explained by my age. Mike’s reactions could partly be due to his position in the family, and him being in high school.

My reaction to Mom’s complaints, about dominating men in particular, was to wonder what the hell was wrong with men. I paid attention to her, took her as a credible voice, and I reflexively took her side, perhaps because I was youngest, but it has been my impulse through life to favor the underdog. Mom’s complaints have always been with me, and I tried hard to understand what she was so angry about. I was a boy, and became a man, and was acutely aware that I was in the camp that angered her. But I understood it wasn’t everyone that made her mad, it was a certain kind of man. The type of man that demeaned and dismissed her. At many points in my life I’ve sworn to myself I wasn’t going to treat others like some have treated me, or other people I’ve seen mistreated.

As for my religious evolution, not once have I ever been a blind faither. I remember doing my paper route and wondering how God could send babies to Hell, or stupid people who just didn’t know what they were doing, to Hell. I remember when I first started dating Mary, and learned the importance of spirituality to her, that I was missing something, and felt I was ‘broken’ somehow. My thoughts about religion have meandered so far I can’t talk about the topic without nuance. I have come to a place I never could have imagined, where I know that Science can’t answer everything, and that there are aspects of our lives we can never know or understand, and must simply give in to our subconscious.

I don’t believe in any kind of ‘god’, but I recognize a real value to religion, in that it’s a way to commune with others and to connect with a part of ourselves that is an eternal mystery. I don’t resent any of my religious instruction; rather, I feel it gave me a base, a structure that helps me understand our culture, and allowed me to veer off into my own exploration.

There’s not a yes or no, right or wrong to how these things affected us. It’s just interesting to me that they’re so different.

A Blog About Reinhold Marxhausen

Somebody (I don't know who) has started a blog entirely about Reinhold Marxhausen. Below are three pictures from that blog. The third is a Marxhausen drawing of Concordia University's first president George Weller.

I had forgotten about the unicycle. The odd vehicle I remember Mr. Marxhausen riding was a motor scooter.

Dorris Marxhausen

Karl Marxhausen, in his own blog, has an article about the humor that characterized his family and in particular about his mother Dorris and her sense of humor. Below is part of Karl's article, with a few of the pictures. Read the whole article.

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Growing up under the Marxhausen roof has been a dance with literature. This was where I learned to love reading. My mother introduced me to Sam And The Firefly, an adventure about an owl and his friend, whose tail light filled the night sky with illuminated words. She read books to me when I was young.

She loved to read newspapers and worked in the library at St. John's Elementary School. She loved to compose her thoughts on her royal typewriter with its carbon papers. Letters came to me the summer I worked in Galena, Illinois, bringing me up to speed on all the family news. She wrote letters to the editor and tried her hand at politics as well. Simply put, my love words came from her. Much thanks to Dorris Marxhausen.

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(This is Mike again.) I remember Dorris mostly as she looks in the third photograph.

I remember Dorris Marxhausen as someone who laughed a lot.

She was also a rather serious person, though. She was very interested and active in Nebraska politics, which was unusual for a woman in those years. She was a Republican, but in Nebraska in those years, the Republicans were the liberal party.

Here is a picture of the Marxhausen family now:

Seated (left to right): Reinhold Marxhausen and Jerry Lodwig.
Standing: Kim Marxhausen, Paul Marxhausen, Karl Marxhausen, Dorris Marxhausen and Marie Lodwig.

Reinhold Marxhausen's Sound-Making Sculptures

Some guy named Ramon Galvan has a blog named Outer Tumbolia. I looked through the blog for a while, and I must say that I do not get the blog's theme or direction. Maybe he is writing articles about sound.

Anyway, the blog includes an interesting article about how Reinhold Marxhausen began to make sculptures that make sounds. Whenever I visited Marxhausen's studio, he would show me some sound-making sculpture he was developing.

The relevant part of the blog article follows:

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Reinhold Marxhausen grew up in the 1920's and 1930's, the son of a pastor and one of eight children in Vergas Minnesota. He played the musical saw, he played water-tuned bottles, and he found piano lessons boring. He carried stardust in his pocket.

After military service, followed by degrees in art and biology, Marxhausen took a teaching position at Concordia College in Seward Nebraska, where he remained until his retirement in 1990.

It was in 1962 that he first began to work with sound objects. "It was a boring Saturday at the sculpture studio; no plans for the day," he recalls. "I found a door knob on the table and welded some wires on one end just for the fun of it. I placed the door knob to my ear and strummed the wire on the opposite end."

"WOW."

Since his discovery, Marx has made a wide variety of sound sculptural forms, and he has developed the door-knob idea in two main directions. One form consists of objects with exposed, external spines. some of the most successful have been his manual walkmans, (below) made like a pair of headphones, with spines sticking out from the metal ear pieces and sometimes rising from the over-the-head connecting piece. They make a stereo concert of lovely sounds, on a minuscule one person scale.

The other form is a small, chunky, metal object, fully enclosed, with no hint of what is inside. Sound comes from within when you shake or rock it, audible only when you hold it close to your ear. What is in there? Marx is not telling.

The objects are just pocket-sized and, recalling the meteor of his childhood, Marxhausen has given them the name Stardust. He makes them as plain in appearance as can be; they look like worn and dirty stones. There's a Marxhausen message in his having put so lovely a sound in such a homely thing.

Marxhausen Balloon Float at Seward Parade on July 4

My brother Steve sent these two pictures, which were taken on July 4, 1975. The original images' caption (not shown here) says, "Marxhausen Seward Fourth of July Parade float. Old St. John Lutheran Church in the background."

Steve says that the bottom picture shows the front of the float being held by Karl Marxhausen (in the foreground) and Reinhold Marxhausen (in the background). The back of the float was held by Paul and Dorris Marxhausen (son and mother) and some friends, but they are not seen in these pictures.

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Karl Marxhausen, in his own blog, added this information:

Dad used hula hoops for the four corners. With a walker in each hoop. He created a fish line grid, to which inflated ballons were secured. The rectangular float could be elevated by the front and back walkers moving to the middle, creating a 20 high arch.

A Day in February 1963

Karl Marxhausen has a website that includes some photographs that seem to date back to the early 1960s. This photo shows Reinhold, Paul and Karl (on the right) "outside the igloo we built up on the upper bank of Concordia's football field."

The picture below shows Karl beginning his artistic career, following after his father. You can see at Karl's website that he is an excellent painter whose works people buy.

Below is a picture of Karl as a boy playing in a puddle. I think I had rubber boots just like that. They were part of the uniform for Seward boys in those years.

Karl's website includes images of all the pages from a small, illustrated book that Reinhold Marxhausen made to record a walk he did with Karl and Paul on a day in February 1963. Here is the book's title page:

Below is a sample from inside the book. This page is on the left side:

This page is on the right side:

The entire book is on this webpage.

Sylwester Family's Summer Near the Marxhausens

In the summer of 1964, while our house was being moved from Faculty Lane out to remote Columbia Avenue and being set up, our family moved into a house across the street from the Marxhausen family. Both these houses were on Columbia Avenue, across a street from each other.

During those weeks, I spent my mornings, when the weather was cool, at the empty site of our old house, saving the bricks so that I could sell them and make a lot of money.

During the afternoons, when the weather was hot, I hung out at the house where the Schwich family was supposed imminently to arrive.

My Dad was a good friend of Reinhardt Marxhausen, who taught art at the college. The Art Department, Mr. Marxhausen's office, and my Dad's office were all together in the basement of Weller Hall.

All the kids knew Mr. Marxhausen, because he visited the elementary school sometimes and taught the students how to make mosaics. He looked like a stereotypical artist, with a goatee and a beret. He also taught summer classes about art for local kids. I liked his wife Dorris, because she had a wry sense of humor. They had a couple of boys, Paul and Karl, who were classmates of my younger siblings.

We ate over at the Marxhausen house a few times during that summer. Mr. Marxhausen showed us his current art projects in his studio behind the house.

Since I was already 12 years old and seemed to be very responsible (not all like the bratty, immature little kids), the Marxhausens hired me to babysit their two boys. When I did this job, I never even saw the boys. The Marxhausen parents already had put them to bed. So, I just sat in their basement room (which was walpapered with old newspapers) and watched TV late into the night until they came home. They left me some Pepsi in the refrigerator to drink, so I drank Pepsi and watched Johnny Carson, which was a rare, grown-up treat for me. I think I always was asleep on the couch by the time the parents came home. They would give me some money and send me home across the street.

During that summer, our temporary house at this location was a major gathering point for lots of kids. We always had a lot of friends over, playing Risk, Monopoly and Hearts. It was a madhouse, with kids screaming and running around. One time, Gene Meyer was there, and he asked me how my mother could stand the loud bedlam. My Mom just tuned it all out.

Normally we could not have animals in our home, but my family made an exception that summer and allowed us to have a couple kittens. My little bratty brothers Peter and Andy abused those kittens terribly, throwing them around as aerodynamic experiments, so I had to slug Peter and Andy a lot in order to try to save the kittens.

Those kittens moved with our family into the house in remote Columbia Avenue. They lived in the house there until alergies developed in some of our family members. Then we moved them outside. I don't remember what happened to them afterwards. They have disappeared from my memory. I suppose they just became outide cats and eventually wandered away.

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Update:

As I was looking through Karl Marxhausen's website, I saw a photograph of Karl's dormitory wall.

Seeing this picture reminded me that the walls in Marxhausens' basement were wallpapered with old newspapers that were also three-dimensional. The walls had various protrubences and objects built into the wallpaper. Wierd stuff, like in Karl's dorm room.

Here is Karl's caption for the picture.

1975. Bob Winkler was the best room mate at Centennial College at UNL. Here are paper strips hanging from our dorm room ceiling.

The basement wall I grew up with was covered with layers of markers, collage, with cardboard tubing sticking out. My dad was into paper mache. It was cool. And this wall treatment carried over to my dormroom with the admiration of my room mate.

I would drag empty refrigerator boxes back to our room and make artificial coverings that I could draw on and glue dixie cups to and still not deface school property.

That's the Seward Concordia faculty-kid spirit! Be creative with paper mache, but don't deface school property!

Family Heinicke

Iddo Heinicke Sr (former pastor of St. John's Church in Seward) and Elizabeth Heinicke had eight children -- Gary, Ed, Iddo Jr., Martin, Ted, Victor, Bill and Betsy.

The Heinicke family lived in the St.John's Church parsonage located on the northwest corner of the North 3rd Street and Highway 34 intersection while Iddo Sr served as pastor. After Iddo Heinicke Sr died tragically in an accident, the family moved to the house on the southeast corner of Columbia Avenue and Lincoln Street. Long after her children had grown up, Elizabeth Heinicke finally sold the house, and then moved to North 3rd Street to live with her daughter Betsy Schmidt and her granddaughter Carolyn Schmidt. (Though her sons strongly encouraged her to profit from her years of home ownership, Elizabeth adamantly refused to do so; she sold the house to Reinhold and Dorris Marxhausens for the same price she had paid for it years earlier. Reinhold Marxhausen said years later that his family never would have been able to buy the house if Elizabeth Heinicke had not been so generous.)

Four of those Heinicke children — Gary, Iddo Jr, Bill, and Betsy — raised their own families in Seward for many years, as did the widow of Victor.

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Family of Gerhard "Gary" Heinicke

Gary Heinicke, born in [year?], died in [year?]

Gary had two careers.

First, he was a career U.S. Air Force pilot. His military career began during World War II when he served in the European Theater as a bomber pilot. During WWII, Gary was shot down behind enemy lines in Czechoslovakia, and successfully escaped capture with the help of the Serbian Resistance underground. During his military career, Gary's family lived in Germany, Spain, and Japan among other places. (Son Gary "G.B." was born in Kansas City, Missouri; son Ronald was born in Denver, Colorado; and son Tim was born in Tokyo, Japan.)

After retiring from the U.S. Air Force at the rank of colonel in the mid-1960s, Gary began his second career as the director of both student financial aid and college personnel at Concordia Teachers College in Seward. He was the first president of the Nebraska Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators in 1971-72, and was chairman of the first organizing committee of that association in 1967.

Eleanor (Kolterman) Heinicke, born in [year?]. (Sister of Don Kolterman, who owned the Ben Franklin's store in downtown Seward).

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Gary Heinicke, born in [year?]

Ron Heinicke, born in [year?]

Tim Heinicke, born in 1950, died in 2008. (Obituary post)

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Family of Iddo Heinicke, Jr.

Iddo Heinicke Jr, born in 1923.

Iddo Jr returned to Seward after serving in the U.S. Army in Europe during and after WWII. He ended his military service as a member of The Rainbow Division. He worked full-time at Jones Bank in Seward while also working part-time as treasurer for the Nebraska District of The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, and then became a full-time financial officer for the LCMS Nebraska District. Iddo Jr was instrumental in the beginnings of what is now known as The Lutheran Church Extension Fund (LCEF) and is honored by that LCMS organization as a "Silver Eagle." He served on The Board of Regents at Concordia University Nebraska, and also served in the local Seward government.

Joyce (Muhl) Heinicke, born in 1929.

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Stephanie Heinicke, born in 1953.

Kathie "Koe" Heinicke, born in 1954.

David Heinicke, born in 1956.

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They lived in East Hillcrest House 03 from 1954 to 1967.

Then they then moved to a new house that they had built on North 1st Street in Seward.

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Family of Bill Heinicke

Bill Heinicke, born in [year?].

Bill returned to Seward in the mid-1960s to teach at Concordia Teachers College after he had taught in Denver Lutheran schools for many years. His family moved from Seward to Montana in 1971, and has moved to different places since then.

Pat Heinicke, born in [year?].

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Bill Heinicke, born in [year?].

Eric Heinicke, born in [year?].

Patricia "Patty", born in [year?].

Pamela "Pam", born in [year?].

Jennifer, born in [year?].

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Bill Heinicke's family lived in Faculty Lane House 7 from [year?] to [year].

This family then bought the Sylwester's house on remote Columbia Avenue (former Faculty Lane House 1) and lived there from 1968 to 1971.

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Family of Betsy (Heinicke) Schmidt

Robert "Bob" Heinicke, born in [year?], died in [year?].

Elizabeth "Betsy" Heinicke, born in [year?].

Betsy lived in different places, including foreign countries, until her husband Bob died. She then returned to Seward in the mid-1960s and has remained there since. For decades, she served as the Concordia president's executive secretary, beginning with President Janzow's tenure.

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Carolyn Heinicke, born in [year?].

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Family of Victor Heinicke

Victor Heinicke, born in [year?], died in [year?]

Victor was a Lutheran missionary in New Guinea when he had a heart attack. He then returned to the United States with his family, and died soon thereafter.

Norma Heinicke, born in [year?].

After Victor's death, his widow Norma moved to Seward in the mid-1970s with their children, where she remained until moving away in 2007.

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(Children's names being obtained.)

Family Marxhausen

Reinhold Marxhausen, born in [year?].

Dorris Marxhausen, born in [year?].

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Karl Marxhausen, born in [year?].

Paul Marxhausen, born in [year?].

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They lived at 199 College Avenue from about 1956 to [year?]. This house was was right across from where the old maintenance building and Becker Hall used to be. The house was where one of the Ruth dorms is now.

Then they moved to a house on North Columbia Avenue.