Today we honor Saint Timothy (died 97) and Saint Titus (died c. 96), Bishops.
Born about AD 17, Timothy’s father was a Greek gentile, and his mother Eunice was Jewish. He was converted to Christianity by Saint Paul the Apostle around the year 47, and became the partner, assistant and close friend of Paul. After a career as a missionary, he became head of the Church in Ephesus, and was the recipient of two canonical letters from Saint Paul. Martyred for opposing the worship of Dionysius, he is the Patron Saint invoked for intestinal disorders. Titus was a disciple of Saint Paul as well, and First Bishop of the Church in Crete. Born sometime in the first century, he was also the recipient of a canonical letter from Paul, and is the Patron Saint of Crete. There is a minority opinion that “Titus” is another name for “Timothy”, and that both names refer to the same person. In any case, the Church has chosen to remember these companions of Paul on the day after the Feast of the Conversion of Paul.
First up, last night our LSU Men’s Basketball team was beaten by #18 Mississippi State by the score of 71 to 76.
I woke up this morning at 9:00 am, started my laundry, and read the morning papers while eating my breakfast toast. Back on the computer, I was wrestling with a BlackBerry synchronization problem (my Desktop Software won’t let me synch my BlackBerry address book with the Outlook Express on the PC), and finally put in a request to help on the CrackBerry forums online. I then did my Devotional Reading and said the Second Day of my Novena to St. Blaise. I then ironed my casino shirts, finished my laundry, and played my trivia games.
At 1:00 pm I headed out into town; my first stop was at D.C.’s Sports Bar and Steakhouse, where I ate my lunch and continued reading Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield. I then went to the Hit-n-Run to get my Powerball and Louisiana Lotto lottery tickets for the Saturday evening drawing, then went to Wal-Mart to get salad supplies. Once home at 2:15 pm, I found that my new BlackBerry battery had been delivered, and I gathered up the aluminum cans to put in the garage. I then continued reading Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield until about 3:30 pm, when I made my lunch salads for tomorrow, Saturday, and Sunday. At 4:30 pm Richard and I watched Jeopardy! and ate the last of the gumbo for dinner. He has now gone on to bed; I will finish this Daily Update, take a bath to read the next chapter in The Book: A History of The Bible by Christopher de Hamel, then read one or two short stories in The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain Edited by Charles Neider before I go to sleep.
Tomorrow we return to work; after work we will talk with the Scheduling Department about our proposed October vacation and get our flu shots at the Clinic. And in the afternoon I really would like to lock myself in this room and do the filing of papers.
This Thursday afternoon we have a Parting Quote from Viktor Schreckengost, American industrial designer, sculptor, and artist. Born in 1906 in Sebring, Ohio, his father worked at a ceramics factory from which he brought home material for his six children to model. Every week he held a sculpture contest among the children, the winner of which accompanied his father on his weekend trip into the local big city of Alliance, Ohio. Only years later did Schreckengost realize that his father systematically rotated the winner. In the mid-1920s, he enrolled at the Cleveland School of Art (now the Cleveland Institute of Art, or CIA) to study cartoon making, but after seeing an exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art he changed his focus to ceramics. He graduated from the college at the Cleveland School of the Arts (now the Cleveland Institute of Art) in 1929 at which time he earned a partial scholarship to study at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna. To make the trip, he borrowed $1,500 from two owners of Gem Clay, an industrial ceramics manufacturer in Sebring. When he returned six months later, having built a reputation as both a ceramist and as a jazz saxophonist, Schreckengost paid back his loans — a fortuitous event for the men from Gem Clay, since separate bank failures during the Great Depression had otherwise wiped them out. A year later, at the age of 25, he became the youngest faculty member at the CIA. In 1931, Schreckengost won the first of several awards for excellence in ceramics at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and his works were exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, and elsewhere. By the mid-1930s he had started to pursue his interest in industrial design. For American Limoges, he created the first modern mass-produced dinnerware, called Americana. Along with engineer Ray Spiller, Schreckengost designed the first-cab-over-engine truck for Cleveland’s White Motor Company. By the end of the decade he became the chief bicycle designer for Murray-Ohio, a position held formerly by the famous Count Alexis de Sakhnoffsky. In 1939 he released his first design, the 1939 Mercury Bicycle, which was displayed along with four of his sculptures (The Four Elements) at the New York World’s Fair. In the early 1940′s Schreckengost began quietly revolutionizing the manufacture of children’s pedal cars as well. World War II interrupted his design and ceramic work when he joined the US Navy. His talents were soon recognized and he was recruited to develop a system for radar recognition that won him the Secretary of Navy’s commendation. After the war Schreckengost resumed his industrial design career creating products for Murray, Sears, General Electric, Salem China Company, and Harris Printing, among others. Approximately 100 million of his bicycles and pedal cars were manufactured by Murray, which made it the largest bicycle-maker in the world. He retired from industrial design in 1972, but continued teaching at the Cleveland Institute of Art, serving as Professor Emeritus at the institute. In April 1991, at the age of 93, Schreckengost travelled with Henry B. Adams, then curator of the CIA, to Norfolk, Virginia to address the Hampton Roads chapter of the American Institute of Architects. In 2000, the Cleveland Museum of Art curated the first ever retrospective of Schreckengost’s work. Broad in scope, the exhibition included sculpture, pottery, dinnerware, drawings, and paintings. The centerpiece of the exhibit was the Jazz Bowl, created in 1930. The industrial design portion included many of his famous designs such as safer and cleaner printing presses, economical pedal cars, cab-over-engine trucks, banana-seat bicycles, electric fans, and lawn chairs. Then in his 90s, Schreckengost made many personal appearances at the exhibit. For his 100th birthday in June 2006, The Viktor Schreckengost Foundation planned more than 100 exhibits of his work, with at least one in each state, to celebrate the milestone. The exhibits opened in March 100 days before his 100th birthday. He attended an exhibit in New York City to open the shows, and the night before his birthday he was honored at Cain Park in Cleveland Heights by a large and appreciative crowd. Also in 2006, Schreckengost was awarded the National Medal of Arts, the highest honor the federal government can bestow on an American artist. He and the nine other winners were feted in an Oval Office ceremony by President George W. Bush and the First Lady Laura Bush on November 9, 2006 (died 2010): “I remember picking up one request from a gallery in New York City asking a large punch bowl with a New York theme. I thought about it awhile and felt that the City of New York reflected the excitement and energy of jazz music. I listened to a lot of it when I had visited the city. I also felt that the bowl should be blue to mirror the strange blue tinged light that rose over the city at night. I started with plaster, creating a bowl and then went to white porcelain and started to use a rather primitive method of scratching (etching) an image on the surface of the bowl. This was a black and white technique. I then put on the bowl translucent copper and cobalt blue glazes that were then baked on. A week after the bowl was shipped, the gallery called to say that the lady who ordered it was so pleased that she wanted to order two more. She said that her husband Franklin loved it, too. One was to be sent to her house in Hyde Park, New York, and the other was to the White House in Washington. The lady was, of course, Eleanor Roosevelt.”
