Casimer Norwaish (1919-2008)

Casimer Joseph Norwaish was born on December 31, 1919, in Gary, Indiana. His parents were Lithuanian immigrants by the name of Alex Norvaisis, Norvaisha, Norvaish, Norvish, or Norvick (1887-1963) and Monica "Minnie" Venslovas or Wenslovas (1888-1981). Alex was a baker and ran his own shop and delivery service. Once in the lake region of northern Indiana, he and his wife seem to have remained for the rest of their long lives.

Casimer, nicknamed Cas or Cass, was the middle born of their children. He had an older brother, Alex Norwaish (1918-1981), and a younger sister, Veronica Norvish (b. 1924), who I believe died in infancy. Casimer attended Horace Mann High School and Tolleston High School in his hometown. In 1939, he graduated from the Fort Wayne Art School in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and during World War II served in the U.S. Navy. On June 17, 1947, he married Dorothy Snapp in New York City.

Although he worked as a commercial artist and advertising artist, Casimer Norwaish has come to my attention as an illustrator. The first credit I have for him is his cover illustration for The Great Lockout in American Citizenship (1937) by William Albert Wirt (1874-1938), a teacher and educational innovator in the Gary schools. After the war, Norwaish worked for Bonsib Advertising, a firm established by Indiana artist Louis William Bonsib (1892-1979) in Fort Wayne. Bonsib served as president of the Fort Wayne Art School in 1948-1949.

I discovered Casimer Norwaish just this week when I found a paperback mystery at the local secondhand store, entitled The Kidnap Murder Case by S.S. Van Dine (Bantam, 1948) and with cover art by Norwaish. Unlike so many paperbacks from the 1940s and after, this one has something about the artist. Opposite the title page are these tidbits:

About THE COVER

     Artist Casimer Norwaish, who painted the tense scene on the cover, claims it's absolutely authentic. To get an accurate picture of Philo Vance, "Cass" copied photographs of S.S. Van Dine. Seems he was a dead ringer for his own description of Vance. To create Madelaine Kenting, the frightened woman Vance is questioning, "Cass" says he simply drew the picture of a beautiful blonde that every artist has at the back of his mind!

Norwaish created the covers for at least three other paperback mysteries, Murder Cheats the Bride by Anthony Gilbert (Bantam, 1948), Come and Kill Me (originally Brat Farrar) by Josephine Tey (Pocket Books, 1949), and So Young a Body by Frank Bunce (Pocket Books, 1951). His illustrations also appeared in and on the cover of The American Legion Magazine in 1951. I suspect that he created still more paperback covers and magazine illustrations for which he did not receive credit. As a commercial artist and advertising artist, he would have been anonymous or almost anonymous, and so we have very little that is known to have been his work. That's a shame, for Norwaish was an accomplished illustrator who worked in a classic mid-century style that is so much missed today.

Like others in his family, Casimer Norwaish lived a long life. His came to an end on March 24, 2008, in South Bend, Indiana, and though his family was Catholic, his body was cremated.

Above and below: Casimer Norwaish's illustrations for "The Ship the Nazis Had to Get" by James H. Winchester, from The American Legion Magazine, August 1951. Two months after its publication in magazine form, Winchester's article was read by Ray Milland on the NBC radio show The Cavalcade of America on October 16, 1951. Note the spelling of Norwaish's name as "Norwaist."

Above: Norwaish's illustration for "Our New Privileged Class" by Eugene Lyons from The American Legion Magazine, September 1951.

Casimer Norwaish as a student at Horace Mann High School in Gary, Indiana, 1935.

This year, 2019, marks the hundredth anniversary year of the founding of the American Legion, as well as that of Casimer Norwaish's birth. So, Happy Birthday to both.

Original text and captions copyright 2019, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Franklin Booth on the Cover of Life

The covers of the old Life magazine weren't always comical, humorous, or satirical. Sometimes, as in those shown below, done by Indiana illustrator Franklin Booth, they were serious, adventurous, and romantic. Born on a farm in Indiana, Booth (1874-1948) seems to have been an artist with his head in the clouds, and he often drew and painted clouds--great, mountainous, billowing clouds, like landscapes in the air. Whether he was drawing works of Nature, such as towering trees like columns in a cathedral, or of man, such as skyscrapers or great spires and domes, all also reached for the clouds, or as every artist attempts, to heaven.

Life, an adventure issue, from October 20, 1921, with a cover by the unmatchable Franklin Booth.

Life, subtitled "Air Castles," from January 12, 1922, again with a cover by Booth, and including an element not always seen in his work: a human form.

Text copyright 2018, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Indiana Pioneers-Transportation

Today the Hoosier State of Indiana enters its two-hundreth year, for on December 11, 1816, it was admitted to the Union as the nineteenth state. Of the forty-eight contiguous states, Indiana is the smallest located west of the Appalachians. Nonetheless, it has made outsized contributions to the nation's culture and history, being first, most, and only in many categories, including agriculture, military service, manufacturing, automobiles, aviation, space exploration, education, literature, and art.

Ours is a state of pioneers. Whether in a flatboat, covered wagon, airplane, or spacecraft, Hoosiers have led the way. In observance of Indiana's pioneering efforts in transportation, I offer a number of illustrations by an artist who was herself descended from Indiana pioneers, Clotilde Embree Funk (1893-1991) of Princeton.

Postscript: The New York Times has cited my biographical article on Clotilde Embree Funk. The Times' article is called "Draw, She Said," and the author is David W. Dunlap. Mr. Dunlap's article is dated December 9, 2015, and it includes a photograph of Clotilde. In her hand is what Rooster Cogburn would have called "a big horse pistol." Believe it or not, when the picture was taken in 1926, Clotilde was target shooting in the basement of the Times Tower.

Happy Bison-tennial, Indiana!

Text copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Abraham Lincoln in Indiana

Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky and lived as an adult in Illinois, but his formative years were spent in what is now Spencer County, Indiana. Young Abe arrived in Indiana in the autumn of 1816, not long before the territory became a state. He was then just seven years old. When he was nine, Abe's mother died of milk sickness, a mysterious disease we now know is caused when cow's milk is poisoned by white snakeroot. Abraham Lincoln of course went on to be a lawyer, a U.S. representative, and, as the first Republican president, the Great Emancipator and the savior of the Union. He wrote: "All that I am or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother--blessings on her memory." Nancy Hanks Lincoln lies buried in Hoosier soil, near her home on Little Pigeon Creek.

I recently found three books on Indiana history and Abraham Lincoln. I would like to show three illustrations from those books, each by an illustrator previously unknown to me either as an illustrator or by name. Two have birthdays coming up next month.

"A Typical Pioneer Scene" by the Brown County artist Marie Goth. Born in Indianapolis on August 15, 1887, Jessie Marie Goth was educated at Manual Training High School and the Herron School of Art in her home city. Her teachers included fellow Hoosiers William Merle Allison, Harry E. Wood, and William Merritt Chase. Marie also taught art, but she is best known for her portraits. She was in fact the first woman to paint an official portrait of an Indiana governor (Henry F. Schricker). Her younger sister Genevieve, also an artist, married an artist, Carl C. Graf. Marie Goth was otherwise connected by blood or association with artists of the Hoosier Group and among the artists' colony in Brown County, Indiana. Her longtime companion was the artist Veraldo J. Cariani (1891-1969).

The drawing here is from Historic Indiana by Julia Henderson Levering (1916). In his youth, Abraham Lincoln would have lived in a cabin like this one. He also worked on a ferry boat and a flatboat, making a trip to New Orleans in the 1820s. In 1830, he moved with his family to Illinois, leaving his Indiana home behind. By coincidence, Marie Goth lived in a log house in Brown County. She, too, fell victim to poison when she was bitten by a brown recluse spider in the autumn of 1974. In her weakened state, she fell down the steps of her home and died on January 9, 1975.

In 1927, The Indiana Lincoln Union put out a booklet called Lincoln the Hoosier, written by Charles Garrett Vannest and illustrated by a youthful Constance Forsyth. Born in Indianapolis on August 18, 1903, Constance Forsyth was the daughter of artists Alice Atkinson Forsyth and William Forsyth. Like her father, Constance was renowned as a painter and teacher. Her résumé runs to hundreds of items (education, exhibitions, prizes and honors, holdings in museums, teaching career, etc.). One highlight of her career was her assistance to Thomas Hart Benton in his completion of the murals for the Indiana Building at the Century of Progress Exposition, the Chicago World's Fair of 1933. Lincoln the Hoosier was the first of two books she illustrated, the other being The Friends by Esther Buffler (1951). Constance Forsyth died on January 22, 1987, in Austin, Texas.

This map of Lincoln home sites is in a second booklet called Abraham Lincoln: A Concise Biography, published in 1934 by the Lincoln National Life Insurance Company of Fort Wayne. The mapmaker was Noble Brainard, also of Fort Wayne. (The image reproduced in the booklet shows only part of Brainard's original design. The image above is from the Internet.)

Noble Eyck Brainard was born on September 3, 1893, in Buda, Illinois. Like Marie Goth and Constance Forsyth, he was a teacher. For a time he lived in New Mexico, but he also worked as a civil servant in the Philippines and in Fort Wayne, where he resided from the 1920s on. Brainard married Amelia Zichgraf in 1924 in Fort Wayne. The copyright date on the map above is 1933. Brainard died on October 28, 1956, and is buried in his adopted home city. For years, Fort Wayne was home to the Lincoln Museum, one of the largest collections related to Abraham Lincoln in the United States. In 2008, shortly before Abe's bicentennial, the Lincoln Financial Foundation, holder of the collection, donated it to the Indiana State Library and the Allen County Public Library.

Text and captions copyright 2014, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Charles E. Bauerle (1912-1952)

Charles E. Bauerle was born on March 17, 1912, in North Vernon, Indiana, into a growing family that eventually numbered at least nine children. The Bauerle family made its home on the south side of Indianapolis. I don't know much about Charles Bauerle, but in 1938-1939, at age twenty-six, he completed a series of murals on nautical subjects at the new Indianapolis Naval Armory (now Heslar Naval Armory). The armory was constructed under the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and it was for that agency that Bauerle worked, at least for a time. His murals, which are still in existence (see comment below), show the Bonhomme Richard in action during the Revolutionary War, the victory of the Lawrence and the Niagara over the British fleet in the War of 1812 (commemorated in a U.S. postage stamp in 2013), the Battle of Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War, and the arrival of American destroyers at Queenstown, Ireland, in May 1917, near the outset of the American entry into World War I. Each of the murals is twelve by fifteen feet.

In about 1950, Charles Bauerle (whose name has been misspelled as "Bauerley") moved to rural Brown County. He worked as an artist for naval ordinance, presumably at what is now Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center in Martin and adjoining counties, located well west of Brown County. On the evening of October 17, 1952, while fetching the mail, Bauerle was struck by a truck on State Highway 135 (see comment below). He died from his injuries and was buried at Greenwood Cemetery, Greenwood, Indiana.

On the left, a photograph of a mural by Charles E. Bauerle, taken at the Indianapolis Naval Armory in 1938-1939. The mural shows the arrival of American destroyers at Queenstown, Ireland, in May 1917. On the right, a photograph of the artist, who would have been five years old when that event took place and who was not even thirty when he completed the mural. From the Indianapolis Times, Jan. 7, 1939.

A recent photograph of the same mural, still on display at Heslar Naval Armory, Indianapolis, from the website of Indiana Landmarks, which has an article about the armory, its history, and its planned use at this link.

Updated May 6, 2019. Thanks to the commenters below for further information.
Text and captions copyright 2013, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Raymond E. Lanterman (1916-1994)

Raymond E. Lanterman was born on May 20, 1916, in Howard County, Indiana, presumably in Kokomo. His parents were Harry W. Lanterman, a chemist and draftsman, and Minnie A. (Brown) Lanterman. Ray Lanterman graduated from the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and worked in Chicago as a commercial artist before enlisting in the U.S. Army in October 1940. His place of enlistment was Fort Benjamin Harrison, northeast of Indianapolis. According to the newsletter of the Polynesian Voyaging Society (Feb.-Mar. 1994), Lanterman was present at the attack on Pearl Harbor and took part in the invasion at Normandy. Lanterman achieved the rank of first lieutenant and settled in Hawaii in the 1940s. It is for his books on Hawaii that he is known today.

In addition to being a commercial artist and illustrator, Ray E. Lanterman was president of the Hawaiian Astronomical Society and the head of the membership committee of the Polynesian Voyaging Society. He was also the co-author of books, either as a writer or illustrator or both. His credits include:

• Aunty Pinau's Banyan Tree (1967) by Helen Lamar Berkey
• What's My Name in Hawaiian? (1967) by Louise Bonner
• The Secret Cave of Kamanawa (1968) by Helen Lamar Berkey
• Incredible Hawaii (1974) with Terence Barrow
• Twelve Sky Maps (1974) with Will Kyselka
• Maui--How It Came To Be (1980) with Will Kyselka
• More Incredible Hawaii (1986) with Terence Barrow

Raymond E. Lanterman died on January 23, 1994, in Honolulu. A recipient of the Purple Heart and the Distinguished Service Cross (for actions on D-Day), he was buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in the city of his death. You can read more about him on my blog, Book Jacket Bios.

A selection of Raymond Lanterman's books, mostly about Hawaii.

Text copyright 2013, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

George David Yater (1910-1993)

George David Yater was born on November 30, 1910, in the old Ohio River town of Madison, Indiana. Son of a truck driver, Yater studied at the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis and received his diploma in fine arts in 1932. Yater also studied at the Cape School of Art. I don't know much about his career except to say that he was a fine artist, illustrator, and teacher. Yater was also a member of several art organizations, including the American Water Color Society, Indianapolis Art Association, Philadelphia Water Color Club, and Provincetown Art Association. Despite his origins in the Midwest, Yater is known as a Massachusetts artist. He lived in Truro and was a member of the artist's colony at Provincetown. Both towns are located at the northern tip of Cape Cod. Not surprisingly, Yater specialized in landscapes and genre-type paintings set in seaside villages. George Yater died in Massachusetts on April 15, 1993, at age eighty-two.

Here are three watercolors by George Yater, all from an article called "The Lady and the Flounder" by Beth Melcher from Ford Times, April 1953. The top picture is of High Bank Bridge over the Upper Bass River. The middle picture is of the Oyster Harbor Bridge in Osterville, Massachusetts. The bottom picture is of the Herring River Bridge. All are of locations in Cape Cod.

Another really fine watercolor by Yater, entitled "Morning Shape Up," from about 1960.

Text and captions copyright 2013, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

James H. Cloetingh (1894-1965)

James Henry Cloetingh was born into a family of Dutch-Americans on July 3, 1894, in Muskegon, Michigan. As a young man he worked as the advertising manager for the Muskegon Chronicle. In his spare time he was secretary of the Muskegon Kennel Club. In 1923, in Muskegon's first championship dog show, Cloetingh's airedale, named Guardian Trust, took home the best of show honors.

By 1930, Cloetingh was living in South Bend, Indiana, and operating a commercial art studio with a partner. Their firm was called Cloetingh and De Man Studio. I don't know who his clients would have been--perhaps businesses in northern Indiana and the Chicago area. In addition to being a commercial artist, Cloetingh was a painter. I have found two of his pictures. Both are of boats. Cloetingh's subject should come as no surprise considering he was born on and lived close to Lake Michigan for most of his life.

Cloetingh exhibited in the Hoosier Salon in 1961. He died four years later in June 1965 at the age of seventy.

An oil painting (top) and a watercolor (bottom) by Michigan and Indiana artist James H. Cloetingh (1894-1965).

Text copyright 2012, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Mary (1903-1985) & Wallace Stover (1903-1983)

Wallace P. and Mary A. Stover were a husband-and-wife team of commercial artists and illustrators. Wallace Peter Stover was born on January 5, 1903, in Elkhart, Indiana, and graduated from Elkhart High School in 1921. He received a scholarship to the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis and received his diploma in 1925 after four years of study. Oakley E. Richey (later a teacher at Arsenal Technical High School), Mabel Bott (artist and wife of Earl Wayne Bott), and Josephine Hollingsworth were among the other students in attendance at Herron during the early 1920s.

Wallace Stover and Mary Alys Polk were married on August 31, 1929, in Manhattan. She was also an artist and a teacher in the Franklin, Indiana, schools. He was then living on Long Island and working in New York as a commercial artist and designer of costumes.

The 1930 census found the newlyweds living in Queens, New York. Wallace was then working as a magazine illustrator. By the 1940s, the Stovers were working together, illustrating inexpensive children's books and coloring books in a number of popular series, including the Wizard of Oz, Uncle Wiggily, and Raggedy Ann and Andy. They ran their own advertising firm, Mary and Wallace Stover Corp., in New York for forty-five years, retiring in 1971.

Wallace P. Stover died on January 13, 1983, in Princeton, New Jersey, and was buried at Florida Memorial Gardens in Rockledge, Florida. Mary Alys Polk Stover followed him to the grave in 1985. Their headstone is marked with the words "Together Forever."

Revised April 12, 2016; January 5, 2021.
Text copyright 2012, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

William Momberger (1829-1895)

William Momberger was born on June 7, 1829, in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany. He studied painting and lithography in his homeland before emigrating to the United States in 1848, a year of revolution in Europe. Settling in New York City, he set up a lithography firm, Coughey and Momberger, as early as 1852. His partner was John Coughey (or Caughey), a wood engraver.

Throughout the 1850s and '60s, Momberger created lithographs and engravings for books, newspapers, banknotes, and other documents. He illustrated Duyckinck's Cyclopedia of American Literature (1856) and the Gallery of American Landscape Artists. He may have been in Indiana as early as 1855 when his illustrations appeared in the book New Purchase, or Early Years in the Far West by Robert Carlton (New Albany, Indiana: Nunemacher, 1855). Momberger also created images from the Civil War and traveled in Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota. Extant lithographs place him in Fort Wayne, Evansville, and Vincennes, Indiana.

Momberger lived in Morrisania, New York, where he was counted in the 1860 census as an artist and in the 1870 census as a portrait painter. He was still active as late as 1888 and died on April 9, 1895. Momberger was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York. (Thanks to an anonymous reader for providing that information.) The obituary of a "retired illustrator" named William H. Momberger of Newark, New Jersey, appeared in the New York Times on December 12, 1933. That William Momberger may very well have been the son of the artist in question here, as he was born in New York in about 1851. 

A descendant of William Momberger has collected images and compiled a bibliography on the artist's works. You can see them at this website:

http://www.myspace.com/williammomberger/blog

You can find more information on William Momberger in:

• Appleton's Cyclopædia of American Biography, Vol. 4, edited by James Grant Wilson and John Fiske
• Pioneer Painters of Indiana by Wilbur D. Peat (1954)
• The New-York Historical Society's Dictionary of Artists in America, edited by George C. Groce and David H. Wallace (1957)

Beldad y la Bestia, illustrated by William Momberger (New York: D. Appleton Co, 1864), from the collection of the New-York Historical Society.

Lithographs of Evansville (top) and near Fort Wayne (bottom), made by William Momberger and dating from the 1860s.

The landing of troops on Roanoke Island, 1862, a Civil War lithograph by Momberger.  

A poor reproduction of Momberger's depiction of the historic duel between the Merrimack and the Monitor of March 8 and 9, 1862 (from the New York Times). That battle took place 150 years ago this year. Although the two ships fought to a standstill, both were lost before the year was out, the Merrimack--the C.S.S. Virginia--on May 11, and the Monitor on December 31.

Thanks to Anonymous for providing the date of death and the place of burial for William Momberger.

Text and captions copyright 2012, 2024 Terence E. Hanley