{"id":1299,"date":"2022-03-05T12:52:53","date_gmt":"2022-03-05T17:52:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maxdesser.com\/?page_id=1299"},"modified":"2024-07-22T08:00:39","modified_gmt":"2024-07-22T12:00:39","slug":"reflections-of-a-nephew","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/maxdesser.com\/index.php\/reflections-of-a-nephew\/","title":{"rendered":"[ Reflections ]"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Reflections on Mac<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I knew Mac as his nephew.\u00a0 I was raised by my parents but grew up with Mac because my father and uncle always shared a home, first their parents\u2019, then the house they bought together.\u00a0 It was a one-family house converted to two with the addition of stairs just inside the front door.\u00a0 The original stairs in the middle of the house survived but no longer served as a passageway so much as a social space.\u00a0 Adjacent to the landings were my uncle\u2019s and father\u2019s studios, Mac\u2019s upstairs, my father\u2019s below.\u00a0 At the top and bottom of these stairs were old-time light switches that clacked loudly when you\u2019d flip them on or off, so whenever my father wanted to talk with my uncle, or my uncle to my father, they\u2019d toggle the light switch up and down, up and down, several times, clackety-clackety clack.\u00a0 If the other brother didn\u2019t hear it, the light would be left on as a signal so that whenever he passed by and noticed, he\u2019d come to the stairs and clackety-clack the switch until the first reappeared.\u00a0 That\u2019s how they called to speak to each other several times a day, my father sitting on the bottom steps looking up through the slats, my uncle at the top looking down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their studios were conceived before I was.  Reason and old photographs agree that the rooms began tidy and trim, but by the time I could clamber up stairs their workspaces were shaped by organically-tailored accretions.  Some of their furniture had apparently been broken before the point of accession, probably excessed from their parents\u2019 house or salvaged from somewhere because somehow it fit the space and satisfied a purpose.  Everything they needed would have been reachable within the rolling distance of their chairs if so much else hadn\u2019t been in the way.  This agglomeration made the spaces cozy and comforting.  So did the air.  I would have known Mac\u2019s studio blindly from the imbued perfume of acrylic paints, rubber cement, and flavored pipe tobacco \u2014 and also, increasingly, by the subtle scent of a heated slide in his paint-spattered Kodak Carousel, from which he projected his photographs onto white cardboard hung from a file cabinet.  Those photos were not art but snapshots, a way to bring complex outdoor visuals back into his eyes so he could paint indoors.  Only in his youth did he stand an easel outdoors, a practice he seems to have abandoned after a pair of eager untended dogs lapped his watercolor bucket dry, and that just minutes before a train bore down on him.  He did finish his painting of the Grand Hotel station, but apparently after that he retreated to work in the comfort (and safety) of his studio.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If family lore warrants belief \u2014 and it almost certainly does not, but the story might be telling \u2014 my grandparents fretted that an artist\u2019s earnings could not sustain the family but that my father\u2019s income as an interior designer could, so they ruled that Mac would serve in WWII and my father could claim an exemption as the family\u2019s sole support.  Whether by arrangement or fate (most likely fate, since my father had aged out of the draft by then), that\u2019s how it turned out.  It\u2019s not quite true, then, what I said, that the brothers lived the whole of their imbricated lives together:  Mac spent World War II in DC in the Navy, recruited as an art director alongside Walt Disney\u2019s artists in the Training Film and Motion Picture Branch, ultimately as a lieutenant, junior grade.  Even if he would have resented his parents\u2019 supposed edict, the Navy supplied him with great times and excellent training.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Lieutenant Desser<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Mac\u2019s formal training was in commercial art, with a degree from Cooper Union and courses at Pratt, American University, and NYU, all at night so he could work in the day.  By the time he was, without his knowledge, recommended to Navy recruiters by Dun & Bradstreet, his clients included Collier\u2019s<\/em>, American Magazine<\/em>. Country Life<\/em>, McCall\u2019s<\/em>, United Press, WNEW and WMCA radio stations, and a host of advertising agencies.  But the Navy fostered his mastery of filmstrips.  For those of us old enough, filmstrips were torturously boring static projections on dingy screens in front of the classroom.  But the continuous crawling loops that Mac produced were different:  substantial yet playful, joyous, colorful, and amusing \u2013 not exactly what one might expect in an ad for a company specializing in market analytics.  <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n