The James Monroe Song

James Monroe

Was the last

Pres-i-dent

To wear a white wig

He died in New York

Broken and broke

But unlike Millard Fillmore

He did not become a Whig

Morty Comix # 2494

Morty Comix # 2494 looked like the kind of comic art that needed to travel, so I turned to my online card deck to help me decide where to send it.

The 5 of diamonds. Five. Our 5th President was James Monroe, the first of the subset of Obscure Presidents. Since this blog is basically an online Obscuro Comix, Monroe was the perfect choice Fate decided to use.

There are 17 counties in the United States named Monroe County, and I am guessing each one is named after the President. I whittled the list down to the counties residing in states I have visited: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and West Virginia. I've been in Missouri, but only in the St. Louis airport changing planes and I won't count that.

Next card, 6 of hearts. Six. Ohio was the 6th state I listed. Hearts starts with "H" so I searched for a place in Monroe County, Ohio that starts with that letter and found the small settlement of Hannibal, on the Ohio River across from West Virginia.

I've actually been within about 40 miles or less of Hannibal in 1999 when I was driving north on I-77. Nearby Cambridge, Ohio was the home of Henry McCleary, who founded McCleary, Washington. The McCleary family farm now sits under an artificial lake created in the 1950s and is part of an Ohio state park.

Hannibal is nestled in some nice country.

I also visited Ohio during SPACE 2011, with my friends Bruce and Joan Chrislip as my hosts. In both visits I was impressed by how welcoming the natives of the Buckeye State were. My own ancestors lived for a generation or two in the northeast and southeast corners of pioneer Ohio on their way West.

Anyway, it turns out Hannibal is unincorporated and about a quarter of the size of McCleary (we have a bit over 1600 people here). So I simply searched for Hannibal online and chose the first place that popped up with an address, which turned out to be a vacant place of business up for sale. So I'm sending it care of the "Art Director," with a brief note, and hope whoever receives it has a sense of humor and an appreciation for the unexpected.

I submit that there will be no other comic art title harder to collect than Morty Comix. In March this serial will be 30 years old. And in a weird twist, it is the later issues that will be much harder to find. I am sure most of them have been thrown away since I have created this art form of Obscuro random distribution.

Obscuro Presidents: Monroe and Harrison

I found a couple more pencil drawings of United States Presidents (Monroe and Harrison) in my studio the other day. I think these are more recent than the set I posted not long ago, Washington to JQ Adams.

As I recall I was going to start a series on the obscuro Presidents and started with James Monroe and William Henry Harrison. I have a particular fondness for Franklin Pierce, but I didn't get that far.

Washington to JQ Adams

I found these fellows last week after I started the still-continuing excavation of my studio. I have no idea when they were drawn or what I had in mind during their creation.

Caricature has never been my thing, obviously. I don't think these portraits are particularly good, which is probably why I buried them in a corner of the studio. But they provide a springboard for me to talk a bit about my interest in history in general and presidents in particular. Only natural for someone who lives in a state named after George Washington, one of the greatest presidents.

They are drawn in pencil. The originals to Monroe and JQ Adams have yet to surface, but the photocopies of these two were with the others.

Jefferson was one of those presidents I always found fascinating for his contradictions and complexity. In the few trips I've taken Back East over the years, I count visiting Monticello as one of the highlights.

Here's what I wrote in 2008 when I reviewed Ken Burns' Jefferson documentary as part of my Cheaper by the Dozen film reviews on OlyBlog:

Thomas Jefferson / directed by Ken Burns (1997, VHS off-air). George Will, Gore Vidal, Daniel Boorstin, Garry Wills, Ossie Davis (Narrator), voices by Blythe Danner, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sam Waterston, Julie Harris, Derek Jacobi, Arthur Miller, George Plimpton. A favorite subject for students of paradox, Thomas Jefferson remains one of the most enigmatic of our Founding Fathers. A visionary who was also a captive of his era, he articulated the spirit of American liberty and human rights in the beautiful Declaration of Independence, yet was a total racist when it came to Native Americans and African Americans. He was a champion of small government and states' rights, yet took matters into his own hands as President when ordering an embargo and arranging the Louisiana Purchase. A small army of historians and writers tell us how Jefferson's contradictions reflect the conflicts in the founding and early years of the United States. Such disparate characters as George Will and Gore Vidal share their insight. Ken Burns is one of the few documentarians that has such an indentifiable personal style, raising the sharing of history to an art form. I love the way he'll focus on some inanimate object and through the voiceovers give that item a lot of meaning. He really has a creative gift for telling the story. The choice of Ossie Davis as the narrator, with a voice that is elderly and not smooth, took me off-balance at first. No fault of Burns, but unfortunately I kept associating Ossie's speech with his character in Bubba Ho-tep ("I'm thinking with sand here!"). I've done the Jefferson pilgrimage: visited Monticello, Jefferson's grave, Williamsburg, University of Virginia. It wasn't until later I learned Tom and I share (with thousands of others) immigrant ancestors, Christopher and Mary (Addie) Branch who came to Virginia in the 1620s. So this American Renaissance Man is a distant cousin! Neato. Historians will probably never let the dust settle on Jefferson. Since this was filmed in 1997, DNA tests have concluded that slave Sally Hemings' children were fathered by a member of the Jefferson family. Just one of the many continuing controversies surrounding a man who served as President two centuries ago. I was really struck by Jefferson's radical educational vision in establishing the University of Virginia. I think he would've been right at home during the McCann years at The Evergreen State College when that institution had a more libertarian bent.