Did you catch that shot on Page 1B of Sunday's paper? It showed a couple of boys using one of the last standing pay phones in the country. The photographer was Michael Woods of the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, but is photography the right word for his art? The picture had the realist-romantic quality of an Edward Hopper painting, appealing as it did to a nostalgia for a time past. Yet it's clearly a time not past in Prairie Grove, Arkansas.
That phone booth now has been nominated for the National Register of Historic Places by an arm of the state's Historic Preservation Program--and needed to be. Whether it was Clark Kent using just such a call box to don his Superman costume or motorists pulling off the road to use one in the 1950s, these leftovers from the past are part of American lore and legend.
Now, thanks to Michael Woods, this one is part of American art, too. That little semi-private sanctuary saves Prairie Grove from being what Walker Percy called a no-place, an emptiness without identifying marks, an urban blank.
And the colors in the background of Michael Woods' snapshot/painting/work of art--the gentle blues and greens and grays fading into one sky--the perfect backdrop for two little boys very much of the present yet somehow standing in a past that isn't yet past . . . .
Thank you, Michael Woods.
Editorial on 04/09/2015