FORT SMITH -- Garrison Avenue grumbled and coughed like a giant with a chest cold. It wasn't the thunderstorm rising out of Oklahoma and about to pummel Interstate 40 with hail of remarkable size. It was motorcycles.
Stiff gusts parted bikers' wiry beards and teased the slashed edges of T-shirts as though looking for the edges of big tattoos. This was April 29, a few hours before The Steel Horse rally got fully underway but only minutes before the bottom dropped out of the sky, washing all those burly riders off the road.
But in Cisterna Park, a grassy triangle set with a giant dandelion-shaped fountain, one uniformed rider remained unmoved and unmoving through the storm.
Straddling a 1942 Harley-Davidson WLA on a newly sodded hillock, a bronze likeness of Gen. William O. Darby (1911-1945) gestures to the east and, by romantic extension, toward Fort Smith's far distant sister city, Cisterna, Italy.
Once upon a time, Darby was world-famous and lionized, inspiring news reports, games, coloring and comic books. He recruited, trained and led a celebrated battalion of infantry commandos -- the American Rangers. He ran with his men on front lines, lobbing grenades, and suffered the horror of seeing most of them killed, maimed or captured in a devastating firefight Jan. 30, 1944, near Cisterna.
Darby saw more action at Anzio, reorganized a tattered regiment, and was ordered back to the States to recuperate from wounds physical and mental. He came home to Fort Smith; endured a parade in his honor because his mother insisted; did 11 months of office duty in the Pentagon; and then he lobbied his way back into action in Italy.
Two days before the German surrender, while he outlined plans for attacking lovely Lake Garda, a dime of shrapnel from an exploding shell shot through his heart. One small wound, and he was dead at 34.
He was posthumously promoted to brigadier general; a b̶a̶t̶t̶l̶e̶s̶h̶i̶p̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶m̶i̶s̶s̶i̶o̶n̶e̶d̶ a troop transport ship was renamed in his honor*; James Garner played him in the movie ... a long time ago. Although he's still revered by U.S. Army Rangers, military historians, and the children of Fort Smith who attend Darby Junior High School, his grim glory has become obscure.
But not in his hometown, where a 15-member committee, the Darby Legacy Project, raised $165,000 ($300,000 counting in-kind donations) to create this new monument.
"Even if you don't know anything about this guy, there's four things that are going to impress you," said Darby Watkins, a nephew of the long-dead general. "Number 1, he's handsome. Two, he looks like he's doing something important. Three, he's packing. And four, he's on a Harley, so you know he's a cool guy."
Darby's extended right hand is modeled to suggest decisiveness, leadership. But the soldier was also a musician who performed with his father at clubs and in silent movies, and so his left hand rests on the handlebars in a more sensitive gesture. "If you lifted it off and turned it sideways, he's reaching for C on a clarinet," Watkins said.
Against a stormy sky, it's easy to notice that the sculpture's surface includes shadows not cast by sun. Moments of darkness and light are built into the bronze, in its patina.
"It's like the poet warrior," Watkins said.
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"It was months of work trying to get him right," Kevin Kresse said. This was late October, and the lanky artist stood arms akimbo in the open garage door of a metal work shed attached to the Martin Borchert Co. warehouse in North Little Rock. Union Pacific freight trains clunk-clunked nearby, the occasionally exquisite screeching of brakes drowning out offended dogs.
It was a hot day, and Darby's knuckles were cracking again.
Kresse used a short stick to smooth details on one side of the motorcycle's panniers, while on the other side of the larger-than-life clay hero, last-minute helper Patrick Fleming dabbed at the handlebars.
Fleming lives in Roland. He's a sculptor, a Vietnam veteran and "he knows motorcycles," Kresse said. Also, "he works for beer and pretzels." And he was helping Kresse meet a deadline.
Molten bronze sets up in seconds once it's poured into a mold, but the rest of the casting process takes a lot of time. Kresse's favorite foundry, The Crucible in Norman, Okla., has been jammed with business since its starring role in The History Channel series Monument Guys. So after winning the
Darby Legacy Project commission in January 2013, he decided he'd better deliver a ready-to-cast clay Darby to the foundry before November 2015 -- six months ahead of its scheduled April 30 unveiling in Fort Smith (April 30 being the 71st anniversary of Darby's death).
The committee had to raise funds first, and that took a year or so. But once he got their go-ahead, Kresse approached his deadline methodically, starting with a solid foundation. (Literally solid.)
Not a motorcyclist and wary of disappointing Harley fans, he bought one-tenth-scale Harley-Davidson WLA models from the Franklin Mint online. Kresse calls them "toys." He sculpted 6-inch Darbys to perch atop these toys. His intern Shane Bowers, an art student at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, crafted a model base, or plinth, to support them.
Kresse took a little Darby and a toy motorcycle to Norman, where technicians at The Crucible packed the tiny wheels and other crevices with clay -- creating a shape with no undercuts. He would use this as a maquette, a reference model; but first it was used to make the sculpture's armature, its inner support.
Not far from The Crucible in Norman is a foam-enlargement shop, Synappsys. Technicians there used 3-D computer modeling to make stiff foam versions that were 1 1/4 times the size of the actual man and machine.
Then artisans at The Crucible sprayed the foam with an eighth-inch-thick coat of molten oil-based clay (creating a pebbly texture still seen on the finished sculpture's wheels).
Kresse remembers picking up the foam in October 2014, which means he had just about 12 months to finish the work.
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For months, he added and subtracted clay to the foam in the work shed behind Martin Borchert, keeping the garage door lifted for light. "I had a lot of work to do on the figure," Kresse said, "because when you go from the 6-inch figure to one that's 7 feet tall, anything that's off just a little bit, you're off a lot."
He used looped wire and wooden sculpting tools as well an electric dental-wax carving set, whose heated tips let him carve the clay without leaving behind "boogers." An electric pan he called his "turkey baster" kept a mound of the oily clay ready to apply. "I warm up the clay, and I start to articulate everything and sculpt it on top of the foam," he said.
Bowers pitched in, sculpting parts of the bike and the rifle -- which proved particularly subject to drooping in the heat.
Meanwhile Kresse was reading books about his subject's military significance, conferring with committee members by phone, and poring over a 70,000-word family history document written by Watkins. The Darby Legacy Committee leaders -- Liz Armstrong and husband Joe (a Ranger) and Darby Junior High Principal Darren McKinney -- have done "a lot of research," Kresse said. "They have a passion to keep the general's story alive."
Also, he had enlargements of old photos.
A historian in St. Louis, David Lavely, gave him advice about the uniform. "He would tell me things like, 'You know, Darby had a World War I compass pouch as opposed to a WWII pouch,'" Kresse said. "I would reply, 'Of course, it was the first thing I noticed.'"
He wanted to see how the uniform fabric would fold as a body moved. Lavely had a model willing to strike a pose in the proper garments, but what pose? Kresse asked freelance photographer Brandon Markin to stand in for the 5-foot-9 Darby and photographed him posed as the bronze hero would be. Lavely then posed his own model to match in the vintage uniform, and sent Kresse photos.
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The face took "a good month."
Darby "looked different to me every time I would see different pictures of him," Kresse said. "The Army would do these marches, so he would get really thin, and then he would get, not big by any means, but his weight would fluctuate a lot, and it would change his features. Would the real Darby please stand up?"
His goal was a "fairly tight likeness, but when you're doing something tight, it's easy to kill the life and the personality out of it."
As summer beat down, the portrait and hands proceeded Frankenstein-style, with Kresse taking parts home to sculpt them under air conditioning.
But things came together on schedule. With his deadline for delivery to the foundry upon him, he had just a few hundred tiny details to finish ... until he tried to move the sculpture, and its head fell off.
It hit the concrete.
"So that set me back a bit," Kresse said.
But the dented cheek proved a happy accident, because it gave him a new insight. The result is a complicated expression of resolve and sensitivity, the face that made Watkins cry out when he saw it in Cisterna Park: "If my Memo Nell or Mom were here, they'd say, 'That's Billie.' Billie Darby has come home."
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For the drive to the foundry Oct. 25, Kresse and Bowers cut the finished sculpture into sections, wrapped and padded the clay-topped foam with other foam and braced and strapped it all inside a U-Haul truck. Just to be safe, the head sat up front in the cab. Everything looked A-OK.
But about 340 miles later, 15 minutes from the foundry, the truck blew up -- "or sounded like it," Kresse said. "I was left on the side of the highway with a drive shaft that broke in half."
Fortunately, a wrecker was able to tote the whole truck directly to the foundry. He didn't have to unload and reload.
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He spent a day or two reassembling the sculpture at The Crucible. The foundry techs showed him where they planned to slice it into pieces for casting, and he pressed register marks into the clay. The clay-and-foam Darby was then photographed to a fare-the-well.
And then the Crucible team sawed it apart.
"The bike itself was maybe 10 major pieces," said Scott Adams, production supervisor at the foundry. Creviced sections of the engine and figure were cast differently from simple parts such as the wheels. Molds for the simple bits were created by sandcasting, but the gas tank and hero figure were cast using the lost-wax process.
Foundry technicians worked on Darby over the course of weeks -- making molds, pouring bronze, breaking the metal free from its casting shells, sandblasting parts and grinding edges -- but eventually a silvery soldier gleamed atop his massive bike on the foundry floor, his (not quite three-eighths-inch-thick) walls seamed together inside and out. Each weld was "chased down" and resculpted to make them truly difficult to spot.
In photographs of this stage, hero and bike are so shiny they look like polished aluminum. It was time to apply the patina.
Adams wiped the cold sculpture with liver of sulfur, starting a chemical reaction that darkened the bronze, which (in this case) is about 95 percent copper. He stopped the darkening when he wanted to by washing the chemical off with water.
"So some areas of the finish are darker than others," Adams said. And then he intensified the effect by scrubbing the darkened metal with abrasives. "Usually we're using Scotch-Brite hand pads like you'd clean your dishes with."
Adams washed and dried the sculpture, then put it in a kiln to get it "pretty hot" for a second chemical treatment.
"I sprayed on ferric nitrate, which is basically iron and nitric acid mixed with water," he said. "The ferric nitrate reacts with the bronze and, depending on the temperature of the metal and how much you put on, it will turn it from a light gold color to a brown to a warmish, on-the-orange-side brown. It can even get quite red."
The sculpture was cooled, and then?
"We seal it with wax," Adams said, "and what we use is Johnson's paste wax. It's a floor wax so it sets up hard, and it's translucent."
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"Bronze is bronze," Liz Armstrong said. "It's pretty durable." But like history, a bronze patina must be tended or time and weather combine to destroy it. The metal could darken and corrode, obscuring Darby's humanity under the lichen green of oxidation.
"We've been instructed on how to do it," she said, and the city parks department plans to. "It's a pretty simple process of once a year giving it a good cleaning and waxing it."
Floor wax is so ordinary it sounds "hilarious," she said. But that's what needs to be done.
ActiveStyle on 05/30/2016
*CORRECTION: A troop transport ship was renamed in honor of Gen. William O. Darby after his death during World War II. This article mischaracterized the ship and its commissioning.