Posted by: Steve Hemmingsen - 10/04/2007 12:00 AM
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There’s nothing to make you appreciate art more than a nice glass of wine, a nice setting, and, most of all, the odd chance that you might be one of the subjects of said art. 
Don Reding, right, and Ken Frederickson discuss, art, agriculture and wine.
It was the latter that drew me to the outskirts of
The Reding century farm. I’ll bet that was Arnie Pistulka driving the Mobil bulk truck.
Arnold Kramer was no Terry Redlin or Norman Rockwell but he was something of a Grandpa Moses in
His niece rounded up a tithe, one-tenth of them, forty for this showing. They range from pictures of Jesus, to churches, the Reding farm, to the Gil-Mor Manor retirement home in Morgan. 
Gil-Mor Manor in Morgan. Gimme a minute, I’ll tell you who owned the cars.
The paintings are all simple fare, much like the ones that made Grandma Moses famous in the middle of the last century. She was a household name in the rural
Now Kramer is gone. The rink is gone. The hordes of kids are gone. The memories aren’t. I pointed out to Don Reding that his little brother, a classmate of mine, staged one heck of a party in his house while he was away. That was 40 years ago. I remember when Gil-Mor Manor opened when people decided there was a better way of dealing with Grandpa and Grandma if they insisted on living that long, when everybody around knew the railroad depot in North Redwood was the birthplace of Sears. Yes, that Sears. It burned many years ago, but it still lives on Arnold Kramer’s canvas, a piece of the fabric of all our lives. Remember the big catalog that came just before Christmas, the wish book, when we didn’t already have everything twice over?
The North Redwood Depot, home of Sears Roebuck.
One acquaintance of mine from Morgan pointed out how Kramer painted in “Nice straight lines.” That’s probably not something the average artist would find admirable, but it accurately captures the way we used to live our lives half a century ago; in nice, straight, orderly, unchaotic lines. Go, Grandpa Kramer. 
The ice rink in Wabasso in the mid-50s, when movies were 12 cents and candy was a nickel.
Oh, the painting I was looking for? It wasn’t there. But my 4th grade teacher, Jo Kratzke, tells me there’s a second painting of the ice rink and that it’s hanging in the Wabasso library. That’s grounds for another trip, although I hear every kid in town in the 50s thought he was immortalized on that canvas.
Maybe we all were, maybe we all were.
12:00 AM
