Joseph L. Kagle, Jr. Essays

“One day I was asked why I went to school all the time to learn things and I answered, “Oh, I could do it outside of educational institutions but sometimes it is faster there and safer. Of course, sometimes it is not!”

We go to school, hopefully, to learn life lessons. If we can learn them on the street or in the fields, then we do not need that classroom. My father and his friends taught me much about being a ‘hustler’ not a ‘con artist’.

Others on the street taught me important lessons that I now pass on in the classroom for my students. These are a few of those teachers at a time that needed to find out how to live within my own skin. Later, joining Rotary, I learned to live outside that skin with ‘service above self’ as a tool toward global understand and peace .”

You are always in competition with the person you can become

  When I was growing up in Pittsburgh, my dad would take me as a small learner to the bowling al­ley where several pool tables were always filled with young and old hustlers.

   In a back room, an ongoing poker game always was in session. My dad introduced me to Louie "the Loser" Hsrinka. Louie's game was losing until real money was on the table. Louie taught me the differ­ence between a con artist and a hustler.

     A con artist never backs up what he tells you. A hustler never tells you what he can do until it really counts. My dad was a minor hustler, but he and Louie taught the lessons on major hustling.

     Waco has a place that reminds me of those early images in Pittsburgh: Westview Bowling Lanes on Waco Drive.

     A few years ago I started bowling with the Spe­cial Olympics kids. My son wanted to learn bowling. I had never bowled 10 pins.

     In Pittsburgh, it was duck pins with little pins and a small bowling ball that looked like a shot-put.

     Louie the Loser never shot a 300 game. He would throw 11 strikes and then drop the last ball in the gutter. Louie said, "I don't want to be perfect. There would be nothing to learn." I still do not totally agree, but I understand what he was trying to teach me. You always must try to learn new things.

Didn't know the game

    For two years, I bowled without knowing what I was doing. I got my average to 160. Then I joined the Men's Trio Summer League to get in some exercise and lose some weight. Everyone else was higher in average but that did not bother me. I still didn't know anything about bowling 10 pins. I was getting along on some residual athleticism from the old days. Louie sat on one shoulder and my dad on the other. I willed a score in my bowling.

     Then I saw Ed Smith, age 68. He is a part of the bowling alley, as are the lanes and the pins and the attendants. What I enjoyed watching was the smoothness. He is a dancer with the pins.

    I bowled against his team. My dad and Louie. would have said, "So you got beat. What did you learn?" I learned that there was so much that I did not know about 10-pin bowling.

    I could see Ed Smith knew what I needed to learn. So I went up to him and said, "I know little about bowling. I have some degree of success. But I don't know what I am doing. Would you mind showing me some things?" Louie and my dad always said: "The worst thing that can happen is you are right back to where you were when someone says, ‘No.’"

     Ed said "Yes."

Showed me the ropes

     I went to the lanes. He showed me how to stand, walk to the line, glide into a release, where my hand should be when I let it go, how the ball should feel when it is released correctly, how the oil builds up on the center of the lane, how it is clear the last 20 feet, how to practice and for what results, how to consistently hit the seven and 10-pin, and what kind of ball fits my age and style. In one session, I aver­aged 190. It may not last, but I now know what I have to do and what I am doing.

     Ed Smith, unlike my early mentor Louie, be­lieves in rolling 300 games. He has had many.

     Bowling is a sport which builds inner strength, but it's humbling at times. You're always in compe­tition with the person you can become. Even if the score says you bowl a perfect 300 game, you never stop learning about yourself and how to adjust to conditions.

     Louie the Loser and Ed Smith (the winner) are really cut from the same mold.

   So in my retirement years, if you do not find me making art, I am at the bowling alley, the pool hall or in some back room playing poker. Maybe some learner will call me Joe the Brush and ask for help. I'll replay Louie and Ed by saying "Yes."

“It is interesting that a few years after writing this article, I stopped bowling for average and started only bowling for fun. Maybe it was watching mentally retarded young people on Saturday bowl for the sheer joy of moving their limbs and keeping the ball on the lanes. Maybe I learned that the joy with bowling is the time we spend with others and not within ourselves. That was the time that once a month I had lunch with my friend, Bernard Rapoport, to discuss ‘How do we solve….?’ It was the same time that I created my imaginary friend

Bubba Jay III, Waco Artist and My Friend

Editor's note: Joe Kagle's humor column will occasionally be featured in Museline.

There are stories about artists that we sometimes cannot discern between fact and fiction.

      Did Vincent Van Gogh really cut off his ear for a prostitute?

Did Whistler invite guests for Sunday morning buttermilk pancakes and light opium candles to sell more works of art?

Did Goya go knife fighting in the taverns when he was not court painter for the Spanish king?

Did Bubba Jay III really meet his wife at a roller derby when she got knocked into his lap?

There are so many stories of Bubba Jay that it is truly difficult to picture all these things being true. Bubba Jay III was born in Elm Mott, Texas, in 1941. His father was a fundamentalist Baptist minister, and his mother was a free-lance writer for the Christian Science Monitor.

Bubba starred on his high school football team and went two years to Texas A&M. It was there that he found his call: art. He won a scholarship to the Famous Artists correspondence course by drawing a two-foot copy of a pit bull. The Famous Artists critique complimented Bubba on the quality of his line and depth of his chiaroscuro.

 Bubba dismisses the praise, saying, "Hey, it was only a sketch. I never expected to win anything." But Bubba's life in art can be traced to that simple, almost unglamorous beginning. He finished his schooling at the Art League of New York, studying with Thomas Hart Benton and Robert Motherwell.

Bubba met his wife at a roller rink (not a roller derby as some have alleged). She is part American Indian; in fact, she tells the story that her father was a direct descendant of the Huaco Indians. Her name is Hummingbird Rose. They have two children, Elisha Blue and Lynda Lylac.

If you travel out to Lake Waco (which Bubba calls "that engineered lake in Waco"), you can see Bubba painting the grandeur of the land, the water, and the free, open sky. Bubba calls Lake Waco "God's gift to the locals." He says that he can make that statement since he is a local himself, living just east of Waco on a farm.

When Bubba is not painting, you can see him at the wrestling matches or tractor pulls at the Heart of Texas Coliseum. You can tell it is Bubba because he is the only one there with a Walkman, listening to Mozart or Stravinsky. Bubba is against burning the flag, but, as he says, "damned if I will vote to silence anyone. At least, not in this country. I don't want us to be what the Eastern Bloc countries have left behind."

Some would call Bubba complex, but he is what he is; simple as Waco is simple, complex as Waco is complex. His art reflects the earth tones of his Central Texas youth and the fundamental colors that make up his visual works. When asked why, with his skills, he still prefers Waco to other places with better markets for his art, Bubba smiles and says, "I stay to beat the rush."

In fact, Bubba and his family say they find Waco wonderful. Bubba once said that should be the city's motto, "Wonderful Waco." It is hard to picture any city where Lynda Lylac Jay could aspire to be a Kilgore Rangerette and possible Rhodes scholar at the same time.

Andy Warhol once said that we would all be famous for 15 minutes, but Bubba laughs at that. He has commented that he has been famous all his life. It is just that, at times, only he knows it.

Bubba says, "Every leader should not be too far in front of his troops. He might get shot in the butt." Fame, for Bubba, is a shot in the butt. Even so, Bubba says he is going to run for mayor of Waco one day.

Many will not see Bubba's work in the National Gallery this week. Bubba Jay III (or as his friends call him, Bubba Jay 3) is larger than life; his work is an expres­sion of his life in Waco. He is a mythic hero in his own time. His latest paintings are called "Ode to Tammy Faye and Buddha."

d, Bubba Jay the Third as an alter ego to go to and discuss the world, inside and out.”