Disco, Quiche & Hats

Roscoe “Ike” Hastings is now 81 years old and spends the majority of his time building and captaining paddle boats on the Misssissippi River out of Savanah, Illinois. As a World War II vet, he’s not only seen and done much in his life, he’s seen and done enough to fill three similar lifetimes of average people. Ike was the shining light that blinded most people in the small farming community where I grew up. He was the rebel. I knew him as a mentor—the art teacher who was on track to end a 30-year teaching career as I ended my high school career. He drove a Triumph Spitfire convertible—something that raised a lot of eyebrows in the land of Ford and Chevy trucks. At 54 years old, he flirted with the best-looking girls in my class and taught us disco in the cafeteria after school. He is an amazing man and an amazingly and diversely talented artist. There is nothing that he cannot do with artistry and flair. He hooks rugs, throws pots, builds furniture, makes jewelry, paints, carves, solders, and sculpts. He makes his own clothes and belts. I saw him make snow shoes. He even built the amphibious plane he flies today. And he taught me everything I could possibly learn about art in a span of four short years. Alvin Doyle Moore spent years teaching design at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, including several as the head of the graphic design program. I knew him as an omniscient and sage advisor—the design instructor never afraid to provide honest criticism, but able to do it in a way that made us continually strive to impress him. He seemingly knew, and could do, anything. He wore sandles in the winter and beautifully ornate Hawaiin leis at weddings. He hosted a radio cooking show and taught us, during methodology class, that there was a meaningful similarity between baking a quiche and designing a brochure. He wove tapestries using his own wool, which he dyed himself, from his own sheep which he raised on his farm, on his own loom. He hand set lead type and printed some of the most beautiful books and certificates I’ve ever seen—one of which he was commissioned to design and print for the Pope. He is a master of Japanese tea ceremony and loves Kabuki theater. And in four short years, he taught me as much about the importance of learning as I could possibly learn. Don Strandell was a shining star in our profession through the final transition of commercial art into graphic design. He started his own firm in the late 70s, providing creative support for larger ad agencies, mostly doing logo development for restaurants, big product brands, and corporations. He is the best I’ve ever seen at coming up with the big idea—the kind of creative thinker who, you swear, has been given answers straight from God. When I worked for him, he would leave the office at 5 everyday, because his family was more important than his work. Even though the rest of us would stay and work on concepts for hours longer, he would come in at 10am, slide a pencil sketch across the table, and blow us all away. And he has never really known how good he is. He loves to collect the most obscure and graphically hilarious objects, like paper chopstick sleeves (his favorite has a single illustration and the instructions, “hold food, eat”). He collects air sickness bags. He has a huge collection of hats. He’s a first generation technology adopter—he had the Motorola cell phone that looked like a large, taupe brick with an antenna—which means he wasted a lot of his hard-earned money. But money has never meant that much to him. He worked with joy and went home for love. And in the four short years I worked for him, he taught me everything I could possibly learn about what is, and isn’t, important.