There must be a category somewhere in the register of Chester County Citizenship Requirements that dictates that you have to have at least one Andrew Wyeth Moment.
That is, a time when you or someone close to you have a brush with the most famous painter ever to eat at Hank’s Place.
I thought about this when I saw him on the front page of Friday’s Daily Local. Andy – you get to call him Andy if you’ve lived here long enough and run into him once or twice -- was honored as a recipient of a 2007 National Medal of Arts at a White House ceremony Thursday morning.
Wyeth, now 90, is no stranger to White House honors. In 1963, President Kennedy gave him a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and he got the first Congressional Gold Medal given to an artist from Bush One is 1990.
But it was still good to see him up there next to the president – smiling what must be a trademark smile and wearing what must be the only lapel-less, collarless suit jacket in America. It’s the “local boy makes good” story on a grand scale.
And Andy remains a local boy at heart. He was raised here in the land around Chadds Ford and Birmingham and Pennsbury, and if you pick up the West Chester telephone book today and page through to the “W’s,” you’ll find a listing for an “A. Wyeth” on Route 100. It’s his business office mind you, but you still can call him up if you’d like.
It was just that kind of neighborliness that marked the two encounters I’ve had with him. In November 1986, as a major exhibition of the works of Andy, his father N.C. Wyeth, and Andy’s son Jamie Wyeth was about to open in the then-Soviet Union, I picked up the phone and dialed his number. The phone rang a couple of times, then someone answered and I asked to speak to Andrew Wyeth. A moment later, he came on the line.
I probably didn’t ask him any questions that could have been considered probing or thoughtful, but he was jovial and responsive during the interview and seemed pleased when I told him of an evening a few nights before that we’d spent together – and by together I mean we both occupied space in the same large auditorium at the Metropolitan Life Building – in New York City.
The occasion was a preview of the hour-long documentary, “The Wyeths: A Father and His Family.” After the viewing, I approached Andy for a few words and a quick photograph. He was sitting with his older bother Nathaniel and his sisters Henriette Wyeth Hurd and Ann Wyeth McCoy. When I mentioned I was from the Daily Local News, Andy turned to his siblings and said, “It’s the man from the hometown paper!” I snapped off three or four shots and took my leave.
I was looking at one of those photographs recently and felt pleased. One, it’s in focus. Two, I didn’t cut anybody out of the frame. But best, Andy is wearing that lapel-less suit, holding his sister Ann’s hand, and smiling a smile as big as the Brandywine.
Not bad for an Andrew Wyeth Moment.
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