I woke up with a dream this morning. In it the house I was living in was being rebuilt—or at least a corner of it was. Long ago a huge tree had taken out an entire corner of the place.

And now I watched as builders methodically reconstructed it.

Clearly, I’m healing. My ‘house’ is literally being rebuilt by the wonderful process of writing my father’s biography. Since March I’ve been methodically combing through old newspaper articles, personal letters, sketches, paintings, home movies and even his journals, kept religiously for more than 40 years.

Turns out all those boxes in the basement had solid gold in them. And now, thanks to copious help from the Nebraska State Historical Society where they are housed, I have dug in.

And may I just say that I adored my father. He was funny, generous, and deeply loving to me and my three half-siblings whose mother he had married. We all called him ‘Johno’, the nickname one of his friends had given him.

Here’s what John wrote in his ordinarily terse, businesslike journal on the day I was born.

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What have I learned about my father, whose career included 128 covers on The Saturday Evening Post and his self-portrait on the cover of Newsweek?

John Falter was a much bigger deal than I ever realized.He worked with true, unbridled and relentless passion… and always with the confidence that only comes from knowing and owning your geniusJohn was genuinely liked, loved or appreciated by a lot of people, everyone from his realtor to Jimmy Cagney and former US President Herbert Hoover. They all became good friends who wrote letters for years.He was incredibly good at research and had a knack for getting the story no one else could. He saw himself as creating “stage sets where people could come in in and wander around for a while.” An example here is from his later work, a depiction of the secretive Hopi Snake Dance, which the tribe invited him to photograph and paint.

And yeah, John Falter was a great dad–a REALLY great dad. He would sit down and play Barbies with me after a long day in the studio. And then get me interested in making Barbie clothes…or even an entire Barbie world.

Jay, Sarah and Lisa and I would play an after-dinner game with Johno, as twilight was setting over the old 18th century farmhouse we lived in. This involved walking tentatively into a room we knew he was hiding in.

In giggling voices we’d call out ‘Oh JOHN-o”. And we never knew where we’d see him.

Sooner or later, he’d appear and scare us out of wits. Once he got himself up on a ladder inside the closet, and peered at us through the old glass panes above the door. He’d put a flashlight under his face just to really add to the effect.

We loved it!

So much good stirring of the pot. Just to sign off for now, here’s one of my favorite Saturday Evening Post covers. That’s a portrait of Crow Hill Farm where I grew up, and my sister Lisa, a passionate horsewoman, is the blonde rider in the foreground. My other sister Sarah appears here with red hair.

We regularly modeled for his painting, but that’s a story for a future issue.

But so many more stories to tell… stay tuned and see you here again soon!

With love,

 

 

 

 

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