UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM

Interview #1417
GARD EWELL, MARYO

GARD EWELL, MARYO (1932-)
Arts Administrator (Colorado Council for the Arts) and board member, Robert E. Gard Wisconsin Idea Foundation
At UW: n/a

Interviewed: 	March 25, 2015
Interviewer: 	Harv Thompson, Anne Pryor, Troy Reeves
Index by: 	Stephen A. Pierce
Length: 	60 minutes

Abstract: In her March 2105 interview with Harv Thompson et al, Maryo Gard Ewell reflects on her father’s life and legacy and her own decades-long involvement with arts administration.  First giving some details of her father’s childhood, she offered personal recollections of her time with him and how that affected her own interest in the arts. She then discussed the influences that eventually brought her into arts administration, first in summer jobs during college, then with local arts councils in Connecticut, then with state arts development boards. She discussed major developments in the field during and after R. Gard’s career, and emphasized how ahead of his time her father was.  This interview was conducted for inclusion into the UW-Madison Oral History Program and the Gard Foundation’s UW-Madison and WI Community Arts History Project.

Key Words: Robert Gard; Cornell University; Alexander Drummond; Wisconsin Idea Theater; University of Wisconsin-Madison; School of the Arts; Wisconsin High School; Bryn Mawr College; National Endowment for the Arts (NEA); Community Arts Development Grant; UW-Extension; Yale University; Peter Ewell; Emmett Sarig; New Haven, CT; Illinois Arts Council; National Assembly of Community Arts Agencies (NACAA); Colorado Council for the Arts; retirement; Muir Knoll storyteller’s circle; Robert E. Gard Wisconsin Idea Foundation.

First Interview Session (March 25, 2015): Digital File

Time	Keywords
00:00:00	Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction

00:01:26	Question [HT]: Talk about your father’s early years. Answer: Gard Ewell started by talking about her father’s birth in Kansas in 1910, his early years on a dairy farm there, and his own father’s aspirations both for the farm and for a legal career. She talked about R. Gard’s mother, who essentially managed the farm, and the family’s strong interest in education, to the point that R. Gard was university-educated during the height of the Depression.

00:04:48	[no question] After his college education, during which he met Allen Crafton and “got hooked” on theater, he went to graduate school at Cornell, where he met Gard Ewell’s mother but was also profoundly influenced by Alexander Drummond, who headed the theater department but also worked extensively with Cornell’s Extension, setting up the New York State Plays Project. At the same time, Gard Ewell’s mother was a graduate student being trained for the Broadway stage.

00:06:51	[no question] Not able to join the Army during WWII, R. Gard was hired by the Extension department of the University of Alberta to record folklore stories (there was a sense then that the story of the Canadian interior hadn’t been told) and broadcast them.

00:08:23	[no question] She explained why R. Gard came to UW; at the end of his appointment in Alberta, he was looking for a place where he could integrate all the things he’d done to that point, and found it in Wisconsin. He was captivated by the Wisconsin Idea, expressed in Van Hise’s “I would have no mute in glorious Milton in WI” and in Ag dean C. L. Christenson’s idea of having a visual artist in residence. She quipped about how, even though Gard called his project the “WI Idea Theatre,” UW never knew quite where to house him or what to do with him.

00:13:03	Question [HT]: Your story? Answer: Gard Ewell remarked that she was born in 1948, 3 years after her father came to UW.  She quipped about why her parents named her “Maryo” (though “Centenniana” was a possibility” as a “stage name from the moment of my birth.”

00:15:11	[no question] She reflected on what it was like to grow up in her family.  Her mother reentered the workforce in the 1960s, when it was difficult for her to find an academic job, only able to find work at a department store.  Her father was “rarely home,” often being out in the state—she read a passage written by R. Gard about the “knights of the Wisconsin Idea” that expressed this idea.

00:18:44	[no question] She remembered being influenced by WHA radio and TV, listening to her father’s program “Wisconsin is my doorstep,” “the Friendly Giant,” Carl Schmidt’s “Chapter-a-day,” and Jim Schwalbach’s “Let’s Draw.” She discussed Schwalbach’s method for teaching art and how listening to the radio became a way for her to connect with her father and the Wisconsin Idea.

00:21:47	[no question] She talked about spending time with her father. Sometimes this was in the car as he went out interviewing people, and she reminisced about his unassuming, but shrewd, way of getting people to tell their stories. His interactions and reputation also influenced her through her childhood, and she told stories about how he saw everything as a potential play.  She also talked about Sunday dinners, R. Gard’s love for the Packers, and playing word pun games in their free time.

00:28:14	[no question] During HS, she continued, her ability to drive made her useful to the WI Idea theater as it traveled with original plays about WI history to county fairs, etc. She also sold ticket and did other volunteer work with the theater.

00:30:45	[no question] She recalled, a bit before she was in HS, a pageant produced by the Women’s Club of Madison called “Man and his God” which the club did as a way to do something meaningful to ease conflicts in the city. Her father “engineered” a way for all of Madison’s faith groups to participate in the pageant, and she recalled elements of the production that were far ahead of its time. Similarly, in the early 1950s, Gard put together a program calling for people to write plays responding to the development of the atomic bomb.

00:36:31	[no question] She related some extraordinary experiences she had as a result of her father’s work. In 1953, they moved to England for a summer to study community arts; in 1959, they spent a year in Helsinki as he studied Finnish theater.  She also worked closely with the School of the Arts, where she and a close friend provided affordable labor in exchange for being able to take classes.

00:39:00	Question [HT]: Formal schooling? Answer: She discussed formative influences at Edgewood Elementary, the Lab School of the UW (Wisconsin High), and then West High School (when Wisconsin High closed). She supposed that her Wisconsin High teachers influenced her most, she thought because they were young and “fired up” to teach any student who wanted to learn. She gave some examples of how the teachers there approached their work in interesting and innovative ways.

00:44:42	[no question] She discussed how, after graduating from HS, her parents encouraged her NOT to apply to UW but to go to a smaller women’s college on one of the coasts. She ended up at Bryn Mawr College.

00:45:47	Question [AP]: Your mother’s story? Answer: She related that her mother grew up in a large family in Battle Creek MI. Since her grandfather died young, Gard Ewell’s grandmother had to return to work. With a background in medicine, she got a job as a county social worker and got adept at raising five children as a single mother. Her mother also grew up in a family with a strong emphasis on education, which was seen as a means of service to the community.

00:48:56	Follow up [AP]: Siblings? Answer: She had a younger sister, Eleanor, who became a nurse. Question [TR]: The assassination of JFK? Answer: She recalled where she was when she learned about the traumatic event. [break in interview] 

00:51:02	Question [HT]: Continue with your reflections. Answer: Gard Ewell thought that there was something special about Wisconsin’s public-friendliness to the arts. She traced this back to Van Hise and the Wisconsin Idea (1910s), when a Bureau of Dramatic Affairs existed at UW. She explained the function and outreach of this bureau, which was led by Ethel Rockwell (from UW) and Zona Gale (from Portage) and supported the pageant movement popular at the time.

00:56:27	[no question] She continued to talk about WI’s unique dedication to community arts, and cited the example of county fair plays, which were common even before the WI Idea Theater. She also talked about Thomas Dickenson, who, when discouraged from writing his own plays by the English dept, promoted “insurgent theater” off-campus through the Wisconsin Dramatic Society. Further, UW President Glenn Frank was very interested in folk theater and encouraged Zona Gale.

00:59:12	[no question] She continued by quoting from her father’s Grassroots Theater (1955), in which her father explained how his perspective on community theater was shaped by some experience with meetings he held in rural WI and with conversations he had with normal people. She cited these as important lessons that were still being discovered a half-century later.

01:04:46	[no question] Observing that her father liked to talk about “big ideas,” she remarked that for several summers he produced popular plays in the otherwise unused Camp Randall stadium. She also talked about his “amazing curiosity,” and also his religious belief expressed in becoming a perpetual deacon. When she asked him about his faith, Gard responded that both that and his work with theater dovetailed in their notion of something bigger than self and their respect for other human beings.

01:08:56	Question [HT]: College? Answer: She thought that going to a small women’s college at Bryn Mawr was a great idea for her, an introvert very much in the shadow of her famous father. Initially (she thought) wanting to escape from “this art stuff,” she majored in French and thought she’d be an interpreter at the UN. But after some time in college, she was captivated by social psychology and felt perceptual psychology dovetailed with some things she’d learned at Wisconsin High and had influenced her work ever since.

01:14:54	[no question] Not wanting to be an arts administrator at that point, she discussed summer jobs she had during her college career—first as a typist for a rural sociologist and then in her father’s office. This second job was working on the new grant from the NEA for Community Arts Development, and she detailed the high-level discussions about this grant in the NEA, concluding when Leonard Bernstein eloquently advocated for it.

01:18:39	[no question] Continuing to talk about the Community Arts Development grant, she explained the 3-year arc—first, choosing 5 rural communities (Rhinelander, Spring Green, Waupun, Adams Friendship, and Portage), making local contacts, and bringing University-driven content to the communities; in the second year, implemen-ting community ideas and setting up rural arts councils; and in the third year, local arts would grow in response to local needs. 

01:22:20	[no question] Because of her father’s connections, he was involved in Spring Green and she was employed that summer (1968) as administrative staff. She discussed the travails of working in the community, which she attributed to cultural differences between the urban Milwaukee Repertory Theater and the rural residents and the changes that were occurring in the 1960s. She shared a number of humorous anecdotes about the conflicts that occurred.

01:26:54	[no question] She reflected on her summer working with the Community Arts Development program—while she was a bit out of her depth, it was fun and exciting and made her think she might want to go into arts administration.

01:28:03	[no question] Nevertheless, as a perceptual psychology major at college, she decided for her statistics project to do a survey in Spring Green and also Mazomanie about attitudes toward the arts. This resulted in the conclusion that Mazomanie was actually more friendly to the arts, and she suggested reasons why this might have been.

01:30:49	[no question] After graduation, she had been accepted to Yale and so was studying organizational behavior. She also got married during her graduate study at Yale. She remembered “the moment where it all came together” (her father’s work in commu-nity arts and her interest in social psychology), when a professor observed that the truly healthy community was one that cared as much about the spiritual/creative health as the physical health of its residents.

01:34:37	[no question] After graduating, she returned to Madison to find work, and was employed by Emmett Sarig, chairman of Arts Extension. At the time, the various components of Arts Extension had been merged into one unit, and she discussed the organization of that department, the apprehensions people had about it, and the various people involved in arts extensions at the time.

01:37:39	[no question] She discussed her role in the Arts Extension department, part of which included doing research on how to hire and train Community Arts Specialists, who would be trained as much in how groups and communities work as in the arts. This sought to use UW’s experience with arts in WI to understand communities’ special sense of place, and then using arts to articulate that meaning of place and to promote dialogue within rural communities. 

01:40:27	[no question] She noted here the irony that her father had proposed a similar training program for “rural leaders” 20 years earlier. She described how this program was to have operated, involving local leaders of all types in a several-week workshop with artists-in-residence, sociologists, and philosophers. The program was never funded, and the 1973 program was also never implemented.

01:44:56	[no question] During this time, she continued, and in order to express her love for her “evaluation-guru” husband P. Ewell, she proposed a project to him—to revisit the Community Arts Dev. communities and evaluate the impact of it. She discussed selecting control communities, surveying both the control and development commu-nities, and the results of the evaluation. Amazingly, Spring Green was extremely friendly to the arts, she felt because the conflict engendered during that summer of 1968 had pushed local artists to do things “their own way.”

01:49:24	Question [HT]: Moving into your own career? Answer: Gard Ewell related that after her year with Sarig, she returned to New Haven, was married to Ewell, and looked for jobs. Just when she thought she was going to have to work at a Dunkin’ Donuts, she got a call from the Winnie Scott at Westport/Weston Arts Council, which was rewar-ding because it was her first arts administration job and she’d gotten it on her own (not her father’s) merits. She talked about the serendipity of getting the job, how she arranged getting to Weston every day, and the work the council was doing at the time.

01:55:07	[no question] In the year they built a new pavilion for the performing arts, Scott got a new job in New Haven, which prompted the Arts Council to ask Gard Ewell to run the summer concert program. She was able to do this with Scott’s help, and she talked about some of the mistakes she made during that series out of naiveté. 

01:57:33	[no question] After that summer, she continued, she was able to work with Scott again, who had invited her to come work with her in New Haven, which was great for Gard Ewell, because much of the interesting evening work fell to her. She described some of the odd experiences she had visiting local artists, including local insurgent theater artists, and planning Centennial events that ranged from protest art against the colonial expulsion of indigenous peoples to the local symphony.

02:01:13	[no question] She mentioned that one of the projects that they undertook during the 1970s was one of the very early attempts at creating what is now commonly known as an arts district—housing, new business, arts schools, etc. planned intentionally to renew a derelict street/district in New Haven. This led her to muse on how the arts can be used to inspire and renew communities.

02:07:44	[no question] She and Peter left New Haven for Chicago, where Peter had been offered a job.  She took a job as a typist for a psychologist, but this gave her time to get involved in local Hyde Park affairs. Volunteering to be the treasurer was an eye-opening experience about how arts council’s business is often run (or not run), but also introduced her to the NEA’s regional representative, who made her aware of a job as the community arts director at the Illinois Art Council.

02:10:53	[no question] She talked about her job at the Illinois Arts Council, which she described as a “blank slate.” The NEA was pushing states to form community arts councils at the time, so there was a celebratory atmosphere as Illinois moved from 20-some councils to over 90. She discussed trying to form community arts councils based around the needs of each individual community—a job in which her father’s study of rural arts in WI was helpful—and also promoting neighborhood arts councils in the “tapestry” of the city of Chicago.

02:16:26	[no question] At the IAC from 1976 to 1982, she realized that she wanted to do this as her life’s career. By 1982, NACAA (Nat’l Assembly of Comm. Arts Agencies) had formed and was interested in their respective CDCs (Comm. Devel. Coordinators)—one of whom was Gard Ewell—to work on coordinating networks of community arts councils.  This network that she developed allowed her to find a job at the Colorado CDC when she followed Peter to his job in Colorado.

02:19:31	[no question] She discussed her work at the Colorado Council on the Arts, beginning in 1982. She was the community arts and arts education director, and she reflected on trying to get communities to work together by using their natural distrust of state oversight. As time evolved, she said, arts administration work had shifted from having specialists in fields (arts, organization, community) to having regional, more holistic focus. She thought this strengthened the field, but made it more difficult to define (and therefore made it more vulnerable). She was excited about the time of “knitting” she perceived arts (and the US) to be in at the present.

02:25:53	[no question] When the state of Colorado went through a difficult period in 2003, most of the personnel from the Colorado Council on the Arts were dismissed, though the agency didn’t close. She retired at this point, and she talked about post-retirement work she’d been doing since—teaching arts administration online and working with a newly-reformed Colorado Council on the Arts that emphasized economic develop-ment. She bid to run the creative districts program promoted by CCA and state legislation, which she and a colleague won, and she’d only just in 2014 stopped bidding to do this job.

02:31:28	[no question] She reflected on things she’d like to do as she kept working in arts development—including writing down some of the stories she knows from the evolving field.

02:33:00	[no question] She returned to talking about her father—his dedication to service and his curiosity, which led her to muse about his last book Beyond the Thin Line, which explored what might be going on in the mind of a person afflicted with Alzheimer’s.

02:35:10	[no question] She explored her last memory of her father—he took her to a horse show when she urged him to take a trip through WI with her.

02:36:21	[no question] She mused about how Gard was ahead of his time, and how some of the things happening now are still a reflection of his work in the 1950s and 60s. She contrasted Gard’s vision for the arts with the Rockefellers’—that arts are for everyone to do rather than just to experience. Gard’s articulation of place, his creation of School of the Arts, and his proposal to train local leaders in art, philosophy, etc. were examples of this cutting-edge philosophy.

02:44:27	[no question] She shared an anecdote about dedicating the Muir Knoll storyteller’s circle, in which they planned a “ground tossing” rather than a groundbreaking (which had to be approved from the Regents) so that Gard’s mother could participate before her death. She described the experience, and how a hawk at that moment caught a thermal and hovered above their ceremony.

02:46:31	Question [HT]: Other memories? Answer: She related how her father stressed “big thinking,” which led her to talk about the organization of The Arts and the Small Community, including how contemporary discussions were a continuation of this.

02:48:11	Question [HT]: R. Gard’s retirement? Answer: She related that being somewhat forced out of UW sent her father into a deep depression, wondering if what he’d spent his life doing had made a difference. But he stayed interested in the field, getting very interested in Gard Ewell’s work in urban arts development. She also talked about how her father’s book collection was, though eclectic, littered with dedications from authors in whose work Gard had made a huge impact.

02:53:27	Question [HT]: The Robert E. Gard Wisconsin Idea Foundation? Answer: She noted that it was founded by Gard just after retiring from UW. Since he “knew everyone,” and particularly a number of people of means, it was founded in the 1970s to keep Gard’s work in community theater going. 

02:56:39	[no question] She discussed a number of interesting early projects—a Native American poetry summit and commissioning new works about the meaning of WI.

02:58:02	[no question] She continued by talking about the revitalization of the Gard Foundation as some new people came onto its board of directors.  They shifted the mission of the organization to fostering healthy communities, which though not the language Gard might have used, was part of his vision. She discussed the goals of the Gard foundation today. 

03:01:58	[no question] She closed the interview with a quotation from Gard’s Arts in the Small Community.

03:03:52	End of First Interview Session

End of Oral History #1417