The Girl in the Saloon Doorway

The Mechau children arrived at two-year intervals: after Vanni, Dorik; then Duna, and finally Mike. Singing the old songs became part of their lives. Neighbors, hearing them, would recall others. Soon Paula had a collection of 50. One, Sierry Peaks, inspired Frank to paint Saturday P.M., which many consider his greatest work. The galloping horses, the cowboys and the girl hesitating before the swinging doors of a false-front saloon have the rhythmic quality characteristic of folks songs. Frank claimed that the girl was Paula, wondering whether to drop in for a drink with him at the saloon or hurry on to the bank to ask for another loan.

Three Guggenheim Fellowships – something of a record for any artist – enabled Frank to carry on his painting and, in 1939, he was made a professor in the Fine Arts Department at Columbia University. He and Paula moved from their mountain home to a New York flat.

To their Western-bred children, the six years spent away from Colorado were sheer cumulative misery. But one day, during the 1943 Christmas holidays, Frank suggested a ride downtown on the subway. He had heard that the Almanac Singers Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, Peter Seeger and Lead Belly – top ballad singers – were throwing a folk-song fest in Greenwich Village and he had bought seats in the front row. Mike was five, Duna seven, Dorik nine, and Vanni eleven. They trooped backstage to meet the singers. It was a big moment. Presently, Woody Guthrie strolled onto the platform.

“Friends,” he began, “there are four jailbirds here from Colorado who’ll do a turn themselves.”

He beckoned to the startled Mechau children. “Come on, kids. What’ll it be?”  “I Ride an Old Paint,” Vanni spoke up.

.She and her sister and brothers completely disarmed the audience by the simple directness of their singing. “We weren’t scared,” Dorik recalled later. “It was just like Redstone when the neighbors drop in. Only here there were more of them.” 

In 1944 Frank resigned from Columbia todevote his entire time to painting. Back the Mechaus went to Colorado. The succeeding two years Paula regards as the happiest of her life.  Running through them, like a bright thread, were the folk songs. She and the children sang in the studio while Frank worked, or around the long pine taverntable he had carpentered.

In 1946, when March snows still blanketed Redstone, the Mechaus all piled into their old car and drove to Denver. Paula and the kids had been invited to give a concert for the wounded soldiers at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital. They were also to make come recordings. Fitzsimmons would be their first full-length concert. Paula barred make-up or costumes. The more natural and spontaneous the performance the better; it helped put the children at ease.

During the concert Mike raised his hand. His mother called for an intermission and the soldiers grinned. They applauded when he returned. During the next song Duna looked at Mike. She whispered to Vanni, Vanni to Dorik and Dorik to their mother. Mike had forgotten to finish dressing. He left the stage. When he trotted back with every button properly fastened the soldiers cheered.

Stricken by Tragedy

In Denver, the Mechau family stayed with their artist friend, Anne Downs. The day after the Fitzsimmons concert, Frank volunteered to drive his wife and the children to the studios of the Council Recording Company. As he was opening the car door he turned to speak to Paula and in that instant dropped dead at her feet. A sudden heart attack had killed him at forty-two.

Three weeks after the funeral, Paula and the children sang for the recording company. She says singing those ballads at that time gave her the courage and direction she needed.  “It made it possible for us all to recover from the terrible shock of Frank’s death,” she told me. “Ion those songs there was part of him. He loved them, too. They were a unifying force for the entire family. They gave us the desire to go on. The children expressed it this way: “We felt closer to Daddy when we sang.”

Mrs. Downs invited 50 people to her home to hear the Mechaus sing. Thus, woth no preliminary planning, they were finding a living as a family. The first concert bid, from the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, paid $100.

Nine o’clock was ten-year-old Mike’s bedtime. The concert lasted until ten thirty. In the song Who Killed Cock Robin? Paula, taking the part of the owl, asked each child in turn, “Who?” Mike didn’t answer. He was asleep on his feet, eyes wide open. Paula waited, then said “Mike’s asleep, children. Let’s try it over.” When the audience applauded, Mike came to and went on singing as if nothing had happened.

An enthusiastic listener requested Witch Wilder. Luckily, the Mechaus knew it.  The man was Josh White, the famed ballad singer.

Next day, sitting around the breakfast table reading the reviews, Paula all but wept when she saw the following story in the Colorado Springs Press.  “Some have good songs, some have fine voices., some have scholarship and imagination. The Mechaus have all of these and a unique advantage of their own besides. There are five of them – welded into one unit by a wholehearted, self-forgetting devotion to the beautiful songs they sing. The audience can intercept, every now and then, that private glance among them of confidence and love and fun and joy in their art.”

The Mechaus really had arrived. While they were enjoying the thrill, the telephone rang. A telegram for Paula Mechau. “Would like very much you and children come to Aspen any time between May 24^th and June 1^st to sing at fishing-week festival. If possible stay all week. Burl Ives and Richard Dyer-Bennet both coming. Need you to make it a grand success.”

At this moment someone knocked on the door. There stood Josh White. He had climbed the mountain to present Vanni with If I Had a Ribbon Bow. When one fine ballad singer appreciates the art of another, he compliments him with the gift of a song. In turn, the Mechaus gave Josh two of their favorites, I Know Moonlight and Ezekiel Weeps. 

The Mechaus consider that week at Aspen a milestone. Richard Dyer-Bennet offered Vanni a scholarship in his troubadour school, then open at Aspen. She took it, although generally speaking the family is opposed to professional training for ballad singers. Paula reads a little music, the children none. At first she plucked out the ballad tunes on her guitar, then taught Vanni. Now Vanni plays the accompaniments.

The Mechaus make their own musical arrangements. They study the words of the ballad, getting the rhythm. Paula may hum a tune she thinks will fit the phrasing. Dorik may say, “I like that, but I would change the first bars.” Afte that Vanni will try it on the guitar. Perhaps Dune, and even mike, will contribute a measure. And before they know it, they have the complete song.

There is no showmanship, no rivalry, no egotism in their presentation. To stimulate the family to work as unit and to discourage any emphasis on personal performance, Paula tossed them an idea which has become an exciting part of their folk-song work — the tracking down of lost ballads by going through old books, interviewing old-timers. A concert at the Union Printers’ Home in Colorado Springs proved a gold mine. Here they picked up several versions of Great Granddad, and by jogging memories with their one stanza of He Was Only a Lavender Cowboy got the entire song. Ed Chaez, an art student of Frank’s, had given them that first stanza years before. It begins:

“He was only a lavender cowboy,
The hairs on his chest were two.
But he wished to follow our heroes
And fight like the he-men do.”

The Mechaus pursued their informal course at luncheons given by the Lions, Rotarians, Kiwanians and Masons; at American Legion state meetings; at Women’s Clubs; at churches; at the 1948 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) conference in Colorado Springs; at grange halls in rural areas; and at folklore conferences held by the Universities of Denver, Colorado and Wyoming.

Concerts Without Fees

But it wasn’t all easy going. Once or twice when they needed money most, people overlooked a fee for their concerts.

The Mechaus are the most unmercenary family this side of Utopia. Colorado Springs people, hearing of their plight, gave the family $1,000. With her warm heart and magnificent indifference to money, Paula, immediately thrust $750 of it in the hands of a hungry poet.

The year Frank died they took a cabin at Woodland Park, a tiny village above Colorado Springs. They took it because at first they weren’t able to face being at Redstone without Frank. But they went back to their mountain home the following summer and every summer after that.

In 1949, the children implored their mother to let them remain at Redstone through the winter. She warned them of the hazards. Mike would be the only one able to attend the local school. Vanni, Dorik and Duna, by then of high-school age, would have to drive 36 miles every day to and from Carbondale. The narrow canyon road hugged the Crystal River. Snows get deep in that county and it can be 46 degrees below. The children would have to talk the half mile to the highway before they could even reach the ar. Supplies would have to be hauled by toboggan to the house. There were trees to cut, wood to be sawed, staples to be canned for the days when they would be snowed in.

“All these problems I put before the children,” said Paula. “I wanted them to realize the hardships.”  “We’ll manage, Mom,” they told her.

Wintering in the Rockies

And so the Mechaus spent the winter of 1949-50 high in the Rocky Mountains. Weekends during the early autumn, Dorik and Mike cut hundreds of aspen trees and hauled them to the house on a trailer. They sawed, chopped and stacked logs and kindling handy to the kitchen. Two loads of coal were delivered in readiness for the long winter. A buck, which the boys had shot during hunting season, hung from the barn rafters. They knew how to butcher. Frank had taught them.

The girls did their share of chores too. Part of the deer was salted, part hung in the springhouse and the leftovers made into wonderful mincemeat. Preserves, vegetables, jams and jellies soon lined the basement shelves. Potatoes, carrots, cabbages and onions filled the root cellar. Let the snows come. The Mechaus were ready.

The local powerhouse, last vestige of Osgood’s empire, had been closed in 1948, leaving the Mechaus dependent on kerosene lamps. Their biggest expense items that winter were oil and coal: $50 for Kerosene; $150 for coal.

John Henke, the mailman, also a trapper, brought supplies when Mrs. Mechau and the children couldn’t get to the store in Carbondale. Vanni screamed one morning as she reached in the mailbox. Her hand touched something cold and clammy. Mr.Henke had obligingly left the head of a dead crane. He remembered that she liked to tie trout flies and could use the iridescent feathers.

The Mechaus spent weekends and holidays learning new folk songs. They built up a repertoire of 300 tunes. But ballad practicing isn’t like ordinary practicing. It’s just family singing around a big table after supper, or before an open fire – singing because you like to sing. The Mechaus sang and only the mountains heard.

There were four families at Redstone that winter: Frank Worley and his four sons (they mined coal at nearby Placita); Mr. and Mrs. Harold Christopher (she kept store in the summer; he also mined at Placita); the Dean Cooks, who owned Crystal River Lodge, a ranch upcreek; and Mr. and Mrs. George Clayton, old-timers.

Every other Saturday night their were dances in the local school and the Worleys supplied the music. Frank Worley played the fiddle, his boys strummed guitars. Families fifty miles distant came, bringing baskets of food for a midnight snack. At Christmas everybody went to see everybody else. Thirty people drove up the valley in sleighs pulled by horses strung with silver bells. The visitors sat around the Mechau house singing or exchanging folk songs. Later the rugs were rolled back and they square danced.

New Year’s week Paula and the children climbed in the old sedan and drove to Montrose, Olathe, Ridgway, Delta and Grand Junction for more concert engagements. Paula wished that Frank had lived to see the recognition of his philosophy and hers. And editorial in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel hit the nail on the head. Proudly she shows it for proof.

“Seldom do we remember that our nation was built not only by great men but by the ‘little’ inarticulate people who lived and loved and worked and built for the future without leaving the names in history books. They left their marks, however, not only in their works, but in their most articulate form of expression, the folk songs. Just recently a goodly crowd of Grand Junction people were fortunate enough to hear the Mechaus sing songs our forefathers sang in their cabins, around their campfires, at their church meeting and on board their sailing ships.

It pleased Paula to think that she and her children were leading the same frontier life as these early settlers.

School mornings the alarm rang at 6:30 a.m. Each young Mechau had a special job. Dorik started the furnace and kitchen fires. Soon Paul had the coffee steaming, bacon crisping and eggs frying. Meanwhile, Vanni and Duna made the beds; Mike set the table. Breakfast ended abruptly at seven thirty in a dash for coats and boots. Everyone, including Lil Abner, the sheep dog, plowed through the drifts to the highway. Often Dorik had to cut a path through afoot or more of fresh snow with the car.

When Water Supply Failed

The Mechaus also had water trouble. That can be tough in the mountains. Kline Creek, half a mile from the house, was their source of supply. The water flowed into a pipe which crossed the creek and emptied into a settling tank. One evening Paula noticed that the water pressure was low. Before the dishes were washed every faucet in the house went dry. Dorik and Mike took off on snowshoes at half past seven, with pick, shovel and ax. They hacked at the frozen creek. They built bonfires beneath the supply pipe. At 2:00 a.m. the water flowed once more.

No, says Paula, life is not simple in the mountains. You’ve got to work twice as hard for what you get; but she and the children found it worth it. The folk songs prepared them.

“But we’ll never pull through another winter in the mountains,” prophesied Dorik. “The car won’t hold together.” That car, nine years old, staggered through the balance of the winter. Snowdrifts, ice ruts and mud holes had left their scars. It carried the Mechaus, with frequent prompting, to their summer concert dates. But Paula admitted to herself that it could not survive the next mountain winder. Just when she was wondering what to do, Lloyd Reynolds, the young principal of the Carbondale school, asked her to drop in. How about teaching folk ballad singing and its lore to the Carbondale children in return for a rent-free cabin and a salary of $160 a month? The cabin was less than two miles on a level road from town. Paula said yes in a hurry.

Carbondale is hardly more than a scattering of frame bungalows and log cabins at the junction of the Roaring Fork Creek and Crystal River. In the near distance looms Mount Sopris, more than 12,000 feet high. Carbondale itself has a population of less than 500, but circling it are enormous fertile ranches. Typical are the Bob Perrys’ Mount Sopris Hereford outfit and the Harold Pabst farm adjoining the Merchau cabin. Carbondale is a modern-minded community encouraged by educators like Reynolds and his friend Scott Abbott, civic professor. But the town’s only transportation link with the outside world is a twice-a-day bus from Glenwood Springs.

A Visit to the Schoolhouse

It deposited me at the filling station one morning not long ago. Dorik drove me to Carbondale’s old schoolhouse, a one-room white frame building here Mrs. Mechau was teaching. I found her and the kindergarten group singing, seated close to the friendly warmth of an old-fashioned pot-bellied iron coal stove.

“We’ve just been learning Hush Little Mama,” she greeted me. “It’s a wonderful old ballad that Alvin Foote, Frank’s friend, gave us.”

At first glance I wondered how such a tiny, fragile women could find the strength to cope with the problems which have plagued her. But, after observing her management of the kindergartners, it was easier to understand. And obviously she is the spiritual head her own family.

“If you don’t mind, we’ll lunch here,” she said, taking my coat. “I punch and count the students’ meal tickets.”

Mrs. Perry and Mrs. Pabst pay for the lunches. Two women cook this substantial noon meal each day in the rear of the old school. I could see steaming hot chicken pie, baked sweet potatoes, fresh home-canned peas and wild-plum tarts being dished up.

The grade and high school building is half a block from the old schoolhouse. I heard the noon gong sound and watched the children race across lots, singing as they ran – Pretty Little Black-Eyed Susie and The Kansas Boys. One of the youngsters, introduced himself as Mike Mechau. He had tousled fair hair and mischievous blue eyes, and spoke in a soft Western drawl. Once when a little girl jokingly remarked that she didn’t like the Mechaus, he shot right back: “You will. If people don’t like us, by golly, we make em.”

He takes the hardy folk-song philosophy seriously. One day at Redstone he rode his bike off a cliff, winding up in the creek 40 feet below. Vanni screamed and ran to the phone, a party line. In five minutes all of Redstone responded. Mike came to, caught his wind, wiped the blood off his face and said, “I’m okay.”

Duna was among the next batch of children surging in for lunch. Her blond hair was tied with a scarlet ribbon, and she wore a scarlet sweater with a plain little gray suit. Dorik and Vanni drifted in with an older group for luncheon.

Dorik at seventeen, is the family’s happy worrier. He walks with a slight limp from a knee strain caused in a basketball game. He fears this will curtail his sports activities which would just about break his heart.

Friday nights, during the summer, the Mechaus sing at Crystal River Lodge, a dude ranch beyond Redstone. Among the people they met there last year were Mr. and Mrs. James Lawrence, of Brookline, Massachusetts. Mr. Lawrence, an architect, is a Harvard graduate. The Mechaus’ ballads enchanted him. This winter he wrote Dorik that a Harvard scholarship awaits him when he finishes high school. He is now in his last year.

Vanni is pretty enough to pose for a magazine cover. She has high color, clear gray eyes, soft, light-brown hair, and a gift for looking right in full skirts, tight-fitting basques and flat-heeled slippers. From childhood on she has dreamed of attending Bennington College in Vermont. When her mother suggested that she inquire about a scholarship, Vanni hesitated. But finally, last year, she wrote a letter. Back came a blank. She returned it carefully filled in. To her delight she got the scholarship. She believes that Leslie Chabay, the Metropolitan Opera tenor, is responsible. She and her family met him at Aspen. Her school expenses are paid for out of ballad-singing earnings, plus student wages for waiting on tables at college.

Last December the Bennington Dance Workshop asked her to sing at three of their concerts –two at Bennington, one in New York City.

“I missed my family,” Vanni, home on her spring vacation, told me. “I had never sung alone before. I didn’t like it.”

At the cabin near Carbondale, the enormous natural-pine-paneled living room faces Mount Sopris. Its rafters are hand-hewn, its fireplace native stone. There are neutral-toned rugs, natural-wood furniture, numerous couches and low lights. A refectory table in the window, built by Frank, does double duty for dining and studying.

With five Mechaus crammed into the cabin, every crevice is in use. Paula and Vanni sleep on the two living-room couches; Dorik and Mike in the pint-sized bedroom-sewing room; and Duna in an alcove off the living room. Leading off of the big room are a little kitchen and bath. The casual ease with which the household runs testifies to the experience of mother and daughters. The daily fare is economical and healthy – plenty of mountain rabbit which the boys shoot; spaghetti doused in Italian sauce (Vanni’s specialty), home-canned vegetables and fruits and jams.

Saturday’s Household Chores

 Every Saturday, Duna does the family wash and Vanni the ironing. The boys help Paula house-clean. In winter they make their own ice. Put a pail of water on the back steps at night and by morning it’s frozen solid.

Saturday nights, if there are no concert dates, the children take in a school house dance. Weeknights, after study, they sit around the fire and sing ballads, or try out new numbers for an approaching concert.

Whatever else they do in the way of folk singing or sleuthing will have to be done within the next few years. They are growing up now. Recently they brought out a second volume of recordings. It is their hope that they can make more.

They have several concert dates booked for the summer. They also want to travel through the country singing their songs and hunting others. So far they’ve only tapped Colorado. Whether or not the Mechaus increase their audiences, Paula finds the ballads and folk songs they sing have already given them the things that county most; a rich and mature outlook on life; a belief in the goodness of people.

The Mechaus’ philosophy isn’t divided into an easy, convenient arrangement of one set of rules for business and another for their friends. They live up to the moral code of the beloved ballads.

The time is not far off when the Mechaus will go in different directions. But always they will carry with them those folk songs, sing them when they are homesick and lonely – and when they are with friends and are gay. Whenever they come together they will sing them once again as a family. But they will never forget the ballads – and they will pass them on to their children – and perhaps yours – to have and to cherish.

THE END