Sunday afternoon, a week ago, the idea entered my head that I should ride over to Gordo and look in on Glenn House and Kathy Fetters. I had seen them six weeks earlier at an opening at the Rosenzweig of an exhibition celebrating the art of letter press printing, a craft Glenn has practiced in one form or another most of his adult life. We visited briefly then, but there was such competition for their attention. Glenn looked frail, unusually so.
The following morning I learned by email Glenn died Sunday after a 10-day struggle with a West Nile virus infection. I felt like someone was squeezing my chest as I read the news. You think certain people will be around forever and then suddenly they’re gone.
I’ve known Glenn about 20 years. Right before I took this newspaper job, when I was still a practicing photographer, I’d go over one day a week to Gordo. There I would spend the day alone photographing in a place that defies description, Ma’Cille’s Museum of Miscellanea. Ma’Cille was Lucille House, a country woman who years ago got the idea that the children of Pickens County should have a museum. And then she hauled off and made one.
Eclectic best describes the collection. Among the displays were Ma’Cille’s exhaustive collection of dolls, a framed assortment of matchbooks, various animal fetuses in gallon jars and roadkill stuffed by Ma’Cille. The museum’s piece de resistance, however, was a small diorama of two stuffed possums playing checkers. The museum not only fulfilled its original intent, it became a magnet for artists, photographers and devotees of the esoteric. Ma’Cille was Glenn’s mother.
Glenn lived down the hill from the museum with his partner, Kathy Fetters, a photographer, who has made lovely hand-tinted photographs of Glenn, Ma’Cille and their environs. Kathy, as she continues to do, was selling her photographs at the Kentuck festival; Glenn was making pots.
Then I’d heard Glenn and Kathy bought a building in Gordo and made a gallery/print shop. On the way home from Birmingham we detoured down the town’s main street. On the front of a building that bore a sign that read “NAPA Auto Parts,” someone had painted over all the letters except for the “arts” in Parts. I reckoned correctly that was Glenn and Kathy’s place.
Over time Glenn bought more buildings to put the unwanted letter presses he was finding in garages and the basements of newspapers. Graduate students from the U of A would come over and do projects. Like Glenn, it all had a goofy logic to it. And it worked. Gordo’s mayor Craig Patterson, a retired fireman who owns a used book store across the street from the NAPA gallery was supportive. The project attracted other creative types, most notably Amos Paul Kennedy, a nationally known printer, who set up shop in one of Glenn’s buildings. Amos Paul has since abandoned Gordo for the wilds of Detroit.
Years earlier Glenn had worked in Tuscaloosa as a commercial printer. In that capacity, as a printer and graphic designer, he produced what might be his most enduring artistic legacy, certainly it was his most celebrated.
In 1957 while employed by the Rivers Sign Company, Glenn designed a sign for the Moon Winx Motor Court in the Alberta City neighborhood of Tuscaloosa. The sign features a winking and smiling crescent moon. The sign has long been a cherished Tuscaloosa landmark. (For a time Bear Bryant housed his Crimson Tide teams at the motel on the eve of home games.) When spared by the 2011 tornado that tore up much of the surrounding neighborhood, the sign’s survival was reported in the Tuscaloosa News.
Glenn, in typical Glenn fashion, figured he was paid $1.50 for his design of the Moon Winx sign (three hours at $.50 per).
In the early 1970s Glenn began teaching letterpress printing at the University of Alabama. Those classes became the genesis of the school’s acclaimed book arts program.
Glenn had a child-like enthusiasm for any sort of creative expression. That enthusiasm and an abiding kindness were his most prominent traits. I never heard him disparage anyone nor greet anyone with anything other than honest enthusiasm.
A tribute on a funeral home website reveals another side of Glenn:
Glenn was scoutmaster of Troop 55. We were probably the luckiest scouts ever. He taught us woods craft, whittling and was always a thoroughly decent man. His campfire stories, the arrowhead hunts, and our campouts will never be forgotten. Mr. House was as fine a person as could ever be, talent and patience beyond measure. We’ll not see his like again, not in this life. Marty and Butch, y’all hang tough, it’s a privilege to have had y’all & your Dad in scouting. A singular man he was.
— David Muir, Northport, Ala.
A singular man he was. An uncommonly good man. We’re going miss you, Glenn House.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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