When Sig Byrd Met Forrest Bess

Robert Boyd

After supper at Forrest Bess' house at the mouth of Chinquapin Bayou (surely the loneliest spot in Texas), we all went into the shipshape studio to drink tequila and coffee and look at our host's pictures.

That is the opening sentence of an article called "Trawling in the Collective Subconscious at Chinquapin" by the great Houston newspaper columnist Sigman Byrd. It was published on Sunday, March 11, 1956 in the Houston Chronicle. Byrd is one of the very few writers who actually went out and visited Bess in his shack on East Matagorda Bay and wrote about it. (I went to the microfilm library at the University of Houston to read this column as research for an article chronicling a trip to East Matagorda Bay in search of Bess's home.) I greatly admire both Bess and Byrd and was delighted when I learned they had met. That opening sentence, so unlike a good, solid J-school-approved opener, shows why Byrd is such a great writer. He throws us right into the middle of his story with no explanation; he uses an unusual word "shipshape" which happens to describe Bess' studio (which apparently had a concrete "prow"); he mixes tequila and coffee in a family newspaper. (Literally a family newspaper--that was the Houston Chronicle's motto at the time--"Houston's Family Newspaper".)

Byrd was a newspaper columnist who specialized in telling human stories about folks who lived in places where polite middle-class white folks seldom went. He was surely one of the few Houston writers of the 1950s to regularly write about African American and Hispanic subjects. He also was willing to write sympathetically about ex-cons, petty criminals, prostitutes and other denizens of the demimonde. There is one great collection of his columns, Sig Byrd's Houston, which is of course long out of print. (I wrote about it on my old blog back in 2009.) Byrd wrote a classic column called "The Stroller" in the 40s and 50s for the old Houston Press newspaper (back when Houston had three daily papers). Robert Kimberley has been scanning these for a while now and you can read a lot of them on Flickr.

By the time he wrote about Bess, he was working for the Chronicle, where he would stay until 1964. The Chronicle was not so interested in Byrd's stories of low-life and put him on a farm/rural beat. And maybe that's why he wrote about Bess, an eccentric (which would have appealed to Byrd) in an extremely rural setting. I looked up this old article because I was researching the location of Bess's shack for an article I wrote for Glasstire.

Byrd is bemused, and the work is a bit beyond his ken. He was a little too street to have much understanding or sympathy for abstract painting--his appreciation of Bess is strictly on the basis of Bess's status as a likeable oddball.

Forest [sic] calls his paintings ideograms--"pictures that talk back to the other part of our natures." They are filled with symbols trawled up from the muddy bottom of what this fishmonger-artist calls "the collective subconscious."

If I dig this cat--and I'm not sure I do--he first dreams these pictures while sleeping of lying half-asleep and listening to the Matagorda wind and waves. Then he puts them on canvas in bold form and color. And finally he searches out the meaning of his symbology in the literature of mythology, alchemy and Jungian psychology.

Byrd visited Bess with Jack Akridge, a plumber from Pasadena, and  his wife. Akridge was a collector--he already had two Bess paintings and was buying a third on an installment plan.Bess was delighted to include a plumber among his collectors.

Byrd recounts their discussion of one painting in particular.

Then he called our attention to a curious painting in which a couple of dozen unidentified quadrupeds ranged a grey prairie under a pendulous cloud. "Most people get sleepy when they look at this," he said.

Sure enough, Earl [a local fisherman] and Mrs. Akridge started yawning. Not me, though. "Several days after I did this one," said Forest, "I discovered that what you call a cloud is a uvula--the lobe at the end of the roof of the mouth. You are looking at a yawn. What do the small animals suggest to you?"

"Stigarees?" guessed Earl.

"Bacteria," I said. "Probably streptococci."

"They're sheep to be counted while yawning," said the artist. "I call this Sleep."

As soon as I read that description, I knew the painting he was talking about, which is now referred to as Untitled (No. 31).


Forrest Bess, Untitled (No. 31), 1951, oil on canvas, 8" x 10"

This painting is on display at the Menil through August 18 as part of Forest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible. I reviewed this show and wrote about this painting in particular--but certainly didn't see it in the way that Bess described it to Byrd!

Bess and Byrd are hardly household names. But they both have Facebook pages--Bess has 173 "likes" and Byrd has 183. I know about these Facebook pages because I created both of them (in July 2010 and November 2009 respectively). Bess and Byrd are two great Texans who should never be forgotten, and I'm glad they got to meet at least once.

Marvin Zindler, The Houston Press, and the Art of the Tabloid Newspaper

by Robert Boyd


Marvin Zindler, unidentified photo from The Houston Press, 1950s

Most photography shows never get the publicity that Bayou City Noir has gotten. Younger Houstonians or folks who have moved here in the past few years may find this a bit perplexing. But for the rest of us, Marvin Zindler is an icon. He is best known for being the flamboyant consumer affairs reporter for KTRK. Many may also know him as the crusading reporter who got the Chicken Ranch, a rural brothel in LaGrange, closed down. These hardboiled crime photos are a bit of a revelation, but they fit in perfectly with his muckraking career.

What hasn't been discussed as much as Zindler himself is the paper that published them, The Houston Press. In the 1950s, Houston had three major dailies--the Houston Chronicle, the Houston Post, and the Houston Press. The Press was a Scripps-Howard newspaper that was bought out by the Chronicle in 1964. Of the three Houston papers, it was the most tabloidish.

For the nostalgists among us, the key figure at the Press was Sig Byrd, a brilliant columnist who walked among the low-lifes and common folk of Houston, getting their stories for his column, "The Stroller" (a perfect name for his column because Byrd was truly a flâneur). This, to me, is the magic of tabloid newspapers--that they will cover areas of local life that are invisible to more gentile outlets. Sig Byrd is pretty much forgotten today--his book collection of columns, Sig Byrd's Houston, is long out of print. There is a Facebook page devoted to it (which I founded), and Robert Kimberly, a relatively recent immigrant to Houston, has been doggedly scanning old Stroller columns from the U.H. microfilm library and posting them on Flickr.

Sig Byrd would go out among the poor, the African-Americans, the Mexican-Americans, the waterfront types, the barflies, the streetcorner preachers, the prostitutes--people ignored elsewhere in society except to be condemned. He would listen to their stories. He probably embellished them a bit. The result was some of the finest writing ever done in Houston.

Zindler's photos aren't quite as good and Byrd's columns. They also feel like weak echoes of Weegee. Like Weegee, Zindler staged a lot of his photos. I get the impression that this is a journalistic no-no, but those journalistic ethics of impartiality are rules for the bourgeoisie--for people who go to college to study journalism. If Zindler got to the scene a few minutes late, why not pose the participants of the real-life drama that he had just missed. It tells the story better. Not only would he stage some of his photos, he also extensively retouched the photos so they would reproduce better in the paper.


Marvin Zindler, "Husband Was 'Acting Cute'--Now He's Dead," Houston Press, May 22, 1953

If you look closely, all the highlights in the woman's hair are painted in. This helps her head to pop from the background and gives her hair a feeling of three-dimensionality. So is this cheating? Did Zindler deviate from the truth of what the camera saw when he retouched photos? Did he deviate from journalistic truth when he posed photos?

Zindler didn't shy from showing blood and guts--far from it. Tabloids knew their readership wanted to see blood.


Marvin Zindler, date and headline unknown

One weird thing about the exhibit is that all the criminals, victims, lawmen and bystanders are white, except in one dramatic photo.


Marvin Zindler, "Bomb Home in Riverside!" Houston Press, April 17, 1953

Jack Caesar, a cattle trader, had moved into Riverside Terrace, then a white neighborhood. Someone then bombed his house. So the only time Zindler photographs a black man is when he is a victim of racist terrorism. The scared but defiant Caesar is a good subject. But contrast this to Byrd, who regularly wrote about African Americans and gave them a degree of humanity that wasn't all that present in the media of the time, particularly in a Southern city like Houston.


Marvin Zindler, date and headline unknown

Some of the best photos are some of the most inexplicable. Why are this woman and this cop reading a Felix the Cat comic book in a liquor store? I'm sure the explanation is banal, which makes it all the better that there is no explanation in the exhibit.

These photos are fascinating and maybe occasionally they rise to the level of art. But I wonder what people thought of them and of the Press in the 1950s. Was it a disreputable tabloid, the kind of paper respectable folks didn't take? I think of the terrible local TV news with their "if it bleeds, it leads" mentality. Sixty years from now, will curators be showing videos from them in museums? Time can certainly change our perceptions--these photos pandered to the bloodlust of the Press's readership, like gladiatorial competitions did for the Roman masses. Yet sixty years later, we can look at a long-dead bloody corpse and discuss it as art.

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Robert Boyd

Over on my other blog, I posted about Sig Byrd's Houston, a great collection of noirish newspaper columns from the 40s and 50s.  It turns out that Houston cartoonist (and Lawndale alum)  Scott Gilbert freely adapted one of the stories from Sig Byrd's Houston in 1996, and he has given me permission to reproduce it here.