A BOOMER FINDS MEANING IN 1950s MID-CENTURY AMERICA

I returned to my hometown after more than 45 years — and wrote this book, The Artist’s Eye: Vernon P. Johnson’s Watercolors of 1950s Small Town America. You couldn’t find a more typical small town in America in the 1950s, and my father, an artist, recognized that immediately. He painted more than 100 watercolors of this Midwest community of 15,000 in central Ohio — in fact, a town officially recognized as a “typical, small American city” by the US State Department.

The Artist’s Eye portrays a time that has been lost all over America — the first full Baby Boom decade of the 1950s, an era of small towns, families who lived in their communities for generations and genuinely held a  spirit of  optimism about the future. While I began this book as a way of honoring my parents, our family’s legacy and the great gifts of Mount Vernon, Ohio, and Knox County, I soon understood that my own story is not unique — it’s one of those irretrievable stories of our Baby Boom generation. There were Mount Vernons all over America back then.