The Portland/Simpsons Nexus - Part 1

"Wet cement! Is there any sweeter sign?"
- Bart Simpson, Lemon of Troy

Apparently Matt Groening didn't think so in 1996 when he drew a picture of Bart into the newly paved sidewalk near the corner of SW 18th and Salmon Street. Having been a life long fan of the Simpsons (quite a feat since I'm twice as old as the show), I figured it was about time I started to explore the connections between The Simpsons and Portland (Simpsons creator Groening's home town). What better place to start than with this cement carving.

It all started back when Groening was attending Abraham Lincoln High School (Lincoln for short) a quarter century earlier. As an interesting aside; the school was known as Portland High School when it started in 1869. This makes it one of the two oldest public high schools west of the Mississippi (San Fran's Lowell High is the other one). The name changed in 1908 and moved to its current location in 1952. Through all that they seem to have kept there mascot since the school paper, "The Cardinal Times", has been in continuous publication since 1897. Back to Matt...

By all accounts he had a very eventful time at the school. He and his friends formed the "Komix Appreciation Club", comics being a huge part of his younger days. They also formed a political sect called "Teens for Decency", they published an underground newspaper called "Bilge Rat" and created a Lincoln High board game. As a member of the Film Group, he and his friends created "Lightning Tour of Lincoln", essentially them just running really fast through the halls. There was also "Drugs: Killers or Dillers?" featuring an insane clown with an eggbeater. This clown can still be seen today in some of the torch wielding mob scenes in The Simpsons. Did I mention he was the student body president?

Probably one of the more creative activities Matt and his friends took place in was the creation of an imaginary group of greaser thugs. Since there were wacky actions occurring all over the school, someone needed to get blamed. After many locker locks were smeared with bananas, this fictitious group became known as the Banana Gang. During his junior year he and his friends got dressed up as greaser thugs at a party and posed as the Banana Gang for a picture that ended up in the 1971 yearbook.

Perhaps it was antics like these that lead him to call himself a "brat", thus leading him to the anagram Bart making the picture outside his alma mater all the more fitting. Speaking of character connections; Mr. Burns' demeanor was apparently based on a teacher he had in high school.

Groening was not the only celebrity to graduate from Lincoln. The Man of a Thousands Voices, Mel Blanc attended Lincoln. He is most famous for doing the voices of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and Woody Wookpecker (among hundreds of others) but I'll always remember him as Twiki from "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century". Astronaut S. David Griggs, golfer Peter Jacobson, abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko and the late, great singer-songwriter Elliott Smith are all listed as Lincoln alumni.

It actually took me a little wile to find the drawing since it wasn't exactly on the corner (not to mention there are four corners to choose from). However walking southwest along the schools sports field did lead me too it. I'm not quite sure what the circumstances were that led to him making this picture, but he was apparently in town after the Kings Hill Station was constructed and the new sidewalk was laid. It doesn’t seem to have been condoned by the city since the council had to decide not to cite Groening for vandalism. What ever the reason, I'm just glad he did it.

Joan of Arc Memorial

Every time I drive up 39th from I-84 towards Belmont (usually so I can quench my thirst with some friends at one of the fine watering holes along that street) I have to pass through a roundabout at the intersection with Gleason. Normally, this would provoke some indignant response from me due to my admittedly irrational distain for roundabouts (especially ones where you have to stop anyway before going around...why not just make a normal damn intersection!). This roundabout, however, draws my attention away from its inherent annoyance and makes me wonder, "Why is there a big, golden statue of Joan of Arc in the middle of Portland?" Well, enough is enough and its time to get to résoudre ça mystère.

First thing I need to do is get a closer look at it. I parked my car on one of the side streets off 39th, about a block south and walk up to the roundabout. The first thing we noticed (I had Virginia with me since I was taking her home after work via the B-Side) was that there is no crosswalk to get to the park in the middle. The lanes do go from 2 to 1 next to the bus stop, so we crossed over to that and quickly made our way across the street to the park.

Getting a close up look at the statue I could see a stoic yet determined look in her face that is impossible to see zipping by in a car. There were no dedication plaques, but there were little tidbits of information on the statue. On the front of the pedestal it reads:

Joan of Arc
Maid of Orleans
1412-1431

That pretty much confirms that it's a statue of Joan of Arc. I was always told that's what it was, but since I didn't know what the 15th century French heroine looked like (mostly because there are no known depictions of her that survived till modern times) I just sort of took their word for it.

The pedestal also seems to indicate that she is riding into battle during the siege at Orléans in 1429 (or she was just ridding in to clean up the place). This was a major turning point during the Hundred Year's War because, among other reasons, the French actually achieved a military victory (never thought I would say that). It all began with Joan going to the uncrowned King Charles VII with a tale of how God told her to kick the English out of France. For whatever reason, Chuck bought into her story and sent her to Orléans which had been under siege for six months. Joan showed up on April 29th and by May 8th the English had packed up their tea and crumpits and left. So you see, the French can win...they just need to be lead by someone with the balls of a 17 year old girl. While we are on the subject of French bashing; the war probably took so long because the French soldiers refused to fight more than 35 hours a week, 39 hours being far to taxing on them.

On the right side (if you were sitting on the horse) of the statue, just under the hooves, there is an inscription that reads, "F. Barbedienne, Fondeur. Paris, France". At first I thought this might be the sculptures name, but it's actually the mark of the F. Barbedienne foundry located in Paris. These guys invented a way to mechanically create bronze reproductions of statues, which they did from 1838 till 1952 (with the exceptions of 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War). Our statue is one of eight castings. Four of them are in France, one is in Melbourne, Australia, one is in Philadelphia, and the youngest one (dedicated in 1972) is in New Orleans. The original was commissioned in 1874 by Emperor Napoleon III and sculpted by Emmanuel Frémiet. That statue is in the Place des Pyramides in Paris.

On the other side we found another engraving, "A Gift to Portland from Henry Waldo Coe M.D. 1924". Now things start to fall into place. Henry Coe was a psychiatrist who owned the Morningside Hospital nuthouse in East Portland. He also seemed to have a thing for donating statues to Portland. Aside from the Joan of Arc (donated in 1924, as indicated), there was also the Theodor Roosevelt (1922) across from Art Museum (Calvin Coolidge did the ground breaking ceremony), there was a ten-foot, bronze Abraham Lincoln (1926) situated in the South Park Blocks between SW Main and Madison, and finally a George Washington (1927) that sits on 47th and Sandy Blvd. In 1905 he also donated the material for Alice Cooper to make the Sacajawea statue in Washington Park.

Dr. Coe donated the Joan of Arc statue to memorialize the American "doughboys" that fought alongside the French during World War I. The statue was unveiled on Memorial Day 1925, not coincidentally the anniversary of Joan's martyrdom on May 30, 1431. The statue was unveiled in what is now known as Coe Park at the center of the Laurelhurst neighborhood. On May 30, 2002 there was a rededication of the statue after it was restored (new, very shiny gold-leave coating, new flag and new laurel wreath on her head).

The only other thing I noticed was the peculiar placement of the statue itself. Rather than being in the center of the park, it is on the southern side. Turns out the reason for this is related to the name of the neighborhood. Prior to 1921, this whole area used to be owned by the Laurelhurst Company and called "Block A". They set up an office on the north side of what would become Coe Park because the Portland Railway Light and Power streetcar line (the Montavilla line) ran through the center of the circle. The property was sold to the McFadden Building Co. in late 1921 who wanted to develop the area but after a ruckus caused the local residents the area was deeded to the city in April 1922. In 1924 the only place to put the statue was the southern edge of the circle. Eventually the Laurelhurst Co. building moved, and the tracks were filled in when buses replaced the streetcars leaving us with a big grassy roundabout and an off-center, golden statue of Joan of Arc.