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During my early career, I worked as a journalist, primarily in New York. I traveled around the city and the U.S., attending press conferences and conducting interviews. I spent many hours each week writing and editing, which I enjoyed until I began suffering from headaches. Though given many accolades, I took a break from the magazine business and worked as a handyman assistant for what I thought would be a brief stint. My headaches disappeared as we erected fences, poured concrete around posts and painted exteriors. Eventually, I became a master carpenter and then a construction manager, a better fit for my brain.
I never got back to full-time writing and editing. However, for the next almost 40 years, I wrote some free-lance articles, participated in a writers’ group, and dissected works of great writers to learn how they created strong plots and put feeling and drama into their works. I published Cows in the Fog and Other Poems and Stories and received nice reviews. Amy Newmark, Editor-in-Chief of Chicken Soup for the Soul books wrote to me, “Cows in the Fog is a wonderful book. I like it. I really like it.”
I felt encouraged to author another book. Here is how NORMAN ROCKWELL’S MODELS, In and Out of the Studio came to be. During my childhood, I spent entire summers in rural Sandgate, Vermont, part of the West Arlington community. I still visit often. Don Trachte Jr., who had been a Rockwell model, read Cows in the Fog. He considered my book to be authentic rural Vermont.
Don’s father, an artist himself, was a friend of Norman’s. Don Sr. had also been a model. Don Jr., who organizes Rockwell Reunions, suggested I write a book about local models, who appear in the artist’s most iconic paintings. He gave me a list of potential interviewees. Don told me his story as a model and about his father’s purchase of Rockwell’s Breaking Home Ties in 1962 for $900. It is one of the artist’s most popular works. For one year, they could only find the original after a frantic search around their father’s studio. The publicity around the search caused the price of the painting to soar to $16 million from an expected $7 million at Sotheby’s.
I was fascinated as Don told me stories about Rockwell models. I was aware as a child that I knew some of them, such as the weather-worn horse trainer in Breaking Home Ties and the Lincolnesque speaker at a town meeting in Freedom of Speech. However, I hadn’t known that many people I had known, or knew, had also been models. In books of Rockwell paintings or on my smartphone, I pointed out models I know to friends. First, I was amazed at how many people love his paintings. Secondly, as I related anecdotes about my experiences with the models, haying meadows, swimming in a river called the Batten Kill and dancing on the Village Green, they would say things like, I never knew they were real people. It’s so interesting. You know these people. It’s incredible. I explained that I spent my summers, from June 20 to Labor Day at my family’s mid-1700s farmhouse in rural Vermont, five miles back on a gravel road. I spent my days at the center where Norman discovered a couple hundred models. My times telling these anecdotes were very special. If these friends loved these anecdotes, wouldn’t Rockwell fans around the world.
Eventually, I interviewed 25 models at length, including Norman’s son Jarvis. Jarvis and his wife hosted me in their home many times. Jarvis was more interested in discussing his experiences with our mutual friends, the models, than his father’s paintings. He grew up in West Arlington. I also connected with his brother Thomas Rockwell, Norman’s middle son and Peter, the youngest. We discussed haying, swimming under the red-covered bridge and our neighbors and friends. There was the hardest working farm family ever, the Vaughns, who lived across the road from the Rockwell’s 1792 white Colonial on the Village Green. Curnel Vaughn, appears in The Long Shadow of Lincoln, which tells the story of the suffering of war. Tall, handsome and an outdoors adventurer, Buddy Edgerton, who lived next door to the Rockwells, appeared in more Boy Scout paintings than anyone. Jarvis recalled that Buddy, tall, handsome, mild-mannered, as well as a leader in the community, made the perfect Scout model for the organization’s annual calendars. Jarvis recalled that Arlington was perfect for his father’s work because every kind of character was there: farmers, mechanics, country doctors, wealthy businessmen and spirited farming children. Tom, who co-wrote his father’s Autobiography, NORMAN ROCKWELL, My Adventures as an Illustrator, explained that Norman did his best work in Arlington during WWII because he was energized to create lively picture stories of soldiers.
As I drove around New England, I was impressed at the detail of the models’ recollections. At 19, when she posed for Tired Salesgirl in 1947, Sophie Rachiski Aumand kept a diary of the day she spent in the studio with Norman Rockwell, her lunch with Norman’s wife Mary and at the hairdresser and listening to a Boston Red Sox game on the radio in the living room with the Rockwell boys. That was a treat because her family did not own a radio.
I could continue on at length about my interviews. As I drafted the book, I worked hard to pick out the best anecdotes of their experiences with Norman and around town. Then, publishing and marketing began. I built up a social media following and found an agent and publisher. We edited my book, created a cover, and a friend improved the photos with contrast. After a year of working with the publisher and waiting for reviews and endorsements, NORMAN ROCKWELL’S MODELS is now released as of February 15, 2023.
S.T. Haggerty (Steve) is a freelance writer and former staff editor and writer at McGraw-Hill Publications in New York, where he enjoyed writing business articles and profiles on the country’s top business executives. He is also a longtime writer of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. He is known for his intriguing, heartfelt, and lively storytelling. He received his B.S. from Southern Vermont College, and M.A. in Journalism from the University of South Carolina. He is the author of Norman Rockwell’s Models: In and Out of the Studio, and lives in Dutchess County, New York.
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