Memoir of Agnes Kulungian Woolsey (1933-2023), Mendocino, CA, by Brother Harold Kulungian

We did not become wards of the state because my father consented to pay for our room and board, which was seven dollars per week per child during World War II and beyond, until Auntie finally, in the late 1940s, raised the fee to ten dollars per week per child. But by that time, my brother had left us to join the US Marine Corps at age 17 with his father’s permission.

The interesting fact that allowed my mother’s prediction to be fulfilled was that Auntie had gone out of the business of providing a foster-home for state wards, had moved out of the city, and into a rural setting where she apparently intended to take only “private” children whose parents would compensate her better than the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. They came from private homes where family life had been disrupted, or they came for shorter stays, summers only, while us four Kulungian children were the only ones who stayed with Aunty and Uncle Bill, as her husband was called, permanently.

The Richardson couple had both transplanted here from Victorian England, where children were reluctantly seen and rarely heard. The children’s room in that big farmhouse was a separate kitchen with an iron stove where our food was cooked and we ate at a long table, seated on benches; and with an adverse wind causing the room to be suddenly filled with choking smoke because the stovepipe had to veer downwards for a foot before it could exit out a window. It was hopelessly against the will of nature that smoke must rise, and normally refuses to turn downwards to accommodate the lack of a proper chimney. It was often my sister Agnes who was faulted when our room filled up with smoke in frigid winter, because as the eldest of the young ones, she was put in charge of tending the stove. If she was at her sewing machine or busy at any arts or crafts she cultivated, she was fully absorbed in that, and did not notice that the stove was choking us until it was too late.

Now, reverting to my mother’s prediction that Aunty would bring up her children, stated years before she was ultimately placed in the Worcester State Hospital, Aunty Richardson was very fond of telling that story to any guest, not only because it had wondrously come to pass, but because she was unmistakably proud of us four Kulungian children. She braided my elder sister’s hair every school morning with obvious pride and pleasure, like Alice was her own daughter. She continued to read the tea leaves for wealthy English friends who visited her regularly from Worcester. She also read playing cards and even ultimately: handkerchiefs.  She recited Mother Shipton’s prophecies as gospel truth. After all, the English seer had predicted women riding astride horseback like men. And she was proved correct.

When the breast cancer epidemic began right after World War II, due to women being unable to discharge their dietary waste products through the pores of their skin, from wearing the newly-invented non-absorbent nylon stockings – and then the pantyhose in the 1950s, that covered them right up to the belly-button with petroleum-based synthetic fabric – women would come to Aunty’s house to have their fortune predicted before they were scheduled to have a chest X-ray. Aunty would reassure them, on the basis of reading their tea leaves or a careful examination of their handkerchief. Her power of forecasting people’s future was truly remarkable and highly respected by upper-class wealthy people. She had originally emigrated from England as a young woman to serve as a governess and caretaker for the children of wealthy English families who had made their fortunes in America, manufacturing rugs.

Thus, if we ask, How did she raise children while charging merely seven dollars per week? The answer is she had connections. Every Monday she drove to Worcester for her shopping trip and stopped at the Town-Talk Bakery where a large carton of week-old brown bread was waiting for her, some of it moldy, to be sure. But we weren’t too proud to pick off the mold in those less-than-affluent days. Aunty also made a regular weekly stop at the home of a wealthy Mrs. Smith, where she was given a large shopping bag of used clothing for the children, donated by the successful families who ran the Junior League, a charitable organization that looked out for the poor. Aunty never lost her connections with that American-based English aristocracy who continued to visit her until she died in 1962 in her eighties.

She had suffered for years an oozing ulcer in her left leg, which she had to clean and rebandage every two days. After nursing that inexplicable affliction for years, her husband suddenly died of a heart-attack in 1951 and so she stopped cooking the greasy hamburger he liked. And then, lo and behold, her painful ulcer stopped oozing and suddenly healed itself because she stopped feeding it the animal fat from the hamburgers she had been consuming with him, without knowing that the fatty meat was beyond the metabolic capacity of her constitution.

Agnes had been absorbed in arts and crafts for years, making her own clothes for years – and years later her children’s clothes – before it was decided she would not attend high school, but would be sent instead to Girls Trade School in Worcester, where it was arranged she would live with an Armenian family with a daughter her age. Was this a derogation of her ability to learn academic subjects in high school? I suspected she resented it somewhat, but I may have been wrong, because dressmaking did provide an outlet for her artistic talent. But she apparently never took it seriously as a potential lucrative profession as a fashion dress designer. She was too enamored of the visual arts to see anything else easily within her grasp.

Agnes was allowed to take her first professional art lessons at the Worcester Art Museum at age 13, in 1946, and from that day she was hooked on the fine arts as well as the manual arts. When the question arose: Where would she go for higher education, there was no tradition of a college education in our working-class family. But the Worcester County Council of Churches heard of Agnes’ need. She had been a faithful attender of Sunday School at the First Congregational Church in Oxford for many years. The Christian organization responded with a scholarship to a Christian college: Southern Union College in Wadley, Alabama. Without knowing what she was getting into in the deep conservative South, Agnes studied there for her freshman year before extricating herself from those Southern conventions that cramped her style. She did her research well for a new school that could nourish her arts and crafts creative instincts, and found the perfect college that was the least academic and offered her the widest scope to develop her talents: Berea College in Berea, Kentucky.

Whomever designed the structure of this college apparently surmised well that this do-it-yourself curriculum in an arts and crafts college for such young people is perfectly appropriate. But such an unstructured option for the pursuit of abstract academic subjects that inherently build on previous learning, can be self-defeating, however much it may flatter the student’s ability to choose one’s own path where such paths do not pre-exist.

Agnes evidently enjoyed immensely her three years at Berea College, a select place for a person of her cast of mind, where she made interesting new friends, not all of them Americans. She thrived on the Berea “No tuition” regimen of work at arts and crafts to earn her education without accruing onerous debt. As one of her crafts projects she made for me a hand-woven woolen necktie of brown and blue slanted stripes, with delicate gold threads where the colors met. It was a truly breathtaking work of art that I wore only rarely, because it was so precious that I feared soiling it, and also because the wool around my neck stimulated my blood circulation inordinately, and explains why cooling silk is most often used for neckwear.

On graduation from Berea College, Agnes got her first art-teaching job in upstate New York in the public schools of the modest city of Troy, where she appeared in a group photo among new friends at the Troy Armenian Church in 1958. Her next job was as a waitress on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where she was banking on the reputation for generosity in tipping from the summer tourists there, to help her raise the funds she needed to attend graduate school the ensuing academic year.

For that professional education to qualify herself for a better-paying  position, she chose the Master’s Degree Program in Teaching at the California College of Arts and Crafts on the far side of the American continent in Oakland, CA. From there, Agnes sent me a photo in 1960 of herself seated on a couch in the apartment of the late Professor Olvi Mangasarian, taken by him, in Berkeley, who was married to the sister of the woman I was courting here in Massachusetts. In that amazing photo, Agnes was glowing like an illuminated Christmas tree, with a radiant joyful happiness that has been rarely seen in the annals of humanity. It took me over sixty years to discover the secret behind her amazing glow: Agnes had become engaged to a dashing blond Englishman by the name of John Woolsey, who was also a student at the same school. If I had not lost that photo years ago, it would be posted here to illustrate this memoir.

Needless to say, I saw very little of Agnes in the ensuing years, except when she rarely came East with her family–daughter Robin and son David – to visit and stay with our elder sister Alice in Oxford, MA, the town where we grew up. Of course, we had occasional letters back and forth, in which she showed her remarkable astuteness in understanding women. Back in 1961, after Agnes had met only briefly, at a social function, three years earlier, the young woman I was courting to no avail, I complained to my sister that I was not making any progress in winning my beloved’s heart. Agnes had the answer, although it was not borne out until five years later. Agnes consoled me with her observation: “She is the type of woman with no fire in her blood. She has to be swept off her feet.” That is exactly what eventually happened. When the swain saw that she was wavering, and did not show up for the shopping trip planned to pick out a diamond engagement ring, he shrewdly bought an oversize ring, with a ring-guard on it to prevent it from falling off her finger. Then he threw a surprise engagement party at the home of a relative, in which he pushed that oversize ring on her finger in front of a gaping roomful of applauding friends and relatives, on the very evening when she had pledged to break off from the man and come to the residence of her longtime suitor.

Agnes had foreseen it all, even though she didn’t have the exact script. If she was extraordinarily perceptive, with her artist’s eyes, about women, she was equally adroit about making her irresistibly sharp demands upon the men in her life. So her relations with men were usually cut shorter than she would have liked, due to an excess of self-confidence in her own eyes. Her superb self-regard was doubtless based on her physical attractiveness as well as her self-esteem as an accomplished artist. But there is only so much that a man can endure. And she remained blithely unaware of where that limit loomed over her relationships with men.

I can relate only one such arresting encounter with Agnes after her move to California. It was in 1968, as I recall, when the Boston Museum of Fine Arts announced a month-long exhibit of Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings. Agnes was thriving quite well at that time. She owned two houses in Berkeley. One she lived in, and one she rented. She had husbanded her finances well from her school teaching job. So, on the spur of an artist’s inspiration, she took a cross-country jet flight from San Francisco to Bradley Field near Hartford, Connecticut. From there she telephoned her sister to send her husband to come the forty miles each way to drive her to Oxford, MA, and put her up overnight.

I had no telephone, since I dwelt like an impecunious hermit during my 1960s years studying in the Harvard Extension School. But the next morning after Agnes’s arrival on the East Coast, my landlady downstairs received a telephone call from Agnes instructing her brother to pick her up at the Boston Bus Terminal at midday and drive her to the Museum of Fine Arts. Amazing! Without even knowing my landlady’s name, but only the street address, Agnes had succeeded in getting the telephone operator to find the name and phone number of my landlady, who took the call and then passed the message onto me. Naturally, I was annoyed at this sudden imposition on my time. But I had to be impressed by my sister’s resourcefulness in accomplishing her objectives. By that time I hadn’t seen Agnes in many years. I think we felt like strangers in my car, under awkward circumstances; but she showed herself delighted when I drove her to the entrance to the museum. Her overnight excursion from Southern California to Boston’s rarified artistic society at the Museum of Fine Arts had been accomplished without a hitch.

Now to bring this memoir to a close, I reflect upon the longevity of her vitality and her autonomy at living alone with her artistic pursuits for many years, which did provide company enough apparently, because she would never consider remarriage. For some few years I hoped she could find a new fulfilling life with an Armenian husband, and I made overtures toward introducing her to a fine Armenian bachelor attorney in Worcester, Harvard Law School graduate, handsome, and with impeccable family credentials. But Agnes would have none of it, and complained against me. She had ruled herself definitely out of all romantic relationships.

Early on after her divorce from the short-lived marriage to the English father of her two children, she had cohabited with a younger man whom she referred to in her letters only as “Bob,” but never sent a photo of him, before he eventually wore out his welcome in finding shelter under her roof. Either she booted him out or he finally lost patience in accommodating her demands. So I don’t even know whether they had been lovers or merely friends of convenience. I would have liked to know her final judgment about men, which certainly cooled as she aged.

In the heyday of her biological vitality, Agnes had been an avid swimmer for many years, and an expert diver who enjoyed leaping off great heights. Since childhood, she loved the aquatic exercise which doubtless secured  and prolonged her good health until well into her senior years as she continued to swim year-round in indoor pools. Then a few years ago her health apparently went off the rails and she announced she was diagnosed with leukemia, which is an excess of white blood cells and a deficiency of red blood cells.

Commonsense tells us that red blood cells are made of protein and fat, so her diet must have become inimical to metabolizing her food adequately, from being too acidic. This was shown in Agnes’ case from her hair becoming white and brittle in old age, which indicates demineralization, since the basis of pigment is minerals, as anyone understands who knows where potters get the colors for the glazes they make for their pottery. So, I surmise that Agnes had mistakenly become addicted or enamoured of an excessively acidic diet from sweets, vinegar products, acidic fruit juices, and acidic fruits, etc. After all, isn’t it the American way to begin the day with a strong dose of citric acid from orange juice?

If there is any truth to the simple antithesis that artists are born, not made, Agnes’s life demonstrated that a life without the fulfillment of the perpetual pursuit of creativity was impossible for her. Artistic creativity both nourished her daily life and made life worth living, and also set her apart from persons whose friendship she may have preferred not to forego. As a man who came to find that the life of the mind, in the relentless pursuit of fresh thoughts in the Vita Contemplativa is the highest form of happiness, as Aristotle famously avers in the tenth book of his Nicomachean Ethics, I came to understand that the life of the artist and the life of the philosopher are not so dissimilar. That gave me a new sympathy, so to speak, with the inside of her life, which otherwise appeared so remote from mine. She attained the quality of life that she instinctively sought after from an early age. And even if that life cost her a penalty in some human relationships, I have no doubt  that if she had ever tallied up the costs and benefits, she would have had no regrets about the fulfillments that her life in art had brought her.

Harold Kulungian, her two-and-a-half-year younger brother, who finally appreciates how rare it was to have an artist in the family of working-class folks.

25 September 2024