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Models Reunite At Norman Rockwell Museum

  Norman Rockwell is still celebrated for his depiction of everyday life in America. As WAMC’s Jim Levulis found out when he met some of the people who posed for the Americana artist, the models are regular people to this day.

“He was just our neighbor so we didn’t think too much about it,” Marjorie Coulter.  

You wouldn’t think those words would be said about a painting that was so iconic during a perilous time in American history. But that’s how Coulter, who modeled as the girl being tucked into bed in the 1943 Freedom from Fear painting, describes her experience.

“We didn’t want to close our eyes because we didn’t want to miss anything.”

Coulter says the modeling was kind of boring for her and her brother since they just had to lie there. Coulter recently traveled to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts from Vermont, where Rockwell had a studio in the early 1940s, for a model reunion. About 50 people gathered to hear her and the other models speak, with the Four Freedoms paintings as a backdrop.

“I didn’t realize how much it meant to people,” Coulter said. “You don’t think about it when you’re away.”

After his studio in Vermont burned down, Rockwell moved to Stockbridge in 1953 where he would continue his work for the Saturday Evening Post, Look magazine and other companies, using people he saw around town as models.

“He had this wonderful big hound dog with him that he was walking,” said Mary Agnes. “I had seen him around walking his dog. I’d heard of him, but I really didn’t know him.”

Rockwell stopped Mary Agnes Stevens when she was riding her bike one day and she eventually wound up in advertisements for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.  

“I didn’t realize how much sugar was in it at the time,” she said. “But it’s great. We liked Corn Flakes. We always used to have it as kids.”

Stevens’ sister Eleanor posed as one of the three girls in the 1957 Saturday Evening Post cover “Girl Missing Tooth.” In the years after, Eleanor says she never really felt special about being a Rockwell model until she left the Stockbridge area.

“I would get this reaction from people ‘Oh, Norman Rockwell?’” Eleanor said. “Well yeah, it was kind of what we did. It was a community thing. It was kind of a normal experience. I didn’t feel special until other people started reacting to it and it was later and usually in different parts of the country.”

Eleanor did share an interesting run-in she had with the image.

“I was on a trash can that was being sold in Kmart in Pittsfield,” Eleanor said laughing. “And I still have the trash can.”

Mary Agnes contends Rockwell is the real star, not those who modeled for him – although it is a unique brother or sisterhood.

“I’ll go around the country and see a Rockwell and I know one of the models,” Mary Agnes said.  “It’s just a special connection – that’s part of the world I grew up in.

“I think that’s what it reflects is the lifestyle and growing up in a small town which I think is what Rockwell really wanted to portray,” said Eleanor.

Jim is WAMC’s Assistant News Director and hosts WAMC's flagship news programs: Midday Magazine, Northeast Report and Northeast Report Late Edition. Email: jlevulis@wamc.org
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