Reflections on 60 + Years of Friendship

I didn't find my friends; the good God gave them to me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

I met most of my closest friends early in school before I went to college in 1946. Richard Serrin would certainly be one of them. We were both born in Evanston, Illinois. Our paths first crossed in the early 1940s when America was totally involved in World War II. We attended Evanston township high school (ETHS) together. We were both in a Hi-Y club around which our social, aspiring athletic and early academic lives revolved.

This year we celebrated our 60^th year since we both graduated from ETHS in1946. Sixty years ago we were just two male acquaintances and over the intervening years our friendship has grown and become mutually enriching. Early, Richard’s life had a great deal more direction than my own. He was well on his way to becoming an established artist when we graduated from high school in 1946.

Our paths did not cross again until 1958. I was out of the navy and just starting my business career in the printing industry in Chicago. In 1952 I married my classmate, best friend and life time companion, Charlyn Floyd. We discovered Richard was in town and we invited him to dinner at our first home in Park Ridge, Illinois. We had our first two children, Betsy and Chet and Richard was still a bachelor. At the end of the evening we promised to stay in touch for the rest of our lives. Then mysteriously three weeks later he completely vanished from Chicago and I did not hear about him again until 1975. It turns out that Richard had met the pastor of St. John’s Lutheran Church of Minneapolis in Italy. Richard asked the pastor if he could help find a place in the U.S. where he could paint four 9’ x 9’ paintings of the Passion of Christ. The pastor had known Dorothy, Richard’s wife, when she had previously been a member of his church. The pastor invited Richard and his family to live in the church’s manse and complete the four large paintings in the basement of the church. He also offered to pay Richard $3500 if he would do the necessary janitorial work for the church. So, Richard, his wife and two daughters, Saskia and Alleta, moved from Florence to Minneapolis. It was a wild idea to undertake such a project that was totally uncommissioned.

Our mutual friend and classmate, Chuck Roberts, lived in Tokyo. He had heard that Richard was having a retrospective of his painting at the University of Minnesota. Chuck suggested that I collect $10 from several of our mutual friends and send Richard a plant for the opening of his show. Chuck thought that Richard needed a great deal of encouragement given the nature of his art. But best of all, Chuck suggested that it would be great if I could attend the opening of Richard’s show myself.

This latter thought had immediate appeal to me as our oldest Daughter, Betsy, was in her senior year at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Char and I had never visited her during the four years she had been there. So whimsically on a ruse, I got Char out to O’Hare Airport, and then stepped from behind a pillar with a packed suitcase and spirited Char off to Minneapolis for a total surprise visit. We spent Friday evening with Richard and his family and then on Saturday and Sunday we were with our oldest daughter Betsy

When we met again in 1975, Richard had already been painting for eleven years in Italy. He and Dorothy had moved to Florence in 1964. I was amazed at the broad scope of Richard’s paintings that were exhibited in Minneapolis. This exhibit did not include any of his Passion paintings he was working on at the church.

We discovered was that there were parallel themes about God and his call on both our lives that gave us a great deal of common ground on which to build a lifetime friendship. I had been a board member of Christian Laity of Chicago that helped couples explore the dimensions of their faith in small groups, and Richard was psychologically stirred to the depths of his soul by the uncommissioned task he had set before himself. What he had originally estimated would take him two years to complete was now running into its fourth year. Once we were reacquainted Richard made visits to Chicago on a number of occasions. Quite a following for Richard’s work developed and as a result I started securing commissions for Richard to paint Biblical paintings.

Then I got the news from Richard’s wife that Richard was disheartened by the lack of progress on the Passion paintings. He had made the decision to abandon the project, and just leave the Passion paintings unfinished in the basement of St. John’s Church and return to Italy to a much more receptive climate for the type of art that he was painting. I felt that this would be a great personal tragedy and through an earlier contact I had made in Chicago, I was able to set up an artist-in-residence program at Fuller Theological Seminary that allowed Richard to complete this project. The completed Passion paintings and then later two transitional paintings, each 7’ x 8’ were sold to a contact I had in Chicago. Ten years later these six paintings were appraised for fair market value in Atlanta and New York for 9-1/2 times their original purchase price.

Another milestone in this long friendship was that I made the decision to leave the printing business in 1983, and I registered as a fulltime student at the age of 55 to enter a Doctoral Program in Chicago to become a clinical psychologist. This was a five year commitment on my part and during this time, I continued to secure more commissions for Biblical paintings for Richard. In 1986 Char and I moved down to Columbus, Georgia when I accepted a pre-doctoral internship at the Bradley Center, a private mental hospital in Columbus, Georgia. It has now been twenty years since we made this move from Chicago to Columbus.