Exhibit highlights works of barber turned cartoonist
Staff writer
By way of framed reprints and antique violins, Goessel’s Mennonite Heritage Museum is celebrating one of the most eclectic characters in town history.
Born in 1904 in Medford, Oklahoma, Ferdinand Graevs moved to Goessel at a young age. His family, unsurprisingly, were Mennonites.
His grandparents immigrated to the United States in the mid-1800s. A trunk owned by them travelled atop camels on a 19th-century Mennonite mission through Asia. It is one of the crown jewels of the museum.
Graevs is best known as Goessel’s first barber. As a teenager, he opened his shop in 1920 out of his father’s drugstore.
Graevs cut hair for 50 years. His barbershop building has since been demolished; it was on Main St., where a credit union parking lot is now.
But the exhibit does not honor Graevs through locks of hair and razors. Instead, it does so through one of his many hobbies — cartooning.
While browsing Tabor College’s archives, Ilona Abrahams, a retired teacher and local historian, discovered 60 cartoons Graevs drew for the Goessel Gazette in 1981 and 1982.
The Gazette took up a section of the Hillsboro Star-Journal at the time. His cartoon column was called “Wise and Otherwise.”
The cartoons are now on display, along with a few of his earlier drawings, which made their way into Crossroads Co-op annual reports in the 1960s.
His cartoons, scanned, enlarged, and framed, are strange things.
Pencil drawings of faces, mostly men in profile, hover above pithy one-liners. The jokes are bizarre enough that Graevs likely came up with them himself.
“Give the gift that keeps on giving — a pregnant cat,” reads one.
“One night he dreamed he was dead — the heat woke him up,” exclaims another.
One more: “It’s not the ups and downs in life that bother me. It’s the jerks.”
The jokes seem dated even for the ’80s, though given that the artist was in his 70s at the time, that is perhaps unsurprising.
The highlight of the exhibit are the drawings, which are goofy and somber at the same time.
Each of Graevs’s faces is unique and expressive. Despite exaggerated features, they manage to escape caricature and appear, if not realistic, something honest.
Most do not smile or frown but gaze out into the edge of the frame, pondering something. Despite this, there is a beautiful casualness to the drawings. None of them look as if they took more than two minutes.
Museum director Fern Bartel remembered meeting Graevs in her 20s when she worked at Goessel’s grocery store.
“He had such an extraordinary personality,” she said. “I just thought he was a strange character.”
In addition to cartooning, Graevs had other hobbies that brought him notoriety around town: leatherwork, rope spinning, horse and dog training, chalk talks. For rural Kansas, Graevs was a renaissance man.
Though the exhibit is small, one gets a sense of the breadth of the man’s life. Framed pictures of Graevs partaking in his many passions sit in a glass case below his drawings, along with six violins.
“I don’t know whether he made them or just fixed them,” Bartel said. “You can look in the grooves. Some of them say his name, some of them say something else.”
One of the violins is covered with gems.
Four of six were found in the attic of the historic Schaeffler House in Hillsboro. It is unclear how they ended up there.
Music was likely a bigger part of Graev’s life than visual art.
He played piano, organ, accordion, guitar, and violin and gave lessons in the latter for most of his life.
Graevs owned a violin repair shop for a handful of years and directed his own 23-piece band for half a decade.
When he was younger, he was in a four-piece band — the boringly-titled Goessel Musical Group — along with his brother and two other local youths.
Bartel doesn’t create new exhibits often, but she hopes this one will bring in more visitors and highlight one of Goessel’s most interesting men.
It also serves as a kind of memorial to Graevs, who has no living heirs. His only daughter died in 2004.
“I wish I could interview him now,” Bartel said.