ART
16
“We met Bean
and he said sure,
I will give you
lessons — if you
bring your sister,”
he recalls. “Well, he
wasn’t interested in
giving me lessons.
He circled my sister
like a shark.”
Though Backus
was 20 years older
than she, Patty
ended up marrying
A circa-1955 shows Hutchinson at center, with
his sister, Patsy and brother-in-law A.E. “Beanie”
Backus in the back row, along with friends and
musicians at a jazz jam session held at the
Backus studio.
Backus in 1950 and became known by the artist and his
friends as Patsy. She died in 1955 during heart surgery.
“I moved in with them the last year of my senior year of
high school,” says Hutchinson. “Bean never gave me any formal
training. But I absorbed more than anybody had a right
to from him.”
Hutchinson went on to college at Florida State University
and met Joan Austin, a pretty co-ed who was the daughter of
a Naval officer. “We met at the Florida State circus,” he says.
“She was on the triple trap and I was on the roller board.”
When Joan left Tallahassee, Hutchinson joined the Navy,
traveling to Guam, and ending up in San Francisco, where
Joan’s family happened to be stationed. Their romance
continued to blossom, even after Hutchinson was honorably
discharged as a seaman and went to New York City to attend
the School of Illustration.
“I had six wonderful months there and lived with another
artist in a loft. The school for ballerinas was next door to ours
and we had the most gorgeous girls incapable of a clumsy
movement to draw for our figure classes,” says Hutchinson.
Joan was studying at American University in Washington,
D.C. She moved to Melbourne to teach school and Hutchinson
went to Port Salerno to help his father paint houses. He also
worked as a guide at McKee Jungle Garden in Vero Beach.
It was the mid-1950s and Hutchinson, who seems to have
never met a stranger, was a friend to many, rich and poor.
Some were the old Salerno fishermen, true Florida crackers
with names like “Lighter Knot Smith.”
He was also close to his sister and Backus, who, despite
the Jim Crow laws that pervaded Florida at the time, made a
point of opening their studio home to both blacks and whites.
Jim and Joan were regulars at the integrated Saturday night
jazz jam sessions at the Backus studio.
“Joan and I made up our minds early on that we hated the
idea of segregation and how bad black people were treated,”
he says. “We were just friendly to everyone.”
ENTER ZORA
One of those friends was the great literary figure of the
Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston lived her final
years in poverty in Fort Pierce. She was a good friend of the
Hutchinsons, even living with them for a time at their apartment
in the Golden Gate Building in Stuart.
“I don’t know what we fed her, since we didn’t have much
ourselves then,” says Hutchinson. One of his regrets was that
the couple was visiting Hurston when she had a stroke.
“We were so young and naïve that we thought she had
been drinking, because her speech was slurred,” he says. “We
found out later she had had a stroke.” Hurston recovered, but
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