Grand festivities mark Hemingway birthday centennial

By Riyadi

CHICAGO (JP): The Chicago suburb of Oak Park held a week-long centennial festival celebrating the life of hometown hero Ernest Hemingway, wrapping up the celebration on Wednesday, the anniversary of the writer's birth.

Although Hemingway, who won the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes, is remembered as an adventurer and "a worldly man at home in the bullrings of Spain and the plains of Africa", he spent the first 18 years of his life in the small suburb of Oak Park.

The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, which first began celebrating the writer's birthday in 1984, held its largest and most extravagant birthday celebration for Hemingway this year.

The one-week extravaganza included an international literary conference, screenings of movies based on his books, the rededication of his newly restored birthplace and an arts exhibition. Also included in the celebrations was the three-day Fiesta de Hemingway, which paid homage to the writer's intense love for Spain, which he called "the country that I love more than any other, except my own."

The fiesta, which ended on Wednesday, featured swing dance competitions, Spanish flamenco dancing, a Hemingway look-alike contest, a variety of bands performing on two stages and a running of the bulls, which were, however, not real bulls.

Some of Oak Park finest restaurants also joined forces to celebrate Hemingway's 100th birthday with A Moveable Feast, named after the author's book on Paris.

Some stores like Thomasville and Paul Stuart also used the special occasion to promote their products and boost sales. They stores say Hemingway is "a writer, a world traveler, and now a lifestyle".

No corner of Oak Park was left devoid of a picture or some other representation of Hemingway. The residents of Oak Park happily wore red T-shirts depicting a bull's head, a symbol for Hemingway.

Linda Sahagian, cochairwoman of the Hemingway centennial birthday celebration, said the author was special to Oak Park because "he was born here, he was raised here and he went to school here".

"Hemingway spent his formative years here in Oak Park, an experience that profoundly affected his character and work," she told The Jakarta Post.

Pat Brey, a volunteer worker at Fiesta de Hemingway, agreed, saying, "We all love this amazing boy."

Hemingway was born early on the morning of July 21, 1899, to a prosperous middle-class family. His father Clarence Hemingway was a medical doctor, and his mother Grace Hall Hemingway was a gifted musician who gave up a possible musical career for marriage and six children.

Legend has it that Hemingway's father blew a cornet on the porch of the house to announce the arrival of his firstborn son.

The Hemingway family moved when Ernest was 6, although they didn't go far, just to a different house in Oak Park. The family attended the Congregational church where Grace was choir director and soloist.

Each summer the family would go to rural upper Michigan, where Clarence Hemingway, an avid sportsman, shared his love of nature and passion for camping, hunting, fishing, canoeing and hiking with young Ernest.

The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park wrote in its booklet for the writer's centennial celebration: "It's hard to imagine this author of tough, terse prose as a choir boy in the family church, or the son of a devout family that shunned alcoholic spirits.

"Yet, it was this strict upbringing, along with his father's passion for nature and his mother's attention to her children's artistic talents, that helped shape Hemingway's legendary career."

In the beginning, the young Hemingway wanted to study science in college and join an expedition after school. But later on, he was began to lean more toward writing.

Marcelline Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway's older sister, wrote in her book At the Hemingways that sets of classic works by Scott, Dickens, Stevenson and Shakespeare filled the shelves of the family library. Marcelline recollected that both she and Ernest devoured the books.

During his school years, Ernest had a regular income from delivering the Oak Leaves weekly.

"Ernie carried his weekly papers in a cloth sack hung from his shoulder," said Marcelline. "His was a long route and it took him several hours after school and sometimes into the evening to finish his lengthy list of customers each weekend."

At Oak Park High School, classes on the short story and journalism taught by Miss Fanny Biggs were of the most interest to Ernest.

In Miss Biggs' short story class, Ernest produced his earliest stories. One of his first stories, Sepi Jingan, appeared in the November 1916 issue of Tabula, then the school's literary magazine.

Miss Biggs' journalism class also proved invaluable for Ernest, who wrote at least one journalistic piece a week for the school newspaper, the Trapeze, and later served as its editor.

Graduating from Oak Park High School in 1917, Hemingway was confronted with three choices: college, work or war. He chose work. He left Oak Park to work as a cub reporter on the Kansas City Star. He then served as an ambulance driver in World War I for the American Red Cross in Italy, where he was wounded and underwent the experiences which served as the basis for his widely successful novel A Farewell to Arms.

Hemingway rarely returned to Oak Park. Instead he traveled, lived and wrote his novels, short stories and other prose in France, Spain, Kenya and Cuba.

Not only a popular writer but also a celebrity, Ernest Hemingway's enduring works include In Our Time, The Sun Also Rises, The Green Hills of Africa, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea, A Moveable Feast and numerous short stories.

He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea, the tale of a poor Cuban fisherman's struggle to land a great fish. One year later, he received the Nobel Prize for his powerful mastery of the art of modern narration.

He was married four times, to Hadley Richardson, Pauline M. Pfeiffer, Martha E. Gellhorn and Mary Welsh. He had three sons from these marriages, John, Patrick and Gregory. He finally settled in Ketchum, Idaho, where he took his own life with his favorite shotgun in 1961. He was 61 when the bell tolled.