I drew about 20 patients at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Hospital in Reno, Nevada. These were working off photos by a talented photographer. I had been volunteering there for a year of Saturdays to see if I wanted to go into medicine. This was around 1977-1978.
When I left they had to hire a University of Nevada, Reno art student to come and draw the patients because new patients would want their pictures on the wall too.
This was on the intensive care unit so some of the patients I drew during that period died during that 1977-1978 period.
The oldest was from the Spanish-American War and must have been nearing 100. The youngest was a Vietnam War veteran who had played walrus with a pool stick and gotten bumped so that the stick went up his nose into his brain.
I still draw portraits once in a while but am very rusty.
I had had an art show while at Earl Wooster High School in Reno, Nevada in 1976 but the art teacher forced me to put up my drawing of a cactus with cactus spelled out under it. I had misspelled cactus with "cacutus" insisting that the "u" was silent. Nobody said much of anything except that my English teacher Mrs. Barbara Mitchell wanted a drawing of a model I had done--working off a magazine picture-- which she said looked like her recently deceased daughter Michelle Mitchell.
This drawing looked just like a married woman I worked with at Information Access Company (IAC) from 1984-1986. This company was in Belmont, CA about 20 miles south of San Francisco and about 7 miles north of Palo Alto.
I entered law school at the University of Minnesota in 1986 and there was a woman Mary Jane W., in the "C" group of about 50 law students who looked hauntingly like the drawing and like the woman I had worked with at Information Access Company. MJW also seemed smart, funny and kind. The U of MN woman though was much thinner and more elf like than the IAC marketing pro.
I became a little obsessed with this U of MN Law Student MJW but she always treated me nicely and with respect. I made a few passes - some very ungainly and immature-- but we went our separate ways in 1989.
In 1992, in San Francisco at the American Association of Law Libraries convention that summer I went looking for employment in a law library.
The woman from IAC --the married woman-- was pitching their product the Legal Resource Index to law librarians. As I said, she had been in the marketing department at IAC.
One of the law librarians, Suzanne T., from the University of Minnesota Law School approached this IAC woman and asked her what she was doing in San Francisco at a law library convention. She had mistaken these two blonde women-- the IAC marketing lady and the U of MN Law Grad. Michelle Mitchell had been a redhead but the drawing I did was all in pencil so it made her look like she could have been a blonde. Pretty much the whole U of MN Law School body, including Suzanne T., had known I had had a crush on this elfish blonde law student MJW.
I never mentioned the drawing though nor any resemblances until maybe 2002.
We three U of MN law school grads were all Class of 1989 but the Law Librarian Suzanne T., still employed at the U of MN Law Library had mistaken identities and the IAC woman then explained that I had had a crush on yet another blonde Sandy--single though when I was there- at IAC.
It is strange what affects a drawing done in youth can have.
I tried a few times to get the lady lawyer Mary Jane W., who graduated from the U of MN Law School to help with my access to practical information for survivors of crimes project 224 613, but she just would send it back "return to sender" or threaten me with stalking cease and desist orders for no reason so I just gave up. I thought threatening stalking charges was really extreme especially when all I did was write a few letters with copies of letters I had received from various authorities. There was not much of a personal nature in any of them. The picture I did in high school that looked like three women-- Michelle Mitchell, the IAC marketing woman, and Mary Jane W (Class of 1989, U of MN Law School) still haunted me back then and still haunts me now.
I have not seen this picture though since visiting the Mitchell home around May of 1976 to give them it and offer them my condolences for their murdered daughter (killed on 2-24 in 1976) and thank them for a small scholarship they gave me and another Earl Wooster High School student., John P. This Scholarhsip was a Memorial Scholarship in Michelle Mitchell's name. Michelle Mitchell had been murdered on the night of my birthday of 2-24 in 1976 near the University of Nevada, Reno campus. The case was re-opened a few months ago in 2014 as it looks like her murder is related to a series of slayings in the San Francisco Bay area in January-April of 1976 called the Gypsy Hill murders.
Gypsy Hill Murders - Overview