DRAPER — Luana Guymon was Luana Lunnen back then. She hadn’t married Rex Guymon yet, hadn’t raised their six children, hadn’t wound up with 29 grandkids and 27 great-grandkids and a lifetime of memories.
It was the spring of 1951. Luana (Lou-awna) was in ninth grade at Draper Park School on her way to the art museum in Springville with the rest of the class.
It was a rite of passage for the Draper Park ninth-graders. Every spring, under the direction of longtime principal Reid Beck, students about to graduate and move on to Jordan High School in faraway Sandy in the fall would file onto school buses and make the drive to Springville, aka “Art City.”
With money raised by the kids, their parents and local businesses, the students would select one or more paintings to purchase and hang in the school hallway alongside the other objects ‘d art bought by ninth-graders dating back to 1928.
Even kids who had no more interest in art than nuclear physics loved going on an all-day field trip that got them out of class for the day and included lunch.
But Luana loved art, and when she walked in the Springville museum she was instantly drawn to a piece titled “Ichabod.”
She liked it even before she knew it was painted by America’s most popular artist, Norman Rockwell, of Saturday Evening Post magazine cover fame.
Rockwell had drawn his depiction of “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” schoolmaster Ichabod Crane in the 1930s. How it wound up in Utah a decade and a half later is a footnote lost to history. But there it was in Springville, with a price tag of $1,200.
Or about what a new Ford would cost in 1951.
There were a couple or sizeable hurdles for Luana and other “Ichabod” fans to overcome. For one, not every ninth-grader was sold on that being the painting they ought to buy. One of them was Luana’s friend Betty Ruth, who looked at the hunched-over, stern schoolmaster and said, “That is the ugliest picture I’ve ever seen.”
With the Korean War underway, others, boys mostly, lobbied for war paintings.
The kids picked their top three, drove back to Draper, and voted.
“Ichabod” won.
That brought on the second problem: They couldn’t afford it. After all their bake sales, car washes, baby-sitting, tomato-picking, sugar beet-weeding, parent-cajoling and business-hustling the kids had $800 to their name.
They decided to write a letter to Rockwell personally, telling him about their annual school art project and wondering if maybe, possibly, would he, you know, accept $800.
He wrote back, “If it’s for kids, OK.”
Just like that, Draper Park School owned a Norman Rockwell.
• • •
Fast forward to 2016. Luana Guymon is 65 years older than when she was a ninth-grader at Draper Park School. These days she’s president of the Draper Historical Society. Every Monday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. she volunteers at the Draper Museum, showing off artifacts of the town that was first settled by Mormon pioneers in 1849.
One of the museum exhibits tells the story of “Ichabod,” including a copy of the painting and a certificate of authenticity.
The original hangs a couple of blocks away at the Draper Elementary School, alongside other paintings in the “Reid Beck” collection.
In all, 63 paintings were purchased by the students in 26 years, from 1928 until the field trips ended in 1954 — on account of Mount Jordan Junior High School opening in Sandy and Draper kids going there for seventh, eighth and ninth grades.
Beginning with a landscape by Lee Green Richards titled “Spring Francies,” the collection includes a variety of works by many prominent artists, turning the hallways at Draper Elementary School into one of Utah’s finest, and least-known, art galleries.
Luana’s eyes light up as she talks about the good old days when Draper’s ninth-graders were art collectors.
They especially light up when she talks about the spring of 1951, when the ninth-graders went to Springville and bought “Ichabod.”
“Everybody wants to have something in their life they can boast about,” she says as she and classmate Janet McMillan strike their best model pose next to the painting they helped buy 65 years ago. “Our whole class is so proud of the fact that we did this.”
Even Betty Ford (Bell), who has since passed on, came around, according to Luana. “It just took her a while to warm up,” she says.
As for the painting itself, the image of the iconic schoolmaster has aged well. At last report, “Ichabod,” sold by Norman Rockwell himself for a bargain price of $800, appraised at somewhere near $2 million.
Lee Benson's About Utah column runs Mondays.
Email: benson@deseretnews.com