Review Julie Whitesel Weston The Good Times are all Gone Now: Life, Death, and Rebirth in an Idaho Mining Town University of Oklahoma Press , Norman , 2009 . Illustrations, photographs, notes, bibliography. 248 pages. $$19.95 paper.

Abstract

 OHQ vol. 111, no. 2 Company in North Tonawanda,NewYork.The carousel, with its paintings, arrived at Oaks Park in 1923,acquired from an amusement park in Spokane,Washington.By 1944,the Edwardian images of sexy women, charming children, and exotic others were dated, dilapidated, and in need of repair or replacement. Replacement was the option chosen. Two artists from Washington State, the brothers Waldo and Wendell Chase, were hired to paint new pictures on top of the old ones. They rendered scenes of the Columbia Gorge, the Oregon Coast,and other regional vistas,eclipsing the cast of characters that had accompanied the carousel=s riders for decades. By 1970,when Lommasson first took a close look at these paintings, time and two floods had partially undone the work of the Chase brothers and partially revealed the older paintings underneath. The result was a set of new images that merged the creations of 1912 with those of 1944. The buxom woman with her parasol stands amid the swirl of the curving road leading to the Crown Point Vista House, which finds itself lodged between her thighs (Panel 1, page 18). The cute little girl stands in a mountain lake, still holding her doll, which in this new setting looks somehow like a baby fish (Panel 11,page 28).The figure of the Native American man materializes in a haunting way from a forest terrain (Panel 9, page 26), a dematerialized, spiritual, and not entirely beneficent presence. For late modern viewers, these Adouble exposures@ are appealing because of their basis in accident and unpredictability and their collage-like fusion of unrelated images to evoke unexpected possibilities for new audiences (p. 16). The book=s jacket defines the word pentimento as Athe appearance of an underlying image that had been painted over,@ though this takes into account only half of the aesthetic equation posed by these paintings. The essays are succinct, well written, and informative. Though this is not made entirely clear, the carousel paintings= history was apparently retrieved by Lommasson=s queries and research. Verzemnieks tells the story in dramatic terms, invoking Einstein=s Theory of Relativity and the ghosts of carousel riders past while setting forth the facts and describing the visual magic that resulted.Lommasson writes of first seeing the paintings when he was a photography student and deciding to document them twelve years later, in 1982. Roberts provides information on the eccentric Chase brothers and their place in Northwest art. The publication is designed with plenty of space for the high quality photographs of the paintings. Also reproduced are vintage postcards, photographs, and other archival materials related to Oaks Park. Most illustrations are uncaptioned; for data, one relies on a condensed Credits section. Nowhere are dimensions provided for the subject paintings, aminorbutnoticeableomissionsincethepoint of the book is to document fully a strange and beguiling cycle of now-hidden works. Roger Hull Willamette University The Good Times Are All Gone Now: Life, Death, and Rebirth in an Idaho Mining Town by Julie Whitesel Weston University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2009. Illustrations, photographs, notes, bibliography. 248 pages. $19.95 paper. JulieWhiteselWeston has combined a personal reminiscence of growing up in the small northern Idaho mining community of Kellogg with a broader discussion of the town’s behemoth Bunker Hill Company and its demise.Weston’s fond memories of Kellogg, along with commentary on the mining industry, make for an engaging read. A fifth generation Idahoan, Julie Whitesel was raised in Kellogg — the daughter of a local  Reviews physician. She graduated from high school in 1961 and never lived in Kellogg again,although her father continued to work there until 1978. Her purpose was to“preserve in writing a way of life fast disappearing from theAmerican and Northwest scenes — that of the miner and the small mining town” (p. 10–11). Few industries are more male-dominated than mining, and one of the contributions of this work is the picture of a mining town through the eyes of a young woman.She writes that mothers were “the ones with whom we lived and talked” while fathers were strangers, “visitors in our house at night” (p. 62). Her recollections will resonate with women...