Keaton joins new, repeat visitors

Bruce Levinson, left, and Robert Arkus visit Saturday night at the Buster Keaton Celebration. Levinson traveled from New York City to Iola for a third time this year to hear Arkus, a film archivist who showed rare clips of Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and other presenters speak about the silent film stars. Below, Susanna Hicks and her son, John, were at their first Keaton Celebration, coming here from Arkansas.

By BRUCE SYMES
Register Reporter

For the third, Bruce Levinson has traveled 1,300 miles — one way— to feel at home.
Friday and Saturday, the New Yorker was surrounded by like-minded people who revere Buster Keaton and are passionate about silent films.
“We as Buster fans always thought we were alone out there, that everyone was into Chaplin and others,” Levinson said Saturday morning during a break from the 15th annual Buster Keaton Celebration at the Bowlus Fine Arts Center. “When we find each other, it’s like coming home. We’re instant kin, and it’s very special.”
The family was enraptured during the two-day tribute to Piqua’s native son who would grow to Hollywood legend, soaking up the skinny on Keaton, Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Theodore Roosevelt from academicians, absorbing the beauty of silent film from the big screen and trading notes and anecdotes with other Keaton buffs.
Enjoying her first Keaton Celebration was Susanna Hicks of Bentonville, Ark., who learned of the Iola event while studying history in college.
She took a film history class at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, then another, from Dr. Frank Scheide. He conveyed the magic of Keaton’s art so well in his classroom 190 miles from the Bowlus Center — as he does as co-chairman of the Keaton Celebration Committee and regular presenter and moderator at the Iola event — that she had to see for herself what all the fuss was about.
“He opened up a whole new world of silents for me,” said Hicks, who was accompanied here by her 12-year-old son, John. “When I first discovered Charlie Chaplin, yes he was funny, but he was so courageous. I was inspired. It’s the same with Buster, and with Fairbanks, too. I think people my age get that out of it and it goes on to John’s generation. That’s so exciting to me, to see him enjoying these films the way he does.”

HICKS UNDERSTANDS the passion exhibited by those who make the annual pilgrimage to Iola’s Keaton Celebration. In addition to continuing education and, now, silent movies, hers is a dissemination of information about the horrors of the Holocaust, a pursuit she assists through an Internet project.
“Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive” is a 26-year effort by Prof. Sidney Bolkosky of the University of Michigan to share personal, first-hand accounts of the Holocaust with the world. Hicks is chief transcriber for the project, having volunteered her services the past 10 years.
“I started doing this when I lived in Florida and first found out about it, then I moved to Virginia and then I moved to Arkansas, so I can do it anywhere I am,” she said. “They send me audiotapes and I transcribe them and e-mail them back to them.”
She was moved when learning of the atrocities committed just half a century ago. “When I was a young teenager and learned about the Holocaust, I just thought it was the worst thing, that human beings could do these things to other human beings just for being Jewish, and I wanted to know everything about it,” Hicks said. “This professor put out a call for volunteers, and I’ve been doing it ever since. It’s become an avocation for me. I was honored to be invited to the University of Michigan last year when they marked 25 years of the project. It was very moving.”
The Keaton weekend — although a much lighter fare of subject matter — sparked the same desire to learn everything there was to know about this year’s theme, “Keaton and Fairbanks: ‘Disciples’ of Teddy Roosevelt’s Philosophy of the Desirability of the Physically Strenuous Life.”
“It’s been fabulous,” Hicks said. “I’ve been impressed with the enthusiasm of the committee. They obviously enjoy the work they are doing, which is very cool, and we’ve felt very welcomed in the community, from everyone here at the fine arts center to the people who waited on us at McDonald’s.”

THE 2007 CELEBRATION was bittersweet for John Kelso, a perennial attendee from Wichita.
The silent film aficionado has visited every Keaton Celebration since it began in 1993 and until last year was accompanied by his mother, Betty. She was too ill to make the two-hour trip and died in November. Her dedication to the event was remembered during a brief tribute Saturday night.
“Mom read about the Keaton festival in a magazine back in ’93 and said, ‘John, we ought to go,’” Kelso recalled. “We were driving out here that first year and it was raining so hard and flooding all around that we didn’t think we were going to make it. The water was this high (indicating knee level) along the sides of the road, and she said, ‘If it gets any higher, we’re turning around.’”
The Kelsos made it that first year, high water and all, and kept coming back for more of Keaton, silents and the fellowship that defines the celebration.
“The people here are so nice,” he said. “I always enjoy coming back. I really miss Mom not being here with me. Everyone was always so nice to her.”

LEVINSON WAS especially moved during a second visit to Iola from New York City — just weeks after 9/11 in 2001.
He’d first come in 1999, after learning about the tribute at a gathering of the Damfinos, the International Buster Keaton Society, in Muskegon, Mich. Levinson, an attorney, is a member of the New York-based fan club and attended the annual film festival in the place where the Keatons had a summer home.
“I thought the variety would be great, to see what you were doing here,” he said. “Iola has more academic subject matter, whereas Muskegon is more fan-based, with movies and raffles and stuff.
“I love to travel and I love the Midwest,” he added. “It’s good to get out of the city and see the horizon. I appreciate the different shades of colors — greens, browns and yellows — when I’m out here, and the people are very friendly.” No stranger to the Midwest, Levinson did his undergraduate studies in Iowa. “I wanted out of New York and to live in open space,” he said of the adventure.
“I can’t come every year (to Iola), but I won’t stay away when there’s something I want to see. Keaton has the qualities I want to learn about, and it’s worth traveling for.”
In 2001, when Levinson flew out of New York, he saw the World Trade Center rubble still smoldering more than two weeks after the terrorist attack. When he arrived in Iola, he felt a collective embrace by acquaintances who were relieved he was among them.
“I felt I was a symbol for a lot of people, like I was representative of all New Yorkers,” Levinson said. “People wanted to come up and touch me and make sure I was OK. It was very therapeutic for both sides, I think.”
He summed up the Keaton weekends succinctly: Class.
“Iola is very lucky to have a facility like the Bowlus Fine Arts Center,” he said, “and you’re very lucky to have the Keaton Celebration. Fifteen years — anything that lasts that long is impressive.”