The Bluegrass and Beyond

Non basta una vita - Italian for “one life is not enough” - was the late John Regis Tuska’s motto to describe his artistic ambitions.

Now, his son is discovering that two lives may not be enough, either.

For the past dozen years, Seth Tuska has worked to preserve and publicize the legacy of his father, a prolific artist and University of Kentucky art professor who died in 1998 at age 67.

Seth Tuska, 51, turned the family home at the corner of Old Park and Central avenues into a museum of his father’s art. He engaged a filmmaker and curator to put together a documentary film about his father and catalog and traveling show of his work.

He sought commercial outlets for reproductions of Tuska pictures and sculptures, which depict the human form in motion. And he started a bronze foundry on Walton Avenue to support regional sculptors.

But last November, after a bronze-pouring at the foundry, Tuska said he went home with a ringing in his ears. Then, on Christmas morning, he awoke at 4 a.m. with an intense pain in his chest. Foolishly, he didn’t see a doctor for three weeks. When he did, he was taken straight in for quadruple heart bypass surgery.

But the worst was still to come.

Tuska said when he resumed normal physical activity in March, the ringing in his ears, which had never really gone away, got much worse. He now suffers from a severe case of tinnitus - a constant sound like cicadas in his head that makes it hard to sleep, read or concentrate.

Tuska said he now needs to deal with his medical crisis and entrust his father’s legacy to others. “I have to move on and figure out what’s ahead for the rest of my life,” he said.

The first public steps in that direction will come Friday. Mayor Jim Newberry is to issue a proclamation honoring John Tuska and his work, and he will accept the loan of a bronze figure, Energy Source, for display at city hall.

That evening, during Gallery Hop, the Kentucky Theatre Gallery will display 18 Tuska pieces. The theater will have two showings, at 5:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m., of  Non Basta Una Vita, a 2008 documentary about John Tuska by Arthur Rouse and Kiley Lane.

Thanks to the event’s sponsors, attendees also will be given a film poster, popcorn and a drink. Tuska said he has worked with local arts educators to distribute many of the 600 tickets to students.

Where things go from there, Tuska said, depends on community interest - both artistic, and financial.

Tuska sold the foundary to artist Amanda Matthews Fields and enlisted a group of community leaders to advise him on how to proceed with setting up a non-profit Tuska Museum and Learning Center foundation to take over the family home and his collection of his father’s art.

Tuska lives upstairs in the home, but is in the process of moving out. He wants to keep the collection of his father’s work in Lexington.

His vision is to continue the home’s first floor museum. But, more importantly, he wants to use the upstairs apartment to house visiting artists and the 2,500-square-foot lower level for educational space.

Downtown developer Phil Holoubek, a member of the advisory group, said several strategies have been discussed. “Seth will have to decide what he feels most comfortable doing,” he said.

Holoubek said the Tuska collection includes outstanding art that could not only enrich the community culturally, but promote economic development.

LexArts President Jim Clark, who for six years directed the New York Public Art Fund, agreed. “If John Tuska had done this work in New York City he would have been a very prominent sculptor,” he said.

Clark sees a lot of potential for the Tuska Museum and Learning Center, if it gets the right leadership that can attract the necessary money.

“Having a house museum is perfect for Lexington,” Clark said. “It is intimate in scale. It’s in a beautiful neighborhood. Anybody flying into Lexington for the (horse) sales, that would be a perfectly lovely discovery. Part of that is just working with what they’ve got and marketing it.”

With more regular museum hours, more advertising and an experienced curator, Clark thinks the Tuska museum could become an important cultural destination. And he thinks Seth Tuska has the right idea about using his father’s legacy to encourage arts education.

In addition to the high quality of John Tuska’s work, Clark said, what made him special was his dedication to teaching. Great artists who also are great arts educators, like Tuska and Centre College’s Stephen Rolfe Powell, are rare.

A learning center that promoted arts education - and honored arts educators with a “Tuska prize” and residency - could put Lexington on the arts map. “That would be a very big deal in this country,” Clark said.

What’s needed now is for people to step up and help Seth Tuska make it happen.

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It was an exhausting two-day trip from her home in Chendu, China, to Lexington, where Tianjiao Yang will become a nursing student at the University of Kentucky.

But when she arrived Sunday at Blue Grass Airport, Judy Phillips was there to greet her and take her to her dormitory. And Yang didn’t need to worry about dinner.

That’s because Phillips and other volunteers from UK’s International Hospitality Program, along with the Lexington Rotary Club, had put on a huge picnic spread to welcome Yang and more than 100 other new international students.

A long table on one side of the E.S. Good Barn, where UK’s College of Agriculture has its offices, was loaded with hamburgers, brats, side dishes and all of the trimmings. Outside, for the few who dared brave the heat and humidity, there were corn hole boards and written instructions on how to play.

Mostly, though, there were a lot of smiling faces to welcome Yang and her fellow students from 24 nations to their new Kentucky home.

“I was a little nervous, but American people are very friendly,” Yang said only a few hours into her first day on this side of the world. “Judy is very kind. She helped me a lot.”

The program has been making the transition to American life a little easier for UK’s new international students for more than four decades.

Later this week, as they did last week, volunteers will take students shopping for everyday necessities they couldn’t bring with them. Later this fall, a square dance is planned to introduce them to traditional Kentucky culture.

And for students who want one, there is a host family or person who has agreed to spend some time with them off campus once a month — invite them to their home for dinner, or take them on a family outing.

Hosts also are only a phone call away for seemingly simple questions that can baffle someone fresh from another culture, such as how to open a bank account, get a driver’s license or figure out what size sheets to buy for their unfamiliar American bed.

The transition usually isn’t difficult for students from Australia, Western Europe and other places with cultures similar to the United States. But it can be daunting for some students from Africa, Asia and parts of Eastern Europe.

Yang was one of several students getting airport pickup service this year from Phillips, who is in her 19th year as an IHP volunteer and host.

“It’s really a great program in that you can have a relationship with an exchange student, but they don’t live in your home and you don’t have a financial commitment,” said Phillips, who over the years has traveled to Poland, Egypt and Dubai to visit exchange students she once hosted. “They become like your own kids. I have thoroughly enjoyed it.”

Stephanie Hong, executive director of the city’s Partners for Youth program, has served for many years as an IHP board member and host because she remembers how important it was for someone to show her around when she arrived from Taiwan to become an undergraduate at Eastern Kentucky University.

She often takes students to a pumpkin patch before Halloween, to a Thanksgiving dinner and to see Christmas lights to help explain American culture. “It’s a one-year commitment for the host family, but it often becomes a lifelong friendship,” said Hong, who once traveled to India to attend a former exchange student’s wedding.

“We’re always looking for more host families,” said Karen Slaymaker, assistant director of UK’s international affairs office, who oversees the program. People interested in becoming hosts or volunteers may call her for more information at (859) 257-4067, ext. 237, or go to the Web site, www.uky.edu/intlaffairs.

UK usually has about 300 international students from as many as 100 nations at any given time, from teenage undergrads to post-doctoral students.

“They’re all somebody’s children,” said Pat Bond, assistant dean of UK’s graduate school and chair of the International Hospitality Program. “They’re courageous to be doing this in the first place, coming to a new country and culture. Just little acts of kindness mean so much to these kids.”

This is one thing about which there seems to be no debate: J.W. Patterson is a University of Kentucky treasure.

Patterson, a communications professor and the student government adviser for 42 years, is retiring from his last and most significant job. At age 81, he is stepping down as director of UK’s debate program, which since 1971 he has shaped into one of the nation’s best.

Nearly 100 former students are in Lexington this weekend from as far away as New York and California for several parties and a big dinner in Patterson’s honor.

“J.W. had a legednary career at UK,” said Mayor Jim Newberry, who was advised by Patterson when he was student government president in 1977-78.

“He put the debate team on the map and kept it there for decades,” Newberry said. “There are not going to be very many people like him in the years to come, because it is rare to see anyone with the longevity at an institution that he had. He will be missed.”

Gov. Steve Beshear was on UK’s debate team under Patterson’s predecessor, Gifford Blyton. But as a law student, Beshear worked two summers at the high school debate camp Patterson started and built into one of America’s most prestigious.

“He has such a good rapport with students,” Beshear said. “He would, in a sense, be your friend as well as your professor.”

One of the first to arrive for the weekend festivities was Murray Stewart, 78, who drove from Tulsa, Okla. He was on the first debate team Patterson ever coached, at Muskogee (Okla.) Central High School in 1948.

“He had quite an influence on my life,” said Stewart, a retired tax lawyer who said Patterson taught him self-confidence, organized thinking and impromptu speaking. “He’s just a wonderful man.”

Patterson, whose initials are the only first and middle names his parents gave him, is a native of Oklahoma who taught high school before earning graduate degrees from the universities of Michigan and Oklahoma. He joined UK’s faculty in 1960, arriving on campus the day John F. Kennedy came to campaign for president.

“I came to UK because it was the best offer I got that didn’t require me to do debate,” Patterson said. “I was planning to get out of debate forever.”

He became UK’s student government adviser in 1964. That proved to be an interesting experience as the campus was swept up in national turmoil over the Vietnam war and societal change.

“It was a difficult time,” said Patterson, who often was caught between students and top administrators. It didn’t help that Patterson also was president of a faculty organization that sued UK to force the removal of National Guard troops from campus.

Perhaps UK’s most controversial student president was Stephen Bright in 1970-71. He has since become one of the nation’s leading death-penalty opponents and legal scholars, teaching at the Harvard and Yale law schools.

“Steve was an excellent president,” Patterson said. “People would expect this long-haired radical and he would come in with hair shorter than mine and wearing a suit. It would blow their minds.”

Bright also remembers Patterson fondly. “He was engaged in more things involving students than just about any member of the faculty,” said Bright, who heads the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta.

“It was a tumultuous time,” Bright said. “There were a lot of issues being passionately debated at the university … the great issues of the day — war and peace, wealth and poverty and what kind of future the country ought to have. Dr. Patterson was somebody who liked to facilitate the exchange of ideas, which is really what you should try to do at a university.”

Patterson served many roles at UK, including assistant to the president and organizer of UK’s centennial celebration in 1965, which included a visit by President Lyndon B. Johnson.

But debate was always his first love. His greatest legacy is the UK debate team, which has consistently won top awards, including several national championships.

“It’s almost like a one-on-one tutorial job,” Patterson said of coaching debate. In retirement, he hopes to update a debating textbook he co-authored.

About 75 percent of Patterson’s debate students were pre-law and political science majors. But one of his best, who won a national championship, became one of Kentucky’s best restaurateurs, Ouita Papka Michel of Holly Hill Inn in Midway.

“I went to the Culinary Institute of America, while others went on to Harvard and Yale,” she said. “But debate was definitely one of the best aspects of my college career and serves me well in my life today.”

Like many others, Michel remembers Patterson’s passion for helping students succeed, both in debate and in life.

“He was really tough, but in a friendly way,” she said. “He’s a person who in my mind will be forever young.”

John Stempel insists that the title of his new book, Common Sense and Foreign Policy, is not an oxymoron, even if it seems like it lately.

In fact, the veteran U.S. diplomat, senior professor and former director of the University of Kentucky’s Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce is optimistic that President-elect Barack Obama can repair some of the damage wrought by the Bush Administration’s so-called neoconservatives.

“What will definitely be gone is American unilateralism — the idea that we’re so powerful we can do whatever we want,” said Stempel, who is among 220 authors who will be signing books Saturday at the Kentucky Book Fair in the Frankfort Convention Center. “The neoconservatives will be anathema — as they deserve to be.”

John D. Stempel

At a recent signing party for the book (The Clark Group, $29.95), Stempel discussed what he thinks is needed to repair America’s relationships around the world. Mainly, he said, leaders must stop the “with us or against us” bluster of the Bush years and return to traditional principles of international cooperation and diplomacy — “the art of letting the other fellow have it your way.”

Stempel’s book is a concise tutorial on foreign policy, filled with common sense. He even seems to have discovered a secret that few writers like to admit: The shorter the book, the more likely people are to read it.

Stempel defines common sense in foreign policy as “creating balanced and moderate policies and carrying them out in a competent and consistent manner to maximize their effectiveness.”

In Stempel’s view, American foreign policy ran off the road after Sept. 11, 2001, because radical Islamic terrorism was a threat our top leaders didn’t understand and weren’t prepared to confront.

Stempel, whose 23-year U.S. Foreign Service career included five years in Iran before and during the 1979 Islamic revolution, said the neoconservatives brushed aside people in government who had expertise in Middle East politics and culture and made decisions based on ideology. The result: We bungled the job in Afghanistan, let Osama bin Laden escape and started an unnecessary war in Iraq that fueled terrorism.

But Stempel, a self-described “radical moderate” who served both Democratic and Republican administrations, notes that arrogant cluelessness is bipartisan. Remember Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs? Johnson’s Vietnam? Carter’s Iran hostage crisis?

In addition to radical Islamic terrorism, Stempel notes that the world is full of challenges and potential crises, including North Korea and the relationship between India and Pakistan.

So what should we do?

America is the world’s acknowledged military superpower. But, Stempel notes, nobody likes a bully. By flaunting its power, the United States has made itself unpopular with friends and foes alike. Obama’s current popularity overseas offers a window to start repairing the damage.

The U.S. government would have far more influence if officials worked harder to understand the motivations and dynamics of other cultures. “We especially need moderate allies in the Islamic world to refute and tamp down radicals,” he said.

He notes that, when Europe and Japan faced terrorist threats in the 1960s and 1970s, they brought them to heel through international cooperation, good intelligence and police work, not by declaring a “war” on terrorism.

“We currently treat terrorism as a concrete enemy, not as the tactic it truly is,” Stempel writes. “We emphasize the military response out of proportion to the necessary police and political efforts that would bring in more allied help. We are too focused on the ‘American Empire’ concept.”

Stempel thinks we should pay more attention to international public opinion and seek to understand the motivations of other governments, cultures and religions rather than just dismissing them as irrational or evil. “Awareness of the new and complex is essential for effective common sense,” Stempel writes.

And he suggests we follow the advice of former Baltimore Oriole manager Earl Weaver: “It’s what you learn after you think you know everything that really counts.”