March 23, 2008

100 and counting
Carl Kramer paints and dances his way into triple digits

By ED COX
of The Dalles Chronicle

Want to live to 100? Consider Carl Kramer’s three-point system: “Love God, eat your veggies, and don’t smoke,” he reveals with a grin.

It’s worked for Kramer, who hit the milestone running on Tuesday, even though he smoked for 25 years more than half a century ago.

He doesn’t say so directly, but keep working and keep dancing could equally well be parts of the formula. Kramer, an artist who has worked as a sign painter for 80-plus years of his life, still knocks out the occasional sign.

The man who learned ballroom dancing in Chicago as a youth in the 1920s still regulary cuts a rug with his nearly-94-year-old lady friend, Muriel Harrison.

“How do you think I get a figure like this?” he smiles.

In fact, Kramer is in tremendous shape for his age. He takes regular walks or drives his “Ferrari” (an electric tricyle) up and down the streets that surround the small house where he lives alone in West The Dalles.

“A regular bachelor pad,” he remarks as he invites me into the one-bedroom home he has occupied for 47 years, just under half his life.

The walls are decorated by decades of his work in oil, pastels, acrylic and watercolor. He shows me examples of the different media, stopping to admire a particularly fine pastel painting of his former cat, “Sugar,” as a kitten.

“If it’s art, I do it,” he says as he handles illustrated gun stocks, some of which he has carved himself. “That’s probably one of the secrets to long life: you’ve got to want to do something.”

What Kramer can’t stop doing is drawing and painting — “mak[ing] music with color,” as he describes it. In fair weather, he still spends time on the upper floor of the two-story studio behind his house, though he stopped giving classes up there at age 87.

“I had to quit; it was getting too hard,” he says, showing me the brushes and paints his students left behind on the classroom table. For years, he’s been after one woman to pick up what must be $300 worth of her stuff.

“Do you know what these cost now?” he asks as he shows me a tube of oil paint. “Five or six dollars each!”

There was no waste in the Kramer household when Carl was growing up, the middle of seven children. His father was a signal maintenance man on the railroad.

“We weren’t dirt-poor,” he says. “We had three good meals a day.” But nothing went unused, and there was no going to the movies 2-3 times per week.

Theirs was an immigrant family of German descent. Carl was born March 18, 1908, in what was then Russia and is now the Ukraine.

The rumblings of the first world war were already audible when he was 2, and in 1910 his family emigrated to the U.S. via Poland, Austria, Switzerland, Holland, and Halifax, Canada, finally landing in Chicago.

Carl has no distinct memories of his toddler years in a small Ukranian town, though he says he occasionally catches a glimpse of a village street filled with horses.

“Everything was horses back then,” he says. Not for long. Carl’s birth year was the same that Henry Ford introduced his Model T. By the time he was 19, Kramer and a friend were touring six Midwestern and Western states in a Model T truck as traveling sign painters.

But not before he went to a Chicago grammar school, exchanged his native German for English, marched in a World War One victory parade in 1918, worked odd jobs while he stayed in (but did not finish) high school, and had a short stint on a scholarship to the Chicago Art Institute.

It was the second world war that brought him out west to The Dalles in 1942.
“The war moved a lot of people,” he notes.

In his case, he and his late wife Marjorie already had their two children, Karleene and Dennis, which gave Kramer 3-A status for the draft. The 3-As were eventually going to be called up, he says, and it was thought to be helpful to get into an important industry, such as painting.

As it was, Kramer got called for a physical in 1945 and had just picked up his draft board paperwork on Second Street in The Dalles when he heard whistles blowing and people shouting. The war had ended.

“Funny things happen,” he says, before reflecting that it was just as well — he’d have made a bad soldier because of his inability to stomach so much authority.
Kramer is nothing if not opinionated.

“I didn’t live 100 years with my eyes and ears closed,” he says, as he reflects on the great country the U.S. was in his early days and a certain decline he’s witnessed of late.

That includes, he says, widespread moral corruption and a health care system that “smells.”

“I’m an old Chicago man, and I recognize a racket when I see it,” he says of medical care. “And they don’t even take a day off. They’re out there seven days a week robbin’ the people.”

Instead of focusing on solving those problems, he notes, Americans push them aside and worry about professional sports events instead.

“A lot of people who were born here take a lot for granted,” he says, with a perhaps typical immigrant outlook. “You’d better take your head out of the sand.”
Despite his dim view of the political and social scene, Kramer’s lust for living is undiminished.

“I enjoy life; I like people,” he says simply, noting that he had 118 of them at his Tuesday birthday celebration at the Mid-Columbia Senior Center, a Meals On Wheels Event.

Everyone there was younger than he; all his friends are too. Virtually none of the original ones survive, except a few in nursing homes that don’t recognize him.
He’s the only one left of seven Kramer siblings and has trouble finding anyone he knew as a lifetime member of a painter’s association.

“When you’re as old as I am, everybody’s dead,” he says matter-of-factly.
That includes his wife Marjorie, who died young at 61 — a “damn shame,” he says. He met Muriel, also recently widowed, at a dance that same year, 1974.
She lives right down the block and interrupts our conversation with a call to talk about a new neighbor. He regularly visits her on his scooter, he says, and the two of them dance at the senior center, Civic Auditorium and at jam sessions at the Cherry Park Grange Hall.

“It keeps you young, and it’s fun,” he says.

But there’s more than that to the Kramerian philosophy; it includes a moral element that I note as we stand in his studio next to a hand-carved sign reading “O man thou stranger on earth, Heaven is thy Home.”

“A lot of what happens to you is your own doing,” Carl assures me. “You get what you deserve by what you’re trying for.

‘‘Live right,’’ he continues, ‘‘and you’ll be a lot luckier — if lucky is what you live by.’’