Queens
In 1936 the long trip to Provincetown was abandoned as was Sam's participation in exhibitions. They moved from the Village and eventually settled in apartments in Sunnyside in Queens. He took a full-time job in advertising doing lettering and layout work. He worked for some of the largest advertising firms in NYC, Benton & Bowles, D'Arcy and others. Upon entering the advertising world he changed his professional name to Sinclair Lewis Shane.
In 1938 they bought a plot in a newly formed cooperative community, eventually named Shrub Oak Park for a summer home. It was near Peekskill, NY and a much older community, Mohegan Lake, to which they had connections. Shane built the house, a 24’ square Cape Cod, with the help of his father-in-law and some friends. All three children and the oldest grandchild spent their summers there growing up in a progressive political community. He was a devoted husband and father.
He took a hiatus from painting in oils after he started regular employment in the late 1930s. Although there were practical reasons, i.e. a growing family and regular employment, he also was very affected by the Great Depression and worsening situation in Europe with the Spanish Civil War and Hitler's rise. World War II affected him strongly. There was a map he kept of the Eastern Front. The sweep of the German armies through the Poland, Russia and Ukraine and Jewish settlements there was very traumatic for him and the whole family.
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Famous quotes containing the word queens:
““Your strength, that is so lofty and fierce and kind,
It might call up a new age, calling to mind
The queens that were imagined long ago,
Is but half yours....””
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“The queers of the sixties, like those since, have connived with their repression under a veneer of respectability. Good mannered city queens in suits and pinstripes, so busy establishing themselves, were useless at changing anything.”
—Derek Jarman (b. 1942)