# 2: Childhood

Interview with George Mueller: 4/4/12

J.McWilliams: Let’s begin with where were you born, or with any circumstances that you can tell me about your childhood.

Mueller: I was born in a Catholic hospital: St. Barnabas Hospital, a redbrick building on the corner of High Street. My mother had been a Catholic and gave up her religion when she married my father who was a Lutheran, although neither of them ever practiced any religion that I can recall.

JMcW: I remember your telling me about your early childhood; you were confined to a very small backyard, never allowed to go out on the street because you lived in what your parents believed to be a dangerous neighborhood.

Mueller: The entire space in the back was surrounded by very tall boards--solid--no one could see in and we couldn’t see out. There was a dog that barked somewhere. Who knows what went on beyond those high board fences in the back yard? We weren’t allowed in the store (whenever we went there we would cause some problem), and my grandmother would chase us upstairs or out to the back yard, which consisted of intricate flower beds with small walks between the beds and as children, well there just wasn’t much room to do anything. The store was great because there was candy in there, but we weren’t given any. My sister and I would carefully open the bubblegum packets to steal the baseball cards when no one was looking. My grandmother was not a particularly warm person; in fact she was a drag; we didn’t like her and I’m guessing she didn’t care much for us either. She would scold us constantly in the yard, there was nowhere else to play and clearly her flowers were more important than her grandchildren. The yard was small, the space was confined, controlled and the outside world, we were led to believe, was a very dangerous place! Why? We were never told.

JMcW: A little like being in a space station on Mars. You can probably guess where I’m going with this interview. I’m reading a biography just now about Dorothea Lange and was struck by the fact that she had polio as a child; one of her legs was withered and she always walked with a limp. Her biographers and her son refer to her disability, which haunted her entire life, as the force that drove her subject matter later as a photographer. She always referred to her favorite subjects as “walking wounded.”

I suppose I’m looking to identify what forces drove your artistic preferences later in life. “Space” then was definitely something that your early experiences must have been shaped by…or is that too much of a stretch?

Mueller: I don’t know. I wasn’t aware that I was being contained while I was contained; it was all I knew, how much space does a three or four year old need to develop? I was definitely confined to interiors though, and when my sister took us out for a walk around the block, I felt something very like panic. My parents had moved us into our own apartment on 5th Street. I was five years old by then and the day we moved, my older sister said, “Come on, let’s go for a walk.” And I remember that at the time I was convinced I would never again see my parents alive. The world was flat, we’d be lost forever, fall off, but the world turned out to be round after all and it opened a whole new life for me. At the new neighborhood, I made friends. The street was very pleasant: tree lined, red brick street. I had friends then and there was stick ball, stoop ball, ring olivieo, a sort of a tag/ball game, lots of physical freedom, games on the front porches of those old buildings. We played marbles, built model planes, but I don’t recall anything traumatic that made me pick up a brush and need to paint.

JMcW: Well, what did make you first pick up a brush and want to paint?

Mueller: Greenwood Lake. Part of every summer, perhaps a month, my mother, aunts, cousins (the men stayed behind to work) left the city for Greenwood Lake in New Jersey: cabins without electricity or plumbing. It was fantastic being there. The air was cool; we played games/read by kerosene lamp, slept on the porch. At first it was just a kind of exhilarated freedom but later I began to love that strangeness of night, of dew falling, of darkness, of the blackness outside, the look of early light. There was a boy’s camp somewhere nearby and at every dusk someone would play taps. It was like a movie set. I used to think about perhaps writing something down, writing something about the feelings the scene evoked: an essay or story. Like it wasn’t enough to be there, you had to do something about it. Already you’re in trouble.

And when I was riding my bike past this one barn, maybe I was ten or eleven, I made a plan to come back the next day with some paper and pencils and sketch that barn. I loved the way it sat there, it looked so perfect. So I made some pencil drawings, and when I went back to the city I tried to paint them with watercolor. Then sketching became something that I liked to do. When my buddy and I were maybe 14 or 15 we would hop on the backs of trucks in Newark and ride anywhere with our sketching-stuff, we were looking for things to sketch.

But in my life, no one dies, there is no polio, it’s uneventful, no trauma, violence. I didn’t question anything. My parents didn’t talk a great deal of their past but I never asked. I don’t think I cared. Everything looked fine to me.