That's when they learned the true value of the 25-by-30-inch painting titled The Baby Sitter. To the men and women who were sixth-graders at Taft in 1946, the picture represents something money can't buy: memories, an irreplaceable piece of their past. The red-haired girl in the painting, whose hair is being yanked by her unruly charge, reminds them of their friend Alison Pooley, who died of leukemia in 1947. Rockwell himself gave the class the picture as a way of commemorating her. When her classmates learned it might be sold, they were, to put it mildly, upset.
The school board understood their feelings but also felt deeply conflicted. "How can we sell a treasure so important to the heritage of the children of Burlington?" asks chairman Carol Bua Ode. "But at the same time, how can we keep something of such monetary value when there are so many needs to be met in our district?"
The dilemma may be on its way to getting solved, and in a manner that seems true to the can-do, all-American spirit that animates so many of Rockwell's illustrations. But first, the story behind The Baby Sitter.
The 32 members of Taft's sixth grade met Rockwell, then 52, on Oct. 16, 1946—a day none of them will ever forget. World War II had ended the year before, and with it the gasoline rationing. Piling into the bus, the class set off on an adventure that would cover hundreds of miles. They visited a rabbit farm and Middlebury College, as well as Rokeby, a stop on the underground railroad that helped guide escaped slaves to Canada. They met poet Walter Hard, and at one point the bus got stuck in the mud and had to be pulled out by a farmer with his tractor.
But the trip's highlight, recalls Lorna Brown, 61, who later became a language arts teacher, was visiting Rockwell at his studio in Arlington, 100 miles south of Burlington. The famous illustrator gave each student an autograph and some of his homegrown apples. He also showed them, step by step, how he created his celebrated Saturday Evening Post covers.
Eleven-year-old Alison Pooley was in her usual high spirits. "She was terribly excited about the whole trip," says Suzanne Pooley Fleisher, 66, her older sister, "but especially about going to this famous artist's place." The daughter of a University of Vermont classics professor father and a homemaker, Alison was, by all accounts, a special child. She was on the safety patrol and in the Girl Scouts. She played the piano. She was crazy about horses. Most of all, she loved life.
"She was very bright, a very outgoing girl," says Fleisher. "When we traveled on trains, during wartime, she'd be up and down, talking to soldiers or nuns or whoever she could find. What happened to Alison was particularly hard because she was a marvelous person." No one knew how sick she was. The following June, she fainted at summer camp. Alison died of leukemia on Sept. 11, 1947.
The trip still fresh in their minds, her classmates raised $48 and offered it to Rockwell, in the hope of buying an artwork to remember her by. It took about a year, but the painting finally arrived, with a real safety pin poked through the canvas where a diaper drapes across a chair. (Rockwell never said why he sent The Baby Sitter, but some think he chose it because the girl was Alison's age.)
Since Rockwell refused to accept the $48, the students used the money to buy a plaque to honor Alison. With the school about to close, the painting was appraised by Sotheby's—at $30,000—and in 1978 put into Burlington's Chittenden Bank for safekeeping.
The painting and the story behind it were largely forgotten until 1995, when the school board began to examine its assets. In the past half-dozen years, explains chairman Ode, the board has been forced to cut a total of $2 million from its budget. They were delighted to learn that the painting was worth as much as 10 times what it had been. But when the Burlington Free Press reported that the board was considering selling Rockwell's gift, Alison Pooley's classmates suddenly materialized. Two of them—Lynne Swan, a former staff assistant at the University of Vermont, and superior court judge David Jenkins—joined by onetime Rockwell neighbor James Edgerton—met with school officials. They made it clear they did not want The Baby Sitter sold.
"What bugged me," says Lorna Brown, "was that the school board did not really own this painting—Our class did." But there was more to it than that. For the class, the painting is a souvenir of childhood—a symbol, for many of them, of a simpler, more compassionate time. "This was a period of caring about people, a time when maybe there was a little more caring than there is today," says Swan. "Norman Rockwell cared enough to send a painting. This is what our heritage is."
Chairman Ode says the school board did not know what to do. No one did, until a Solomon appeared in the form of Burlington lawyer Samuel S. Bloomberg, himself a product of the local schools. "I thought selling the painting would be a terrible thing," says Bloomberg. "So I came up with the idea of having a campaign to raise the equivalent sum of money, so the painting wouldn't be sold."
The Save The Baby Sitter campaign began formally on Oct. 25 with a reception at the Chittenden Bank that coincided with the 50th reunion of Alison's class. So far about $25,000 of the $300,000 has been pledged. The board has given the campaign until October 1998 to come up with the rest, but the due date, says Ode, is flexible. Meanwhile, plans are afoot to move The Baby Sitter out of the bank to the University of Vermont's Fleming Museum, a mile away, where it will be displayed with Alison Pooley's story.
"Alison is still with us," says Lorna Brown. "Our class has a unity that never left. That was apparent at our reunion last fall. We were able to pick up where we'd left off 50 years ago. We could laugh, and we could feel sad for Alison all over again."
WILLIAM PLUMMER
STEPHEN SAWICKI in Burlington
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