Rufus Meisel had a Gun
polymerized plaster, revolver
2' x 3' x 2"
2007
The town of Preston in southern Ontario, at the confluence of the Speed and Grand Rivers, was first settled by Mennonites from Pennsylvania in the early 1800s. Preston no longer exists; in 1973 it was incorporated, along with Hespeler and Galt, into the municipality of Cambridge. A pair of friends, Rufus Meisel and Ion Snider, were raising families in Preston in the early part of the last century. Two of their children, Doris Meisel and Edward Snider, went to Galt Collegiate High School together.
Rufus had a grain and feed store in Preston. During the Depression the store fell on hard times, causing him great personal distress, to the point where he no longer trusted himself with a gun he owned. He decided to give it to Ion for safekeeping. The pistol was a nickel-plated, short-barreled, six-shot .32 calibre revolver, called the American Double Action, made by Harrington and Richardson in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Doris married Jack Shadbolt in 1945, and after working for the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, moved to Vancouver with Jack and joined the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1950. My father Edward Snider, who had been a career officer in the RCAF, retired to Tsawwassen in 1970. I met Doris the following year at the Vancouver Art Gallery, where she was then Senior Curator. She agreed to an exhibition of my work at the VAG in 1976.
When Ion died in 1963, the gun went to Edward. I later learned Doris Shadbolt's maiden name was Meisel, and that she had grown up in Preston, like my father. When I asked Edward if he had known Doris in school, he said he had, and then told the story of how Ion got the gun from Rufus. Edward died in November of 2003; I inherited the gun and immediately wanted to let Doris know what I had found out. At the time, she was traveling in Mexico; she died there suddenly that December.
The conversation was never had – there are sunderings that cannot be repaired. In 2007 the gun was cut in half and embedded. The object of a partial memory endures.