“NOTHING IS JUST ORDINARY”
Story★★★★SEVERAL years ago I was talking with Ralph Adams Cram, the American famous architect who designed and built the West Point Chapel, the university chapel at Princeton, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, the Cathedral of SS. Peter and Paul in Washington, and hundreds of other great Gothic projects in this nation. In his beautiful home near Boston he told me a story of William Walcot, the English etcher, who came to New York in the early twenties to sketch New York skyscrapers.
For several weeks he simply wandered around the great city gathering impressions of those high mountainous buildings, and he was deeply impressed. To Mr. Cram he said: “Here in this country you have developed an entirely new architecture which fits the great expanses of your land. It is indigenous.
It is what you call stupendous and it fits into your American mood and spirit. It seems that you do things in a big way here.” Then one morning he suddenly felt in the mood to record some of his impressions.
He tried in vain to obtain sketching paper, but it was Sunday and all the art stores were closed and he could not find what he wanted. He remembered that Mr. Cram often worked in his office on Sunday mornings, and at that time he was giving much of his time to the plans for St. John the Divine.
However, he did not find Mr. Cram in his office that 101 Sunday, but an office boy was there wrapping up house plans, and Walcot asked: “What is that paper, boy?”
“Oh, just ordinary wrapping paper,” replied the boy. “Nothing is just ordinary,” corrected the artist, “if you know how to use it. Give me some of that ordinary paper, as you call it, and I’ll show you what I mean when I say that nothing is ordinary.”
With a master’s touch Mr. Walcot executed two sky¬ scraper sketches. One later sold for a thousand dollars, and the other for five hundred dollars. They are now master¬ pieces which will live among the most famous etchings of the world.
We used to see certain unimpressive, pimply-faced youths jerking sodas in our corner drugstores, boys who were so ordinary that we would not give them a second look on our village streets. Those same boys were soon flying half- million-dollar bombers over Japan and wearing medals of courage and heroism. World War II taught us that “nothing is just ordinary”; there were no ordinary boys, no ordinary times, no ordi¬ nary feelings. The nations and the people were not ordinary.
And we have found that just ordinary people are full of courage, sacrifice, and heroism. One day Quentin Roosevelt came running into the White House and told his father that he had been playing with some common little boys on the lawn.
President Theodore Roosevelt replied, and Quentin never forgot the lesson: “Quentin, there are no common little boys. There are large and small boys, there are black and white boys, there are fat and slender boys, but there is no such thing as a common boy.”
“Nothing is just ordinary!”
The point
English artist Walcot tells architect Cram that "nothing is just ordinary," demonstrating by creating masterpiece etchings from wrapping paper—illustrating how ordinary people contain greatness.