A modern dad

Posted by jdg | Wednesday, April 25, 2007 | , ,

Yesterday I took Juniper to the Henry Ford Museum, and made the mistake of walking her through the 600-ton steam engines before we made it to the exhibit that I was there to see, the 50th-anniversary celebration of the Eames Lounge Chair, a vintage example of which we just revealed sits in our living room. I hadn't been to the Henry Ford since I was a kid, and I fell in love with it again. A Smithsonian for the upper Midwest, it has the Rosa Parks bus parked a few feet from the bloody rocking chair in which Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, itself not far from the car JFK was riding in when he got shot. Beyond these common objects grafted into history by the events that occurred within them, there are thousands of other common objects, long rows of automobiles and airplanes and bicycles built for ten and motorized roller skates, steam trains that dwarf every man, steam engines that propelled the first Ford assembly lines, airstream trailers and a R. Buckminster Fuller dymaxion house, all of it together such a wonderful celebration of American ingenuity and industry.

But I was there to see an exhibit about a chair I already owned. As Juniper sat in my arms and I read the placards under early Eames prototypes and molded-plywood splints, she began to whine, "Dada, can we see trains again? Dada, airplanes?" I was there for the minutia of the Eames exhibition, the letters Ray wrote to Charles on construction paper and the charcoal sketches of morphing shapes that would form the basis of so many famous chairs, but Juniper couldn't grasp why we would be looking at pictures of chairs when there were trains and dollhouses and airplanes to see. When we got to the star of the exhibit, the 1956 lounge chair owned by Herman Miller president D.J. Dupree, set under soft light on a spinning pedestal, Juniper looked at it and said, "That our chair. Juney go round and round?" I often spin her on the one in our living room.

Before I took her out of the exhibit to squeal at the most magnificent thing she had ever seen, the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile ("Dada, buy it? Juney drive it!"), I was struck by this 1959 ad showing a pajama-clad father sleeping with his infant child on his lap. The text reads, "Even if you don't have a two o'clock feeding at your house, we think you will appreciate the deep comfort of this rosewood and leather lounge chair designed by Charles Eames for Herman Miller":