A fifty year odyssey of the Star Poster Program

By

Robert E. Bear

It was 1991, the inaugural year of the Bryan Academy for Visual and Performing Arts (BAVPA), an elementary grades Magnet School in Bryan, Texas, and as I walked down the hall one day behind the principal and a father of one of my third graders, I heard the dad say, "I told my son, if one of the other kids bothers you, ‘Hit him with a pipe!’"  That same year I also had a fifth grade student whose brother was stabbed to death on the ninth grade campus. Both of these incidences were disturbing. Obviously, there was a "violence is the solution" mentally in which numerous students in the community were raised. I was compelled to do something, but what?

A couple of years later the fine arts faculty members (we called ourselves the D’MAD Staff) were told to come up with after school enrichment activities for the students. The drama, music, art, theater, and dance teachers had to stay later than the other faculty members and perform functions just as coaches, accept we didn’t get paid. Then I remembered the two incidences from the first year.

Every one needs at least one hero, especially children when they enter their formative years of character development and struggle with who they are to become. The comic heroes of my early youth, Mighty Mouse, Superman, and Captain America somehow morphed into the idols of my adolescence, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jesus Christ, and Mahatmas Gandhi.

            Solomon said, “Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” If this is an affirmed belief, then whatever immediate and long term objectives any of us perceive in our endeavors to improve environments, must include strategies encompassing the total spectrum of a communities’ existence at all economic strata, classes, subcultures, and age levels, particularly the young. What will lead toward a better community where all will benefit is a collaborative altruism involving individuals, organizations, businesses, and government in the stewardship of cultural, educational, and economic ideologies.

            Keeping these in mind, I endeavored to find something kids could relate to, be a venue for positive social changes, and at the same time, teach about the Elements and Principles of art while trying to more effectively communicate their ideas. Kids have social concerns other than just violence in schools. They have visual voices that need guidance to affectively and vividly communicate their thoughts, insights, and feelings. Art affects people. It communicates. It inspires. It leads! This is a profound function of posters. Consequently, I created Star Coolality Kid and the Star Poster Program toward these ends.

August of 1993 saw Star make his debut. There he was a noticeable influence on students where he appeared on bulletin boards, banners, walls, and t-shirts. Originally, the Star Poster Program was a simple after school art enrichment activity and it was literally "run by the seat of the pants." There was no structured course outline, objectives, or instructional documents. Because of the initial success and interest by other students and faculty, a formalized poster program was written.

A few years had passed.  In 1999, I’d gone through a divorce and subsequent bankruptcy. It’s my belief that everyone should have a purpose in life, some sort of dream to strive toward: for, the only life worth living is the one in pursuit of dreams to achieve.  But, I lost my dreams. I left the poster program and art teaching and then returned to Wyoming in 2000 to once again become a Special Education instructor for a short while.

In 2001, I found an art position in Lampasas, Texas to be closer to my three sons and make a little more than the paltry salary up north. Here I again started tutelage of how to make posters to sixth grade students. A couple years later I met a beautiful and wonderful woman, a third grade teacher, Joan Butts. One year later we were married on the anniversary of our first date. (Now some of you may be thinking, “How amusing, she’s become Butts Bear”; however, it gets better. Her maiden name was originally Ware. Now from time to time I tease her with “Ware Butts Bear.” Certainly, truth is funnier than fiction.)

The summer of 2004 Joan and I headed toward Yellowstone on our honeymoon, where I used to enjoy cross-country skiing in the winter. Joan had never had the pleasure of experiencing the grandeur of this incredible area.

On the way we got a call from my sister Erlene that our aunt Velma was in the hospital in Aberdeen, South Dakota and being sent home with Hospice. I was to be one of the executors of her will. So, we made a big detour to visit Velma the last week of her life. Then we continued on our honeymoon to Yellowstone National Park and farther west to meet Joan’s son, Kyle, and his family in Utah.

August the following year I was the winner of a visit from the local sheriff. I was being sued by Velma’s adopted son who’s ten years my senior.

As you are astutely aware, 1991 was not fifty years ago and are probably curious s to  how the focus of the Star Poster Program has become a half century odyssey in such a short time. Well, here is where it starts jetting backwards, painfully fast and furious.

Within a few short days I was getting ready to go to work and attend teacher in-service for the upcoming school year. Joan had already left. I’d been pacing in the house wearing only my shirt, underwear and socks. I just couldn’t continue to get dressed. I can’t remember for how long this was going on, but it seemed like a couple of hours. I’d called Joan and pleaded over and over for her to take me to a psychiatrist. I needed help now! Obviously, I was having a nervous breakdown.

Joan hurried home and contacted a psychiatrist, but what I needed was more immediate. My heart was racing and blood pressure was dangerously high. The family physician prescribed medication and we made arrangements for me to be counseled the next day.

It wasn’t the lawsuit itself that was the biggest conflict. It was who was doing it and some of what I had to face that were deeply buried secrets from my past that I’d been forced to confront, experiences I’d never confessed to anyone.

During the second grade I lived with my aunt Velma and uncle Dick on a farm just north of Warner, South Dakota. One spring evening my older cousin, a senior in high school, and I’d gone to the barn. It was part of our chores to feed and milk the cows. On occasion we also had to clean the stalls and put the manure in the spreader to later use as fertilizer. The latter was not a favorite job since I’d gotten a pitch fork full of fresh dung flung in my face.

This time the excursion to the barn was different: there was no feeding, no milking, and no cleaning. I climbed on the boards separating stalls, as I’d often done before. My cousin and I started talking: then he secured a loop of bailing twine around a ceiling rafter. He pulled me over and put a noose around my neck. I was terrified! This time he had fortunately let my feet stay caught on the stall boards.  After supper a few days later when we had to go to the barn to do chores he hung me from the rafter again. This time he made sure my feet couldn’t reach the stall. There I was dangling, fighting for my life, choking while helplessly trying to get my fingers to pry the rope loose of my neck. A moment later my uncle Dick burst through the barn door and hurriedly rescued me.

Oh, I’d shared this trauma with others over the years, but not what else he’d done to me, something to me that was worse. Something men are too ashamed and scared to admit, especially because of the stigmas that go with it when you’ve dedicated your life to working with kids. This was the deeper scarring I had to face and finally needed to seek professional help and come to terms with, sexual abuse.

That summer I got to return to live with my dad, mom, two older sisters, and two younger brothers in Minneapolis. In mid-April the next spring my father was riding his bicycle to get his car at his sisters on the Lower Sioux Indian reservation near Morton, Minnesota and was killed by a drunk driver in a hit and run. I’ll never forget answering the door to the knock of a policeman informing my mother of the life shattering news. I was eight years old and suddenly had to become the “man of the house” and grow up fast.

The lawsuit forced me to review the past with other numerous, unpleasant memories. That fall my mother moved us to Aberdeen where I would enter fourth grade. Looking back at this time in northeastern South Dakota I could see that my mom probably suffered with a manic/depressive disorder, if not just depression. Who could blame her? We were living on welfare, as my mother, Mable, had to raise five kids alone, didn’t own a driver’s license, and hadn’t had employment in thirteen years. Sometimes she’d get upset and throw at me whatever was within reach. Once I was assailed from across the kitchen by a can of green beans and another instance fortunate enough to dodge the whirling flight of a butcher knife.

We lived in a rent house there that Velma had owned.  Having started kindergarten at four, at the beginning of the sixth grade I was still ten years old. Mom, aunt Velma, and grandma Wobick decided I needed a male role model. Therefore, just before my eleventh birthday I was sent alone on a Greyhound bus from Aberdeen to meet my uncle Neil and grandpa Samuel Bear at the bus station in Ventura, California.

Once again living with relatives, now in California, I was sexually molested. This time by an uncle I had to share sleeping arrangements with for more than a year and a half. After I’d grown and my first son was still an infant, he died. Honestly, I have to admit he’s the only person I was ever glad that had breathed their last.

            Dealing with these issues also made me look at earlier ordeals that have had some effect on the development of the Star Poster Program and its current emphasis on trying to reduce child abuse. This goes all the way back to the age of four and I was taken from my parents and placed in a foster home where the head of the house was a police officer. Why I was put in a “home” has never come to my recollection, but the distress of the event has always been here.

No one can convince me there is no God...no one can convince me that He doesn’t intervene...no one can convince me He doesn’t have a plan for our lives. I’ve seen the evidence...I’ve felt the gentle, guiding pressure of the Potter’s hands on this body of clay.  Hind sight is undeniably more acute than present vision. When we are open to taking a glimpse at God’s shaping of our lives, of the direction, redirection, rescuing, and tacit voice, we become sublimely humbled with awe of His participation in it all.

When I was waiting for the conscientious objector discharge from the Army in 1974, I asked God what He wanted me to do with my life. Art was a strong interest of mine and for a long time I wished to become a commercial artist and art director. As a still, small voice in my mind I heard, “Teacher Art.” So, that is what I’ve pursued. I’ve dealt with all four categories of child abuse to some degree: neglect, physical, emotional, and sexual. It is the culmination of the training and experiences, all the good ones as well as the painful scars, that have lead to the development of the Star Coolality Kids and the direct influence of God in my life that the Star Poster Program has traversed its’ course.

The Star Poster Program is designed as a collaborative altruism involving individuals, organizations, and businesses. It teaches kids how to create posters by employing the elements of design, along with words and graphics, to successfully create immediate and long term emotional and intellectual impacts in the minds of other children and adults in light of social and environmental responsibilities. Peer influence has been recognized for affecting behavior and is an important part of this system. Ultimately, the goal of the Star Poster Program is to aid children in making a committed effort toward the improvement of not just the local, regional, or national, but also the greater collective global community.

In this age the media and sentiment seems to focus on the U.S. military presence in other parts of the world and the billions of dollars spent on fights against terrorism. They also spotlight those involved as heroes. This may certainly be true. However, each day, all over this country and around the world there are other battles just as important, just as devastating to the victims of abuse.  The lives of tens of thousands of children are shockingly affected each day physically, emotionally, sexually, and through neglect. The children who battle their own circumstances of terror are truly heroes.

Where are the billions of dollars spent on the terrors of child abuse? There seems to be no hope for the government to expend needed assets on the war against child abuse. It’s just apparently not that important to politicians. Subsequently, it’s up to us as individuals to try and fight these battles a little at a time to affect positive change. Sometimes it doesn’t take much, but here and there it can mount up to a matter of monumental consequence.

You don’t have to be wealthy, a famous personality, or a community leader to make a productive change to any degree. I’m just a simple teacher that trains children in art in a small town in Texas who thus far has been on a fifty year odyssey in the development of art lessons for children, a dedication to change the world one poster at a time. I really don’t make a sizeable transformation on the fight against child abuse. It is the legacy I leave behind that actually makes a difference. It’s the Star Poster Program and the children who have learned to add a visual voice to their repertoire of communication skills in sharing their concerns, hopes, and dreams as a compass that leads toward a better community. These children are our unsung heroes; they truly need our intervention, support and prayers.

A fantasy of mine at the onset of this program was for Star Coolality Kid to someday win the Nobel Peace Prize, after all Mickey Mouse won an Oscar, why couldn’t a cartoon character be recognized for influencing peaceful measures? Now I have a greater, more important and noble vision for Star, helping children empower themselves to fight against abuses, for them to make a positive difference in their own lives as well as those of others.

Are you are willing to help affect a small difference toward a greater good in your community?  If so, please go to the web site ursidaeenterprises.com to share free lessons on making posters and consider sponsoring a Star Poster Program contest in your community.