ROCKWELL'S SCOUT
Growing up neighbors with an American icon
Sitting down with Bud Edgerton ’52 and looking through the paintings of Norman Rockwell is akin to sharing the pages of a family album. There are three generations of Edgertons in The Long Shadow of Lincoln. There’s sister Ardis in Soldier’s Homecoming. There’s a hired man from the family farm in Back to Civies. There’s Bud’s 4-H Jersey in Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow. And, anytime there’s a Boy Scout, the chances are good the model was the teenage Buddy Edgerton himself.
The Edgertons and the Rockwells were country neighbors who lived city-close. Little more than a dirt lane separated the two West Arlington farmhouses, and in that tight company from 1943 to 1953, the lives of a Vermont farm family and the family of beloved American illustrator Norman Rockwell intertwined.
A farm boy who could hunt, fish, and hit a baseball a long way, Buddy Edgerton was a near-heroic figure to Norman and Mary Rockwell’s three sons, Peter, Jerry, and Tommy. While he became a model to the city boys for all a Vermont kid should be, for Norman he became the cleft-chinned ideal of youth and young manhood, the perfect model for the annual calendars he illustrated for the Boy Scouts of America. It took anywhere from ten minutes to two hours to sit for the photographs that Rockwell worked from for his paintings, Edgerton recalls. Even better than the painter’s five-dollar modeling fee, “He made you feel right at that moment that you were the most important person on Earth.”
For years, Edgerton, who retired in 1987 after a three-decade career with UVM’s Extension Service, shared his stories of the Rockwell family through a slide show and talk for school groups and historical societies. At the urging of his son and daughter, Jim ’77 and Debbie ’79, he has worked with author Nan O’Brien to collect the Rockwell stories into a memoir which they plan to publish next year.
Due to Bud’s rock-solid recall of events sixty years ago, O’Brien says she had a deep well to draw upon in writing this book. When Tommy Rockwell’s memory drew a blank on a particular event, he told the writer, “You’d have to ask Buddy about that.”
As Edgerton digs into his rich memories of growing up next door to the Rockwells, one is struck by the level of trust that grew between the two families. Buddy’s mother personally couriered the Saturday Evening Post cover originals to the publisher in Philadelphia. Sister Ardis helped keep the Rockwells’ house and was, in many ways, the daughter that Mary Rockwell never had. Buddy’s father stopped by Rockwell’s studio every morning, offered his thoughts on the illustrator’s work-in-progress, and collected discarded sketches to toss in the farm’s incinerator. And when UVM eventually beckoned for Buddy, the Rockwells had a lot to do with it. “They kept nudging me along, Mary in particular,” Edgerton says. “She was instrumental in convincing me that there was no alternative but to go to college.”
As it often happened, that moment from a Vermont life found expression in Rockwell’s art. Though his family didn’t model for the painting Breaking Home Ties, which features a weathered, forlorn father and his fresh-faced son waiting for the bus that will take the boy to college, the work was inspired by the day Buddy left the family farm and headed north on Route 7, bound for Burlington.
“What was Rockwell really like?” It’s the one question that Bud Edgerton invariably hears. There are no dark secrets. He was a kind man who, when the Edgertons’ eleven-year-old cousin was killed in a hunting accident, sketched a memorial portrait of the boy and walked up the road to give it to the grieving family. He was a humorous man, quick to mime an expression or pose he sought from his model. He was a patient man, who showed no anger when Buddy put a baseball through his studio window not once, but twice.
The question of what the artist was really like is far better illustrated with anecdote than adjective, Edgerton says, and with that he launches into a memory that invariably ends with the phrase, “That’s Norman.”