Isamu was rescued again the following year when Rumely, out on bail, came to Indiana to arrange the sale of Interlaken. He brought Isamu back to his home in La Porte, Indiana, and put him up with the family of Dr. Charles S. Mack, a sixty-two-year-old former professor of homeopathy at the University of Wisconsin and the pastor of a local Swedenborgian church. The New Church, of which Rumely’s wife Fanny was also a member, was based on the ideas of the eighteenth-century theologian and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and taught that all things are connected by universal analogy, that there is one God and he is the Lord Jesus Christ, and that salvation comes not through faith alone but also through charity, which meant being good and useful to others. Charles Mack and his wife, a former schoolteacher, had six children, four of whom were grown while the two younger boys lived at home. Julian Mack was a year older than Isamu, and Isamu looked up to him. For the next three years Isamu lived comfortably with the Macks while he completed high school, earning his keep by tending furnaces, mowing lawns, and delivering newspapers. For all his feeling of security in his new home, Noguchi’s underlying anxiety remained: “I constantly worried about my mother in Japan and developed a moral loathing for my father.”1
The Macks treated Isamu as a family member. He attended church with them and, though Dr. Mack did not try to influence his religious beliefs, Isamu did absorb some aspects of Swedenborgian thinking. His friend the art critic Dore Ashton wrote that Noguchi believed that his preoccupation with myth derived in part from his exposure to Swedenborgianism, and she quoted Noguchi saying: “They believe the Bible is a myth which had to be interpreted. They reveal the artistic merit of the Bible.”2 Ashton noted the influence on Noguchi of the Swedenborgian concept of a universal rhyme scheme in which all aspects of nature are related.
After Rumely returned to New York, he kept in touch, writing Noguchi letters full of avuncular advice. Soon he became the first of Noguchi’s substitute fathers. In a 1988 letter to Dr. Rumely’s daughter Mary, who was seven years younger than Isamu, Noguchi reminisced about his relationship to her family: “And I think back on all those years and the friendship with your family which permitted me to survive in a strange land. You were my family inasmuch as I had one…”3 In his letters to Isamu, Rumely guided his reading. He sent him books, for example, by Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris. He also instructed him to keep an account book, and he gave him fifteen dollars to open a bank account. In September 1919 he wrote: “First, I wish to know how you are using your money and to guide you by suggestion. Second: You can practice economy better if you know what you are spending for. Third: The habit of careful accounting is an essential for many lines of work and you must learn it now. Let me know how your school work is getting on.”4
What is probably the first of Isamu’s undated letters to Dr. Rumely from La Porte reported on his reading, including The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, My Three Years in America by Count Bernstorff, and a number of books on physics, agriculture, and chemistry.5 In what must be his next letter he informed Rumely that he had opened a savings account and that he had ten dollars left. He enclosed his report card for the first semester and told of his plans to build a wooden model hydroplane. Isamu did not have to pay for room and board, but he had to earn his spending money. To this end, besides his various odd jobs, he cleaned the fireplace, chopped wood, and mowed the lawn for Emmet Scott, Mrs. Rumely’s father and a former mayor of La Porte. Rumely often said to him that he was giving him “the best advantage anybody has, and that was no advantage.”6 Noguchi came to see himself as a “typical American Horatio Alger story.”7 He told the New Yorker writer Calvin Tomkins: “So, you see, I’m a Hoosier. I had a Japanese childhood but an American boyhood, with a paper route and all those things.”8
The following spring he found work at a laboratory. With much improved penmanship Isamu wrote to Rumely: “It is two weeks since I started working at the laboratory, so I asked Dr. Martin for my pay. He asked ‘How much do you want?’ I replied $5. He said the laboratory could not aford [sic] it and that as the training would be very valuable to me, I ought not to ask for any. I have enjoyed the work very much but I guess I will have to look for another job…” In a postscript he added, “I hope your trial ends speedily.”
Another of Isamu’s letters to Rumely reported: “The bysycle [sic] frame busted so I had to get another and the tire is about to go on the blink otherwise the byclycle [sic] is all right as I got another frame from the Great Western.
“All these tough lucks however are counteracted by the fact that I have aquired [sic] a dandy coat from Mrs. Voth on Maple Ave, which she gave to me because her son had outgrown it. This coat is just about new being thick and kind of greenish black. Mrs. Mack said it could not be got for $30.”
During his first winter in La Porte, Isamu learned from a January 18, 1920, New York Times Magazine interview with Yone that his father was in the United States for a three-month lecture tour. In the article, titled “America as Fountain of Youth to the Japanese,” Yone spoke of his youthful days in America, but, not surprisingly, made no mention of having fathered a half-American son. Although in late November he was in Chicago, a two-hour train ride from La Porte, and although Leonie had asked him to contact Isamu, he did not bother to get in touch. In a September 9, 1919, letter to Leonie, Yone had written: “I lost interest in you and even in Isamu.”9
Leonie left Japan with Ailes in 1920. She managed to get as far as San Francisco, where she supported herself and Ailes by selling Japanese woodblock prints and various Japanese curios, an occupation that she would continue after moving to New York in 1922. If she did not immediately make efforts to retrieve her son, she no doubt knew that he was in good hands and was receiving a proper American education thanks to Edward Rumely and the Macks.
That summer, when Isamu and Julian Mack visited the Rumelys’ house on Lake Michigan, Fanny Rumely reported to her husband that Isamu was a wonderful swimmer and was going to teach seven-year-old Isabella how to swim. “Isamu is very nice indeed. When I see him lokin [sic] a little [illegible word] faced I jolly him up and he immediately responds and is so lightning quick at everything he does. He considers M[a]ry’s every wish the law. He really spoils her and she enjoys queening it.”10 To Isamu, Julian Mack was like an older brother. They loved to box until they were “all in.”
Julian Mack, Isabel Rumely, and Isamu at Duneland Beach, Indiana, 1920 (Courtesy of the Edward A. Rumely Papers, Lilly Library, Indiana University)
Isamu made toys—a wooden sleigh, a dollhouse, and a Cinderella carriage—for Isabel, her older sister Mary (nine), and for Scott, age two. In a letter thanking Edward Rumely for sending him the New York Times Magazine article about his father, he wrote a postscript: “I have made a sled much larger than the one I made before for my boss he furnishing all the material. He gave me extra pay and a 8-6-2 in box of candy for making it. It is going to be used to carry papers in from the depot.” As at Chigasaki, Isamu worked on a garden. “I think it’s going to be dandy,” he told Rumely. “I have some carnations, Daisies, sweet alyssiums, and Forget-me-nots coming up. Also Marigolds, cornflowers and nasturtiums which are to be planted later. I have the garden dug and a bed made.”
In a long undated letter, from July 1920 or 1921, Isamu told Rumely about a camping trip he had made on his own. “Last Saturday, it was the third, I decided to go to Logansport. So I started out at two o’clock with my camp outfit and the bysicle [sic]. About thirty miles south of here I had a flat tire and had to walk about three miles till I came to Knox where I got a new tire.”11 Isamu camped for the night on the bank of the Tippecanoe River, a spot where he had camped two years earlier with a “bunch of Interlaken boys.” About ten miles south of Knox, Isamu came upon a lake, which he called “one of the prettiest sights I ever saw the moon was shining and lights were twinkling on the oposite [sic] shore.” On the fourth day he got lost, but finally found his way home at six o’clock. “That is how I enjoyed the ‘glorious 4th.’”
Isamu did well at La Porte High School, where he was known as Sam Gilmour. He graduated at the top of his class in 1922. Because he had a reputation as a draftsman, he was chosen to draw the illustrations for his class yearbook. The senior class, with typically fond ribbing, elected Isamu the “Biggest Bull-Head” in the class. Next to his yearbook photograph, Isamu wrote his motto, a quotation from Henry Clay: “Sir, I would rather be right than be president.”12 For all his feelings of being a misfit, Isamu seems to have been well liked. Yet one classmate, a Wilbur Flickinger, recalled that Isamu was a loner. “He was kind of a quiet type of individual. We peddled papers together.”13 Another schoolmate, R. K. McLean, remembered Isamu as “a curly headed, bright quick speaking boy, very private … His only manifestation of being a sculptor was a carved pair of skis—in an intricate oriental design.”14
When Isamu finished high school, Rumely asked him what he would like to do with his life. “I said promptly, artist. It was an odd choice, considering that art had become altogether foreign to me since coming to America. I did not show any particular aptitude. On the contrary, I had acquired what is known as a healthy skepticism, and perhaps even a prejudice against art, since my father was an artist—that is, a poet. Apart from William Blake, whom I had rediscovered through Swedenborg, it was a time of negation and disbelief. Yet now my first instinctual decision was to become an artist.”15
Rumely warned Isamu that he would not be able to make a living as an artist. “He said, you’d better be a doctor, like he was … And so even before, while [I was still] going to high school he got a job for me at one point working in a laboratory.”16 Isamu had done brilliantly in chemistry, biology, physics, and math—an aptitude for science that would stand him in good stead years later when he designed technologically complex public monuments. But Rumely was broadminded enough to let Isamu try his hand at art, so that first summer after Isamu’s graduation, Rumely organized an apprenticeship for him with his friend the academic sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who had not yet carved the heads of presidents on Mount Rushmore.
When Isamu arrived at Borglum’s estate in Stamford, Connecticut, in the summer of 1922, Borglum was working on the first of his gigantic sculptural projects, a memorial to the heroes of the Confederate Army to be carved on the face of Stone Mountain in Georgia. It was to be a high-relief frieze of a group of equestrian figures, including Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis, followed by a column of soldiers. That summer Borglum was busy with the sculpture’s clay and plaster models. (Borglum had only finished Lee’s head when, thanks to his irascible, authoritarian personality, he fought with the project’s commissioner and, in a rage, smashed his models and abandoned the project.)17
A large, powerful-looking man with a mustache and a prominent chin, Borglum is said to have had little time for anyone who was not a millionaire or a congressman. Even worse, he was a bigot who believed that to be an American you had to have been born of American parents. “I didn’t get along with Borglum,” Noguchi said.18 “He was a very irascible fellow who enjoyed having people feel badly.”19 To earn his keep, Isamu did odd jobs:
It was my job to tutor his son, to get the horses to pose, to pose myself on a horse as General Sherman [actually Lee], and to cut down all the dead chestnut trees for firewood as winter approached. My only chance at sculpture turned out to be a head of Lincoln, a subject in which Borglum specialized. But I enjoyed the company of some wonderful Italian plaster casters, who taught me casting. In the end Borglum told me I would never be a sculptor, so I decided to follow Dr. Rumely’s advice and become a doctor.20
Although Noguchi claimed that Borglum did not teach him and only had him doing chores, the Noguchi scholar Bonnie Rychlak, who worked for Noguchi for many years, claimed Isamu did learn carving, molding, and casting methods from Borglum and, while in Borglum’s employ, he made a number of reliefs and sculptures of birds, cows, and other animals in plaster and terra-cotta.21 The art dealer Julien Levy, who in 1933 wrote one of the earliest and most insightful articles about Noguchi, reproduced a photograph of what he identified as Noguchi’s first sculpture, a bust of a man with a hood.22
After his summer apprenticeship, Isamu went to live with the Rumelys in their Riverside Drive apartment. “I felt liberated coming from the country to a big city like New York.”23 Although he spent much of his life in other places, New York City remained Noguchi’s principal home for the rest of his life.