A FAIRLY SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF LARRY BELMONT MILLIGAN

            My family origins in America are not unique.  Whoever they were, and for whatever reasons, my ancestors risked it all and left the shores of Europe on slow ships bound for "America."  A few died at sea and never arrived with their families.  My descendants landed in New England and worked their way south to North Carolina and Tennessee.  From there, my family tree shows one or more of my relatives later living in almost every State.  I am an eclectic mixture of nationalities and a citizen of the USA as the result of my immigration heritage.  No matter how many generations my family has lived in America, I descended from immigrants and their sons and daughters.  Every American family line immigrated from somewhere else to get to this country, including all indigenous Native American people who preceded Europeans by over 25,000 years.   That should allow some perspective on who is an American.  

             I was born in Alabama on October 17, 1942 but was raised in Idaho from the age of one and a half years old.  I had an older brother and younger sister.  My Dad had an injury to his foot at the Aluminum foundry where he worked in Alabama and was rejected for military service during WWII.  The disappointment he felt by that rejection played a huge part in his decision to move to Idaho in the "Far West," where he had visited while searching farm work during the Great Depression,  He visited relatives there again in 1939, before I was born.  As a consequence,  my earliest memories from one and a half years old are of life in and around the little mining and ranching town of May in the Pahsimeroi Valley of Central Idaho.  It was a time without electricity, telephones, or plumbing - although I had no idea what those things were.  People talk about their palaces and museums and mansions, but the most important and practical architectural concept for modern civilization was the privy.  Pop was a talented metal worker and welder and needed steady work.  Tiny settlements like May, Idaho could not provide it, so we moved around quite a bit in his search.  After my sister was born in 1946, we moved to Salmon City where we lived in an ancient and ramshackle log cabin with painted canvas ceilings located on Water Street near the Salmon River  After a couple of years, we moved south to Jerome where Pop had found a good job - and where I started and finished elementary and high school. 

            I started drawing with pencils and crayons on old sacks and my brother's school tablet when I was 4 years old in Salmon and started painting in oils about age 13 in Jerome.   I drew and painted, but throughout my early life, it never occurred to me that I would profess to be an artist.   My Pop was talented in drawing and encouraged me to be an artist; so naturally, I decided to go into electronics.  After graduation from high school, I caught a Trailways bus aimed at the bright lights of Southern California.   Until I could afford my own place, I lived temporarily with my older brother and his family, started college in Fullerton College that September, going to school in the evenings, and working graveyard shift in Downey on Missile Guidance Systems at Autonetics (a division of North American Aviation, later to become Rockwell International.)  I started as a Utility Man and worked my way up to Assembly and Test.

            About the time life became settled and routine, I got a life-changing letter from the Jerome  Idaho Selective Service Board, (AKA Draft Board) ordering me to report to medical offices in Los Angeles for my pre-induction physical.  I passed my military induction physical; but, I did not want to be drafted, so I took a Military Leave of Absence from my job, drove through Mexico for a couple of weeks, and returned sick and broke to join the Army.  I was sworn in at Boise, went through Boot Camp at Fort Ord, California, and spent a year on Boca Chica Key near Key West, Florida manning Hawk Missiles during the tail-end of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  After surviving two hurricanes and clouds of man-eating mosquitoes, I was rotated out of Key West and spent the next two years in Butzbach and Giessen, West Germany.  At the end of my term of service,  I flew back to the USA to Fort Dix, was mustered out of Active Duty, and was honorably separated from the Army as a Specialist 5.  I bought a bus ticket to New York's LaGuardia Airport (no more free rides!)  I flew to Detroit to visit an Uncle - and to pick up a new car that I had purchased while still a short-timer in Germany.  

            I returned to my job, got married, had a beautiful daughter, and was still working for Autonetics and taking a home course in Electronic Engineering when an unforeseen fork in the road  popped up.  My Company lost a large Military Defense Contract bid just as the bottom was dropping out of the military electronics field and I, along with many others, was laid off.  I searched all over for a job that fit my training and found nothing.  At every stage of my life from child to adult, except in Boot Camp, I was painting and drawing.  My wife worked in an office and mentioned that I had painted a portrait of our daughter and showed them a Polaroid of the painting.  Some asked if I  could do their children. I was apprehensive, but I did, and thus started painting children's and adult portraits for extra money, charging $40.00 each, guaranteed the likeness, and sometimes added Fido or the cat for free.  The portraits were well received and affordable so I stayed fairly busy.  I painted portraits at the rate of about one every three to four days.  However, the customer pool made up of friends - and friends-of-friends - and referrals by that chain of friends was eventually depleted.  I went back to searching for a job.

            I read meters for Southern California Edison and spent my days fighting off disgruntled customers over their power bills - for which I was held solely responsible - and fighting the inevitable backyard guard-dogs; I was attacked often and was bitten twice - by the dogs.  As luck would have it, due to seniority, my company called me back to work - even as the layoffs continued.  My short stint as an artist had taught me something positive for the future;  I could work alone in a studio and muster the self-discipline to devote my time be an artist.  I enjoyed the process.  By the time I was recalled to work, we had made the decision to return to Idaho where I planned to build a log home and become a professional artist who paints scenes from life in the historic Old West.  I had been a student of American western history for years.  What had been a suggested but discarded idea, suddenly became a compelling desire.  Actually, it was a wacky plan similar to jumping out of an airplane and constructing the parachute on your way down.  When I decided to do this admittedly crazy thing, I lacked any formal education in either art or the art business.  I had never built a house, used a chain saw, or experienced temperatures so low that ordinary rubber and plastic shattered like glass when you hit it.  I had a lot of catching up to do at the edge of the Sawtooth Wilderness.  I did it because I did not know it was probably impossible.  Thankfully, our dreams were not driven by logic, but by desire.  It's an old and often true maxim that says, "Ignorance is bliss."  I was bathed in bliss. 

         We purchased two acres in the alpine Sawtooth Valley of Central Idaho 12 miles South of Stanley (50 miles north of Ketchum/Sun Valley) and moved onto the bare ground, making the last payment just before we moved.  I had already designed a log home while still in California, even building a scale model out of dowels using road  gravel for the rockwork. I drew the plans in pencil because I had to erase a lot as reality butted-in during the building process.  Driving a $150 beat-up 1957 Chevy pickup that burned oil to the tune of a quart every 20 miles, I found and cut good dry house logs, gathered local stone for the rockwork, and poured concrete piers to support the house.  The first winter came with the piers, floor joists, and fireplace foundation completed - and a bunch of logs.  All the logs I cut down and hauled in to be used in the house cost us $80. 

            When our first snowy winter arrived and the nighttime temperature dropped to well below zero, the work stopped on the new home until spring.  Staying as caretakers for the winter at a neighbors lodge, we set up housekeeping in a tiny three-room cabin with an outhouse and a frozen water pipe to the kitchen.  The thermometer dropped to -52⁰ in December and nighttime temperatures of -30⁰ and -40⁰ were common that winter.  The only heat came from the kitchen oven and a small propane stove that never shut off until the 40 gallon propane tank was empty - which happened more often than I had planned.  My first studio consisted of a small corner in the 8-foot-wide main room near the outside door.  Anytime anyone needed to go to the outhouse, I was out of business.  I awoke one frigid morning after a howling blizzard to find a snow drift on the frozen living room floor formed from snow that had blown in through the keyhole and doorframe.  From that inauspicious start, I produced my first paintings as a professional and augmented my work in Western Art with a few portrait commissions I brought with me from California.  I also received my first commission when I was asked by the Forest Service to produce a pen and ink illustration of the "New" Stanley Ranger Station built just south of Stanley; it was used on the cover of the brochure distributed at the official Opening festivities.

            My wife waited tables in Stanley and I did odd jobs to help with my really meager art income.  I wrote to some bookstores in an effort to find data as part of my research.  The late Bill Todd, Jr. of Seattle, who owned and operated Shorey's Bookstore, expressed an interest in my work and became my first agent and supporter. He supplied me with  advice, inspiration, motivation, and sales revenue.  He became my main source for rare publications on Old Western History and Native Americana.  He bought many paintings from me and I traded some for books.  More than that, he fostered a comforting lifelong friendship between a master bookseller and a greenhorn artist laden with some modest dreams and a load of ignorance about the art business. 

            Life is not easy for beginning artists and their families, and it is especially difficult for those without credentials.  One of the qualities taught to me by my Pop was the art of persistence. I passed that advice on to my kids and to everyone I knew who felt stymied by fortune and circumstance.   Hard work and determination coupled with the unbounded freedom of blissful ignorance provided some fruitful results.  I spent long winters painting and short summers working on our home/studio.  The endless hours of peeling logs, cutting saddle notches, and lifting the heavy logs onto the walls to be fitted and spiked into place, eventually paid off.  After three summers of building, we moved into the 3/4 finished home just before the next winter and found it comfortable, warm - and home.  I discovered - the hard way - just how much firewood we would need for the winter - we ran out in March and it was still mighty cold - so, I went on an old snowmobile to find what I could in the deep snow.  That never happened again; thereafter, I brought in 10 cords every fall.  That third winter, I shared my studio as our bedroom and the crib site for our second daughter who was born in June.  It was crowded, but I had a corner in the north side  by my large windows where I set up my easel.  I finished the downstairs bedrooms the next summer. We had been hauling our spring water in 10-gallon milk cans and that could no longer keep up with demand, so we had a well drilled.   Happiness is running water

            We worked hard and sacrificed a lot in the process.  Hard work in the studios also started paying and we received invitations and began traveling to art shows in Montana and the Northwest; thereafter, my work  was selling well enough to give us some energetic hope.  No matter what your vocation, you improve your craft by continuous effort.  Within the next 5 years, as my work continued to improve, it attracted more galleries and collectors; soon I was making enough to support the family on the "thick and thin" premise.  When the wolf came to the door, we ate him.  That is the nature of the free-lance art business.  I was asked to hold painting seminars all around Idaho from Jerome to Salmon and that became an annual thing for several years.  Depending on the successes of Art Shows and of the galleries handling my work, much of my income came in  large chunks and the time between chunks was indeterminate and undependable.   Budgeting became an "art" in and of itself.  

            I have been very fortunate.  I was 25 years old when I made the life-altering decision to forsake my job and pursue a career as a full-time artist, eventually sending work to 13 different galleries in the USA, and opening two galleries of my own.  I have always wanted my work to reflect my respect for Native American peoples, the rigors and hardships of the frontier life, and the sometimes sweet, sometimes staggering beauty that can overwhelm us almost anywhere in this Country.  We were helped by fortunate timing, good and caring families, generous friends and neighbors, a strong desire, and the fickle finger of fate. 

Larry B. Milligan

DEDICATION

            This site is dedicated to my beloved Mother, Lucile Sentell Milligan.  She loved and cared for her family and spent 18 years caring for me.  For 14 years, until the end of 2016, I acted as the principle care provider for her.  She was born in January of 1914 at Bluegrass Settlements, Knox County, Tennessee, raised on a farm and graduated High School as Valedictorian.  She was a kind-hearted and loving mother, worked hard all her life, and greatly enjoyed the company of friends and family.   In her middle years, she worked for J.C. Penny Company and later Idaho Department Stores.  She eschewed the need of aggressive competition, yet became an award winning sales person using her kindness and trustworthiness instead.  She suffered from Macular Degeneration which gradually became a real hindrance to her starting in 2004.  It gradually curtailed her reading, cooking, and her beloved quilting, as well as other simple little enjoyments and chores we all take for granted in our lives.  Mom was forever a Tennessee girl and never lost her Tennessee accent and charm.  She was an artist at quilting as well as life and one of the nicest human beings it has been the privilege of many to know.  It is through her that I witnessed the process of aging and the battle to endure despite sickness and frailty.  She was tough and brave until the end.

        Mom passed away peacefully on December 30th of 2016, three weeks short of her 103rd birthday.   She is missed - mightily - even to this day.

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