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"Letters from a Sandburg Docent" by Dr. John W. Quinley. ENJOY!
Dr. John W. Quinley, a retired college administrator and faculty member, was raised in Maywood, Illinois, just a few blocks away from where Sandburg lived 30 years earlier. He served as a docent for Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site for several years, and is the author of Discovering Carl Sandburg: The Eclectic Life of an American Icon (2022). He and his wife, Melissa, live in Hendersonville, North Carolina, just a few miles from Sandburg's former home. _______________________________________________________
#4 22 February 2024
Carl Sandburg reading to his grandchildren, Karlen Paula Steichen and John Carl Steichen (1945) [From the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign C450-008-002]
Remembering Karlen Paula
By John W. Quinley Dear Readers,
The Sandburgs moved to Connemara, their mountain farm
in Flat Rock, North Carolina, in the fall of 1945: Carl and his wife Paula,
their three adult children (Margaret, Janet, and Helga), and Helga’s young
children John Carl and Karlen Paula. Helga and her children lived at the farm
for seven years. I first learned about Carl
Sandburg’s life and his wide range of publications by reading “The Life and
Works of Carl Sandburg,” a section of the Official National Park Handbook for
Connemara. The section was written by Karlen Paula, who was known simply as
Paula. It traces Sandburg’s foundational years, the history of births and
residences, and highlights Sandburg as poet, newspaperman, children’s author,
biography of Lincoln, folk singer and musicologist, and novelist. This was the
same general format I used for my book,
Discovering Carl Sandburg. Paula also wrote a memoir,
My
Connemara. In it she portrays her life on the
farm replete with goats, chickens, horses, barns, extensive gardens, and more.
She shares stories about her ramblings over the estate’s pastures, woods, and
mountains, writing “this was the new world where I would grow up, exploring foot
by foot and day by day for a decade every stream, branch and cavern.” The memoir
also includes chapters about her mother, brother (now a retired engineer), her
grandfather and grandmother, her uncle Edward Steichen who often visited, and
the famous people who came to see the poet and historian. I recommended
My Connemara to
visitors who had taken the tour of the house. Paula returned to Western North Carolina in 1972 and
lived a short way from her childhood home. She married and became Paula Steichen
Polega. She was instrumental in helping the Park determine how best to prepare
the house for the public. She continued to help preserve the Sandburg legacy in
such activities as her interview for UNC TV where she shared what it was like
growing up with her famous grandparents. I met Paula at a community
read of Sandburg’s, The People, Yes.
I asked if she had recently seen the Dragon’s Limb on Little Glassy Mountain
that she described in her book as “a limb with a great snout and open mouth and
eye,” and shared that the “children looked on it with some awe and trod the
dragon’s domain with respect.” She hadn’t been back to it, so I told it was
still there, seventy years later, just extended further across the mountain
path.
Paula Steichen Polega passed away peacefully at her Hendersonville,
NC home on January 13, 2024. She was 80.
You can read her obituary at
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/name/paula-polega-obituary?id=54205093 Her grandfather wrote a poem
for her when she was only two that encapsulated what so many would feel about
Paula:
To fresh flower blooms. I love they spoken words as the shimmer of sun slants and the drift of rain. If I should believe in angels and meet one she would be somewhat like you. Until I come to know one angel worth cherishing I shall go on in my cherishing of thy face and Spoken words Thanks for reading,
John Quinley is the author of Discovering Carl
Sandburg: The Eclectic Life of an American Icon and is a former docent at
the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site in Flat Rock, North Carolina.
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