LOVE’S LABOR’S FOUND
Wilton resident turns parents’ letters into book
CLIFTON PARK, N.Y. >> Author, actor and Wilton resident Richard Cerasani lamented that email is doing away with the wonderful poetry found in handwritten letters. Cerasani should know; he wrote a book based upon love letters between his mother and father from 1940.
In a presentation earlier this month at the Clifton Park-Halfmoon Library in Clifton Park he read some of the letters that formed the basis of his book, “Love Letters From Mount Rushmore: The story of a marriage, monument and a moment in history”.
The book was published in 2014 by the South Dakota Historical Society Press.
As an experienced actor working under the name Richard Caine, Cerasani enjoys the written word and speaking before a live audience. He played the role of villain Bill Watson for several years on “General Hospital.”
“I wouldn’t be standing here in front of you right now had I not stumbled into an attic in Saratoga (Springs) and found an old trunk,” he said. “It was where my mother lived. The trunk was filled with letters, love letters between my mother and father. I had to make a decision. Do I read these love letters?”
It took Cerasani two to three years before he could bring himself to read them all. What he found opened his eyes to a loving relationship that had weathered hard times and distance.
The letters between Arthur and Mary Cerasani during that time period give insight into post-depression America as well as a couple’s deep love for each other.
Cerasani’s father, Arthur, was a sculptor who spent seven months in 1940 working on Mount Rushmore. The book describes the physical hardships and the internal artistic conflicts he dealt with as he came to realize his job at the monument was to help rather than sculpt.
“This my dear is a weary life,” Arthur Cerasani wrote in one letter. “I hope I may be able to sculpture with Borglum. That may help. There’s no play all work and more work-up at 6:30 - to work at 7:30 work until 12:00 one half hour for lunch and back to work, until 4:00 wash eat and that is all. No where to go…”
Arthur Cerasani died in 1970 at age 60. His son, Richard, said he knew him as a sculptor and an art instructor. He admitted he did not know of the difficulties his father had faced as a young artist with a wife and two small children.
As he spoke Richard Cerasani wove a story that started with two young people in Rochester, a girl from upscale New England stock who fell for the son of an immigrant family from Italy. They married and struggled and when times got really tough they separated and went back to their parents’ homes.
When sculptor Gutzon Borglum, the man behind the Mt. Rushmore monument, came to Rochester he made a tentative offer for Arthur Cerasani to come work for him in South Dakota on the project.
The couple was overjoyed when, after a long delay, the Western Union offer from Borglum eventually arrived. Arthur
Cerasani was going to work as a sculptor on a national project funded by the federal government. What he found in Rapid City, S.D. was far different than what he had imagined. The living conditions were raw. “People are happy with crudity and filth,” he wrote home to his wife. “Ice forms in your ears. No way one can take a bath. Just a can of water.” When given the job to survey the mountain, something he knew nothing about, he wrote his wife again. In return she sent him books on surveying. His pay rate at the monument was 65 cents an hour. “Dad thought he was going to Mt. Rushmore to sculpt with Borglum,” Richard Cerasani said. “That wasn’t the case, but he needed the money.” At one point Mary Cerasani left her two young children with her parents in Rochester and joined her husband temporarily in Rapid City. She became a tour guide and was paid 25 cents per person. “They had no running water, lived in a tent and had to use outhouses,” Richard Cerasani said. “These are things I never knew.” As the U.S. began to get involved in World War II the federal money stopped and Arthur Cerasani left the site. He returned home to Rochester where he became a pioneering art instructor. He and his wife went about living their lives and raised three boys. The monument seen today is how he left it. Mary Cerasani spent years teaching in the Rochester area and later joined the Peace Corps where she served two years in Thailand at age 69. She died in 2004. “Mother was steady and faithful and determined that (the marriage) was going to work,” Richard Cerasani said. “When dad would get down and say things like, maybe you married the wrong guy, she would just say, you work at it. That’s how it gets done.”