Joe Minter's Magic City

Art was not an escape from this world; if it existed, Mr. Minter didn’t know about it. What thrived was ingenuity, improvisation. “I didn’t have toys,” he said. “I started making stuff with whatever I could get my hands on.”

A cigar box, perforated with an ice pick and filled with gravel, turned into a rattle. A tree stump, a nail and a 10-foot strip of tin became a twirler-whirler. “It was really just a child mind, inquiring,” he recalled.


He assembled school furniture until the plant shut down. He learned the trade of auto-body repair, but the dust and paint were punishing. He labored on road crews and construction sites until they went away. And then, at 50-something, he realized that he was retired. (Mr. Minter’s pension evaporated when his old employer closed shop. The couple survives on Mrs. Minter’s small retirement, Social Security and providence.)

You could also say that this was when his life’s real work began. One afternoon, as Mr. Minter recalls, he headed outside, gathered the windblown trunks of a gum tree and started carving African totems.

Mrs. Minter offered neither encouragement nor rebuke. “He told me that it was a vision from God,” she said. “And when someone tells me God talk to him, I don’t interfere.”

Mr. Minter chimed in: “I was going back to what they were doing in Africa. You know how they say there was a Bronze Age and the Iron Age. There was a wood age. But they never did keep a record of the wood age.”

Read.