Guestbook

In years past, I had so many wonderful but unfortunately infrequent times, because of distances, with Bruce over the decades of our friendship. I first got to knew him with Penny at Syracuse and visited them there. Before Bruce, Penny was a lifeguard at a lake I swam at in the late 1950’s and subsequently, in high school, I was, by complete chance, good friends with Penny’s sister, Linda. I have a book of Bruce's prints in my New Jersey home that are memories of those Syracuse days. Bruce and I exchanged art as you know from the little pot you own. Then I lost track of Bruce and Penny during the years of Alex’s life. Later I learned that Alex attended Clark University where his mother did and other tidbits of his brilliance that I could find. A fine man, Bruce has as a son who is also a fabulous man! One would expect nothing else with his genes! Penny and Bruce moved to Missouri and the last time they visited back East I saw them again in Mahwah, NJ at Linda’s home when I am sure they knew about Penny’s cancer but said nothing to me. Penny died and Bruce wrote about his mourning and then knowing Barb and what a wonderful, supporting woman and friend she was. I always regretted their thwarted plans to meet me I Paris. Bruce was happy with and deeply appreciated Barb as his partner and wife! She made him whole again. At some point after Bruce was in Missouri, he asked me to help critique the work of his Cottey College photo students. The quality of his teaching was excellent! I enjoyed doing it for so many years and helping him with this brilliant idea. After he retired, I deeply missed receiving carousels of slides and writing to his students as if they were my own. Bruce was a brilliant talent and I shall miss and mourn his departure from us, eternally grateful for his faithful friendship.

I always found Bruce to be a great role model for a life well lived. He traveled, taught, and shared his experiences and talents with us all. The world feels less adventurous without him.

I met Dr. Holman when I entered as a freshman at Cottey in 1987. He inspired me to trust my talent and keep creating. I thought of him recently when I moved house and discovered charcoals and pen and ink drawings I made in his classes. He remains one of my favorite professors and he will be missed. May his memory be a blessing during this sad time.

Dr. Holman was a patient & understanding advisor to me as a young art student. He taught me a lot and sparked a lot of creativity!

I'm now the only survivor of the family of our childhood. Back then, we were a family of five. Dad, ("Boots"), a commercial artist with roots in fine art, Mom, ("Marji") mother, housewife, and artist, Me, Bruce (two years younger) and Sue (four years younger). And it felt to me as if this was an eternal truth, something that would last forever. Now four of us are gone. Bruce and I were playmates, of course. We could more accurately be described as Bruce, the criminal mastermind, and me, his loyal henchman. We were fascinated with weapons, explosives, and toy soldiers, even casting our own. Our leaden heroes fell before salvos of firecrackers, again and again. We mercilessly bullied poor Sue, who always pushed back. It wasn't until years later that we came to value her. And to appreciate her sculpture. Bruce and I are still legendary in Overland Park, Kansas. The folks civilized us ---provided us with art materials and answered our questions ("How do you....") and set us on the road to art. Bruce was my Assistant Editor on the 1958 Kangaroo, the University of Kansas City's yearbook. When I got drafted into the Army, everything cchanged. I got shipped off to Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, and Bruce went on to take flying lessons, and to earn a scholarship at Syracuse, NY, and, presently, his doctorate. So when I returned to Kansas City with a small family of my own, Bruce was 'back East' and tied up with his own life. And we largely stayed apart --we did manage a few visits to each other, and a LOT of correspondence. I'll always be sorry he never finished "The Collected Works of the Brothers Holman." He drew a frontispiece for our cartoons: a uniformed park worker skewering scatted papers, holding one up to look at it, and laughing. We'd get onto a topic and swap cartoons about it --nothing formal, but fun. Zeppelins were delightful. Bruce sent one: the observation car, hanging empty by its cable, aloghside a lamppost as its telephone calls without success. It's obvious that the building next to the lamppost is a brothel. One of my replies was set in the English Channel: a giant sperm whale is broaching, looking up at the Zeppelin high above. In his thoughts, we see a little heart breaking... he has seen his angel. One of the things I miss most about both Bruce and Sue is batting ideas back and forth, solving problems, and creating ideas and projects. Sue never finished her 'Girl in the Mirror' --a woman stepping out of a mirror, looking back at her reflection. Sue came up with the solution to the mirror problem (well, you don't want to run bolts through a glass mirror). A bronze mirror, highly polished. Well, the bronze mirrors we see now are all from antiquity, and corroded to unusability, but new, they were quite serviceable. But the Girl never made it to Bronze... That's the trouble with creativity --there's always at least one project under way. You can't help but leave something unfinished. Bruce did leave a lot of finished work. D

I’ve had to remind myself that Bruce was 82 years old. To me, he is still young and strong – out there someplace, leaving his unique and substantial mark on the world. I still imagine him coming in from his weight room and kissing my cheek on his way to shower. I somehow believe the phone will ring or I’ll hear him coming in the front door. Parkinson’s took so much away from him. Every day brought yet another cruel heartbreak, but Bruce bore each pain, each loss with patient, stoic courage. Typical of Bruce is that he even found humor in the untenable, perfectly horrible disease that was chipping away at him, leaving him battered and brought low but never broken. Never ever broken. I have described this ordeal as being hit by a train when I didn’t even know I was on the track. My heart is broken in two with one side filled memories while the other died with Bruce. Knowing that he is really gone is the worst agony I could ever imagine but I could never ever regret even one moment I had with him.