1988 Model Looks Like Original

--Recognizable despite the changes of nearly six decades, Nan Wood Graham reminisced about being a model for the stern-faced farmer’s daughter in her brother Grant Wood’s painting, “American Gothic.” Graham, now 88 and blind, lives in a convalescent hospital in Menlo Park, Calif. Wood was inspired by a house at Eldon in his native Iowa, Graham said. The home’s sole decoration was a second-story window in the form of a simple Gothic arch. Wood asked his family dentist, Byron McKeeby, 62, and Graham, then 30, to pose. McKeeby, dressed in overalls and holding a pitchfork, and Graham, hair drawn back and wearing an apron over a plain dress, stand solemnly in front of the house in the painting. After the work was complete, Graham became the target of farm women. “They thought that Grant was making fun of them. So they wrote to the newspaper all sorts of insults. The worst one was, ‘That woman’s face . . . would sour milk.’ ” Graham answered the critics in a letter. “I said that I posed for it and I was proud that I had. Well, the situation changed immediately. They were very apologetic and said they didn’t mean what they said.” Wood died in 1942. The Art Institute of Chicago owns “American Gothic.”

--A French mathematics professor has turned down a $136,000 research prize because he earns enough as a teacher. Alexander Grothendieck, 60, of Montpellier’s University of Science and Technology of Languedoc, wrote to the committee for the prestigious Swedish Craaford Prize to reject the prize. “Prof. Grothendieck is known for his radical views, but I must admit we are a bit surprised,” said Tord Ganelius of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Grothendieck was to share the prize with Pierre Deligne, of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N.J., for research in algebraic geometry. Grothendieck’s half of the prize will be returned to the prize fund.

--Some people in Brian Boitano’s hometown want to name part of a street after him, but they may be on thin ice. Sunnyvale, Calif., has a policy against naming streets after living persons. However, Al Reynolds, executive director of the Sunnyvale Chamber of Commerce, which proposed the name change to honor the Olympic gold medalist in men’s figure skating, noted that the one-block section of Willow Avenue proposed as Boitano Way has no businesses or residents to be inconvenienced by the name change. The stretch of road also runs alongside the old Sunnyvale Ice Palace building, where Boitano began skating. Boitano is on tour and could not be reached for comment.