Sketching Life Brings a Grin to Dying Artist

Cleveland Montgomery has cancer. It affects the way he walks (which is slowly), the way he talks (which sounds like molasses dripping over gravel) and the way he draws (which, to him, is everything).

Take that away, he says, and “you really are messin’ with a life.”

Montgomery, 53, came to art the hard way. He gave up drinking 17 years ago and almost overnight endured a dramatic transformation. He said he discovered a lifelong talent for drawing suddenly wanted to express itself “big time.”

Simple sketches became creations that adorned an easel. Before too long, people were willing to pay for Montgomery’s art. The mention of this brings a sly, sweet smile to a round, rough-hewn face.

Not that he’s ever gotten rich. Most of his sketches bring $25 to $75, although some “on the high end” score as much as $800 or $1,000. Monty, as his friends call him, has had his work shown at a gallery in La Jolla and at the Educational Cultural Complex, but the part he relishes is having an identity:

Monty the artist.

Rita Marino, who works at American Jewelers on Broadway, first met Montgomery several years ago. She said he came in the store to buy a ring and kept coming back just to socialize with the workers. He and his art are, by now, familiar to anyone who works there.

“His work is down to earth--it’s him and the part of America he comes from (East Texas),” Marino said. “His sketches are from life, his boyhood mostly. They’re hard-scrabble and tough, like he is. They do justice to the fact that he’s a character, one of the more colorful I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting.”

M’Lafi Thompson, cultural affairs officer for the Educational Cultural Complex, goes one better. She called Cleveland Montgomery an under-appreciated master and a San Diego treasure whose work she has often exhibited.

“His work is historical,” Thompson said. “He paints . . . life ! It’s black life in San Diego, and from his experience (as a child growing up in East Texas). He’s been around a long time and not much has gotten by him. His gallery is in an area of San Diego where a lot of life passes by him every day. Why, this man even painted Einstein black. That one I have in my collection.

“Cleveland is quite a storyteller from his painting. He has an affinity for painting black cowboys, which is of huge historical significance. We don’t think of black cowboys, but history was full of them.

“I don’t feel that justice has been done to Cleveland as an artist, in terms of how he’s perceived by the mainstream. He’s known by a lot of people, but he hasn’t gotten the recognition he deserves. And now, he’s dying. I know this: Cleveland is a man who eats and lives his art. All he’s ever wanted to do, since I’ve known him, is draw and paint.”

Montgomery is a fixture in Southeast San Diego, where he has lived since 1966, when he was discharged from the Navy. At his Imperial Avenue studio, folks are always dropping by, either to look at the latest “Monty” or just to say hi.

He has photographs on the wall from “friends” and “community associates”--Rep. Jim Bates (D-San Diego), attorney Floyd Morrow or other black artists, especially young ones, whom he has taught in classes or more informally. He prefers the one-on-one method, which, in his case, is nothing more elaborate than “talkin’ about drawin’ or talkin’ about life.”

Rita Marino marvels that Montgomery’s lung cancer seems not to have slowed him or curbed his ebullient mood. Chemotherapy has, however, freed the hair from his head, which shines in the light of the studio.

“I have two to three more years, tops,” Montgomery said. “I’m going to give it all I can.”

Montgomery, who, while he works, tunes in to country and Western or the music of Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith, may have lived those blues as deeply as anyone.

He grew up as one of nine children in Quitman, Tex., the son of a farmer and livestock man who did what he could to put food on the table. Montgomery, who was married once, has no children. He blames most of his past mistakes on the booze he’s left behind. He now lives with “a lady friend” who takes “real good care” of him.

Last fall, he went to the hospital with what he thought was flu. He complained of back pains and said it felt as though “the cold was skating around my back.” He said doctors discovered “a gray spot on my lungs,” and soon, he was diagnosed as having a cancerous tumor.

To this day, Montgomery puffs unfiltered Pall Malls, the smoke from which hangs over the studio like a cloud, softly obscuring a set of almost perfect, keyboard-like teeth. Despite the cigarette habit, he believes he incurred the malignancy from having been exposed to radiation during a series of atomic tests in the Marshall Islands in 1956. At the time, he was stationed there in the Navy.

He said a similar flu set in shortly after he quit drinking in 1972, at which time the Navy refused to release his medical records to a private physician.

“I was at (a civilian) hospital, seeing this doctor, and the next thing I know, I’m being picked up by a taxi and taken to Balboa Naval Hospital because the Navy won’t release my records,” Montgomery said. “Don’t that seem fishy to you?”

Dr. David Palchak, a fellow of the Division of Hematology and Oncology at UC San Diego School of Medicine, is Montgomery’s physician. He said it is possible that Montgomery incurred the tumor from having been exposed to radiation during the tests.

“Radiation is a risk factor for cancer, as smoking is,” Palchak said. “It’s impossible to know whether one or the other caused the cancer. However, radiation and smoking have more than an additive effect in the risk for lung cancer and, in fact, may have a multiplicative effect.”

Palchak said that Montgomery, whose mood and outlook he labeled as strong and optimistic, has responded as well as could be expected to chemotherapy.

Montgomery has no proof of a Navy cover-up, only suspicions, and most people would scoff, considering his history as a smoker. Even so, he’s haunted by the memory of the tests, by the searing heat “and the colors, like more than you’ll ever see in a rainbow, and this enormous mushroom cloud risin’ into the sky.”

He started to draw the mushroom cloud.

“I was 18 years old, and we were not told of any danger. I don’t think anyone really knew then what radiation could do. As you know, all the tests now are underground. That ought to tell you something. If they did know anything, they weren’t telling us. The only protection we had was these little glasses they made us wear.”

A Navy spokesman in Washington declined comment but said “complaints of atomic veterans has been an ongoing controversy.”

Montgomery feels that if radiation even partly contributed to the cancer that’s corroding his body, he ought to be compensated. As it is, he receives free care through the Veterans Administration. He said his income is a Social Security disability payment and what little he earns as an artist. He considers making the rent a major victory.

“I can’t work,” he said. “I worked before as a printer but can’t do that no more. About all I can do now is draw, and can’t do much of that.”

Montgomery, who favors denim and cowboy boots, began to draw at age 7. He hails from the same East Texas piney woods as TV sage Bill Moyers, film star Sissy Spacek and rock diva Michelle Shocked.

Most of Montgomery’s East Texas art romanticizes, even idealizes, those moments of rural life. But, for the black child growing up innocently in the South, not all of the memories are romantic or ideal. Montgomery said he can’t remember racial differences being a problem in childhood, until an incident that happened when he was 12. His best friend was Junior Hartfield, a white youth who lived in an adjoining field. One day, he was confronted by Junior’s mother, whom he had known for years.

“She came out and said, ‘Cleveland, y’all quit playin’ so close to the road together. People are startin’ to call Junior a nigger lover.’ That pretty much ended the friendship.”

Despite the shock and ugliness of that moment, Montgomery said San Diego feels more racist than the East Texas of his childhood.

“I just can’t believe,” he said, that the city has one black City Council member, one black member of the County Board of Supervisors and that “so many folks seemed to weep and moan” about a street or a convention center being renamed for the Rev. Martin Luther King when the airport is named for a man some considered a Nazi sympathizer.

“This city has always been governed by a small group,” Montgomery said, “and they keep a lot of that . . . going.”

Much of Montgomery’s art, which is characterized by lines and shadows and which is always black and white, seems either a valentine or a retreat to Texas.

“Yonder” depicts a man who looks like Montgomery, heading to a fishing hole with pole in hand. Others speak of halcyon moments while hunting squirrels or pecans and blackberries.

“Look at this guy,” he said excitedly, “just walking down the road. Why, he could be heading from Wills Point to Winnsboro right now ,” referring to small Texas towns that left an indelible mark on his memory.

Suddenly, he sat back and sighed, and once again, flashed the trademark grin.

“For an old man who started out drawin’ cats and cartoons, I’d say I’ve done pretty good,” he said. “Can you believe it--I’ve even sold pictures in La Jolla. How’s that for a turnaround? Wonder what Junior’s old momma would say now?”