Secret plans. (Editor's Comments).

I suppose I've been involved in more than one cover-up in my life, but perhaps the most secretive was in my elementary school years. It happened one summer when my city cousins from Illinois were visiting my grandfather's farm in Southern Indiana. The three of us were playing in a large forest bordering our cornfields. We decided to make a secret hideout. Daily we planned, and when we had free time, we would sneak deep into the woods with axes, saws, bailer twine, and other necessities "borrowed" from our grandfather's barn. With every trip into the woods, our hide-out became more extensive and elaborate. It was a compound of sheltered structures, all carefully concealed. We had lookout platforms in the trees with pull-up ladders, a pit for cooking, three sleeping areas with beds of compressed leaves, and, of course, a club/ meeting room where we could smoke. We worked on it, off and on, for two weeks before my cousins left, and it was time to go back to school. Once I was in school all day, I never visited the hideout again. As I think back on this, the fun was really in the planning of the thing, and then making it happen. We were quite proud of our accomplishment, but we never told a soul about how we had spent our time in the woods.

Anyway, the "scandal" happened a few months later, at the peak of the hunting season. A hunter came across our hideout, and soon the rumor spread that strangers, perhaps even criminals, had been hiding out in the woods about two miles from town. Someone even called the county sheriff. I think my grandfather figured it out, but he never said anything. For sure, I never confessed. It became a "rural legend" of small proportions that diminished even further in time. Eventually the summer visits ceased, and my clever, older cousins went off to college. One became a wealthy building contractor, the other a successful architect. I became an art teacher and journalist, dedicated to truthful reporting.

I share this story as an example of the extent to which young people will go to satisfy the need to plan for ways to use the spaces around them. It also illustrates how the play activities of children often lead to important career choices in later life. As a young child, Frank Lloyd Wright built with boxed sets of wooden shapes and forms--called the Froebel Gifts. These early explorations with shapes, forms, and space led to his interest in architecture. Contemporary architect Frank Gehry remembers making little cities out of wood scraps with his grandmother.

People are, by nature, planners. Whether we plan temporary spaces like secret hideouts, or permanent shelters like public housing, we are all involved, in some way, with organizing the spaces and places we use.

The articles in this issue are in one way or another connected to the notion of artists as planners. As planners, artists use perspective, they plan ways to organize, they arrange forms in space. As students of art, all young people in our schools need to learn how to plan for more effective use of the spaces and places we inhabit. And, there need be nothing secretive about it!

Eldon Katter, Editor