Teacher Molds Generations Of Art Students

The chrysanthemum will always teach Eloise Scheetz something.

She’s painted it on canvases, china, even eggshells. Each time, it’s a challenge. But it’s also fun.

“Art should be fun,” Eloise insists. She believes this idea so completely that she still weeps over a young artist she taught years ago. His mother scorned his work.

Eloise has helped develop thousands of art-lovers in her eight decades in Coeur d’Alene. She began with the five children she taught in a one-room schoolhouse near Athol in 1932, picked up steam as a classroom teacher in Coeur d’Alene and moved on to adults after she retired.

Last fall, Coeur d’Alene gave its first Extraordinary Support of the Arts Award to Eloise.

“It doesn’t feel like I’ve done much,” she says. “I think people just asked me to do things and I said yes.”

She sketched fashion figures as a girl and studied art in high school and college, but never considered it for a career. She reached a wider audience teaching, especially when she moved to Harding Elementary in 1933.

Eloise encouraged her fourth-graders to experiment with paint, to drip paint on wet paper and watch it spread, to tell stories about their abstract work. She hung their creations in class, hallways and the cafeteria.

In her spare time, she studied art. Oils and watercolor at North Idaho College. Crafts with her women’s clubs. She joined Coeur d’Alene’s Art Association when it met in an old bus depot downtown and the town had no galleries.

Eloise organized art exhibits and demonstrations at the hospital, the churches, the mall. The tiny teacher was no crusader, but her passion was infectious. Art on the Green, Coeur d’Alene’s summer visual and performing arts festival, hasn’t operated a year without her help.

Age has slowed her hands that seek the perfect petal, but not her involvement.

“Art fulfills me,” she says. “And it keeps me connected.”

Listen up

Before you decide your baby just doesn’t listen to you, make sure he or she can hear you. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? But it’s hard to do in North Idaho because no hospital in the state has the equipment to test infant hearing.

Coeur d’Alene’s Kiwanis wants tongues wagging about that problem. The club’s invited Drs. Thomas deTar and Erik Halstenrud to its luncheon meeting at noon today at the Iron Horse, 407 Sherman Ave.

The doctors will explain the link between hearing and speech development. They’ll also explain what people need to do to get infant hearing screening in the community.

Your babies can’t tell you if they can’t hear you. Help them out. The luncheon is open to the public. Call 772-7247 for details.

Bag o’ riches

Coeur d’Alene’s Dorothy Block saved for 10 years before donating to the Multi Services Center, aka the food bank, last week. She dropped off a plastic sandwich bag filled with pennies that she’d found on Coeur d’Alene’s streets between 1986 and 1996.

On the attached note, she wrote that she’d stooped 400 times for $4. “It sure brightens the day,” says food bank coordinator Sandra Miller. At least it gives the day a copper glow.

Privy-leged information

North Idaho’s outhouses are nothing to turn up your nose at. There are some mighty fine models out there with padded seats, heaters, curtained windows, even magazine racks and battery-powered lights. They make the sometimes freezing trip to them worth it.

Where are the Panhandle’s best outhouses and what are their special touches? Flush out the choice models for Cynthia Taggart, “Close to Home,” 608 Northwest Blvd., Suite 200. Coeur d’Alene, ID 83814; fax to 765-7149; call 765-7128; or e-mail to cynthiat@spokesman.com.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo