By Staff
Besides being a talented artist, Leon Pray was quite good doing sculptures
Roberta had two that he had done. They were done on a fungus that grows on the trunk of a tree. They are white and scalloped and look like a mushroom.
He did his sculptures on the underside of them.
The two she showed me, one was of a buck deer. The other was a pretty scene of two rabbits.
She also had a frog like the one Shirley had shown me. She said Leon made a bronze toad one time.
Leon's granddaughter said at one time Leon went down in a diving bell to sketch the coral reef of the Bahamas, which he used as a backdrop for one of his displays of fish he had mounted.
The entire Hall of Fishes was nearly all of Leon's work and his scenes from his 1929 diving in the Bahamas trip were said to be breathtaking.
He also took part in eight other collecting trips for the Field Museum.
Mr. Pray's work in those many years at the museum as told by a colleague, Leon Pray was an all-'round taxidermist, but also an artist, sculptor, craftsman and author.
Pray's work at the Field Museum was in all branches of the art, birds, small and large, mammals, fish, reptiles and as a background artist.
Leon once made a display featuring casts of his own hands showing the flint-knapping technique of Native Americans in producing stone and flint tools and weapons.
For this exhibit, he made his own tools and taught himself the process.
My two visitors told me that Leon had made four large paintings of the four seasons, spring, summer, fall and winter.
They each have two of the pictures.
I also received a 3 1/2-page e-mail from Leon's grandson, Lee Golwey, who lives in Grand Marais, Mich., and this was full of a lot about Leon Pray.
As someone who is interested in old Dowagiac people, I found that Mr. Pray's life was one of another old Dowagiac boy who made good.
Probably not too many around now even knew him.
As a kid, I can remember that in the basement of the old library, it was full of stuffed animals and birds, and I took it to probably have been the work of Leon, but in doing some research, I found out they were not.
They were the collection of a local man by the name of Elias Pardee, and I will write about him in another article as he also was an old Dowagiac boy.
E-mail him at cardinalcharlie@hotmail.com.