Editor's Note: The following story was originally published in The Courier on Nov. 22, 2003, written by J. Steven Dillon.
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As art sales go, an upcoming one involving about 30 paintings and sketches of the late Louis D. Myers wouldn't seem so extraordinary. That is, unless you knew Louie.
Louie, who died of cancer at the age of 84 earlier this year, was one of Findlay's street people.
He could regularly be seen in and around the Jones Building, that enclave for artists in downtown Findlay, where he worked for many years as the janitor, or walking back and forth to his home on Center Street.
But unbeknownst to many, the little hunched man who always wore a hat was an accomplished painter, writer and poet. He was also a storyteller.
Local artist Phil Sugden and writer Carole Elchert, who befriended Louie in the early 1980s, got to know him better than most.
"He pretended to be a cranky old man," Elchert says. "But people who knew him knew better, because they knew how he really was. They knew about his sense of humor and his generous heart."
Sugden says Louie, an avid reader until his eyesight failed, was a self-taught, self-motivated artist who could paint any subject with ease.
He painted landscapes, animals and portraits, but thrived on creating things that elicited strong reactions from the people who viewed them.
He lived vicariously through the books he read and it came out in his short stories, poems and paintings, Sugden says. He had a very active fantasy life.
One of Louie's most provocative paintings featured an overweight, nude Elizabeth Taylor and a grizzly bear. Another time he painted a picture of abstract artist Louise Fishman with her pants down.
"Louie liked to shock people with his work," Sugden says. "He was very opinionated about modern art. He hated it."
Louie would also toy with controversial issues of the day. In a painting on the Equal Rights Amendment, a naked Louie is being roasted literally by a group of bare-breasted females.
At times, his work would annoy members of the Findlay Art League but not enough to prevent that group from honoring Louie with a lifetime achievement award in 2000.
The runt of Dr. Mack and Martha Myers' six sons, Louie left school after the seventh grade, but spent countless hours at the library reading the classics, westerns and mythology.
His energy was eventually directed to art as a teenager Louie is said to have ridden his bike to Toledo just to take art lessons and he grew to favor the paintings of John Singer Sargeant, and the writing of Rudyard Kipling, whose style he would one day imitate in his book The Ore With the Long Black Air.
In the early 1940s, Louie was employed at a factory in Piqua helping build B-24 planes for WWII. Later he would visit a brother in Mexico, travels which would surface in his writings and paintings and storytelling.
He later worked at his brother's sign shop in Findlay, where he painted the Old Dutch beer murals on the sides of trucks and on billboards. He also supported himself by raking leaves and shoveling walks.
Louie, who never married, drank or smoked, and never had a driver's license, died on Mother's Day. With the exception of a distant niece and nephew he was his family's last member.
Sugden inherited the Center Street home where Louie's family had lived since the early 1900s, and with it a stash of long forgotten paintings and sketches, signed Tio Luis Uncle Louie.
Some of the artwork dates back to Louie's teenage years.
Some pieces have already been hung on the walls of the home, while others will be sold at a silent auction beginning Wednesday at the Jones Building. (Appointments to see the offerings can be made by calling Sugden at 419-422-0498).
Elchert says it's satisfying to know Louie's art will be going to people who knew him as more than just a street person.
"I can't think of anything that Louie would like more, than to have his work displayed on someone's wall, and to have them tell their own Louie story," she says. "That, I think, would make him very proud."
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