By Stuart Mitchner
A scrapbook of photos I took years ago in India opens on images of grain elevators outside the town I was born in, Hutchinson, Kansas, which is just over 300 miles south of Omaha, in the neighboring state of Nebraska. Forming a sort of skyline, the elevators tower over the cars of the freight train below.
The cover of Tom Kuhlman’s extraordinary book Baroque Nebraska: An Architectural Entertainment (Author House 2007) depicts “Elevator No. 1 of the Kuhlmannopolis Grain Company,” which, in the author’s words, takes “the form of classical columns, which is only appropriate as both grain elevators and columns are basically tall cylinders.” A unique combination of artist and humorist whose grand hotels, railway stations, and monuments have something in common with the architecture of filmmaker Wes Anderson, Kuhlman searches “tirelessly for the magnificence he knows will be found on the Great Plains if only he can book passage on one of the Cunard liners which sail up (or down) the Platte, Niobrara, and Dismal Rivers to Kuhlmannopolis.” After citing the Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian precedents, he enthuses on the “delightful grandeur” of his own Elevator No. 1: “Encrusted with gold, it achieves the ultimate in baroque magnificence by taking the Solomonic form first used in the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem and visible today in Bernini’s baldachino over the high altar of Saint Peter’s in Rome….” At this point, having already experienced a fair sample of Kuhlman’s wit, I was ready when the sentence moved on to “the bedposts in the chamber of Mr. Frederick Vanderbilt in Hyde Park, New York, whose hubris somewhat resembled that of Quirinus Kuhlmann and the so-disant Duke of Brunswick Negenborn.” Herewith, the royal artist suggests that the “enjoyment of this picture would be heightened by listening to a recording of the 1943 Broadway musical O Nebraska!”
Don’t worry too much about details of geography and lineage on Planet Kuhlman. You know where he’s coming from as soon as you look up Baroque Nebraska online: “Somewhere east of Laramie, south of Pierre, west of Ottumwa and north of Wichita lies a city unsurpassed in the magnificence of its baroque architecture. It rivals Paris, Rome, Prague, or Habsburg Vienna. This city of Kuhlmannopolis was conceived by the 17th-century Silesian visionary, chiliast, heresiarch, charlatan, and first Poet Laureate of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, Quirinus Kuhlmann, known for writing 1200 heroic couplets in twelve hours and for his invention of one machine for the writing of sonnets and another for the teaching of all knowledge.”
You should also know that the great cathedral basilica of Kuhlmannopolis, nearly as large as Saint Peter’s in Rome, was “financed by the proceeds from a bake sale and a car wash” and that the social clubs of the city “are so exclusive that no one has ever applied for membership.” Also pictured in Baroque Nebraska are some of “the world’s most opulent railroad stations, from which one may take the trains of the Sioux City, Homer and Southern Electric Railway to Alaska, Chile, or ancient Greece or Rome.”
At the center of all this magnificence is the real-life city of Omaha and Creighton University, where Thomas A. Kuhlman served on the faculty from 1967 until his death in September 2022.
How Did This Happen?
Although I wasn’t sure even after reading the above samples, I knew I had to see Baroque Nebraska one on one as soon as I read the biographical note: “Tom Kuhlman was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, where in the 1940s he was thrilled to learn that the city’s Terminal Tower was then the tallest building in the world outside New York. He immediately began drawing great buildings, and continued to do so during class lectures at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where he took an Honors Bachelor of Arts in Classical Languages, and at Brown, where he received his M.A. and Ph.D. in American Civilization and met his future wife, Mary Louise Haynes, whom he dragged around the U.S., Europe and Central America to admire baroque architecture. During his three years of teaching at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., his delight in grand urban spaces increased…. Inspired by trips from Barcelona to Budapest, County Cork to Constantinople, he led walking tours of Omaha and frequently gave lectures on Nebraska architecture.”
A Meeting of Sorts
My passion for big cities and tall buildings began even before the train from Indianapolis to New York passed by Cleveland’s Terminal Tower at night. We were on our way to a Christmas week in Manhattan, I was 10, and, like Kuhlman, I was excited to know that this floodlit wonder was the tallest building outside New York City.
In the years to come, although I was no artist (an understatement for the ages), my labored-over pencil drawings of the Terminal Tower, and numerous American skyscrapers and skylines eventually overflowed my desk along with 90 pages of a novel I called The Highway to Adventure. About a quarter century later, Little, Brown published my travel memoir, Indian Action: An American Journey to the Great Fair of the East. Seven years later, in 1983, the same publisher released my novel Rosamund’s Vision, about an imaginary, gloriously un-magnificent New Jersey city. You could say that’s where I “met” Tom Kuhlman by way of his review in Best Sellers, which I reread every now and then when I need cheering up. What impresses me every time is that he alone caught the spirit of the novel and expressed it in terms of perfect pitch appreciation. One sentence in the review has special resonance now that I’ve followed Kuhlman’s tireless search for magnificence in Baroque Nebraska. After referring to my novel’s hero as “a radio talk-show host who obsessively tries to make his listeners see themselves as poets and their horrible city as magical,” he finds that as the novel ends, “the unlikely becomes convincing and the ordinary becomes transcendent.”
Hail Kuhlmannopolis!
Kuhlman’s epigraphs range from Alexander Pope (“A little learning is a dangerous thing”) to Miss Piggy (“Pretentious? Moi?”). The front matter also includes “a warning to parents and guardians of minor chidren that some of the material in this book should not be used in the execution of homework assignments, for study for tests, or for preparation for high school or college entrance examinations.” As for the introduction, it includes almost three pages of tributes to Kuhlmannopolis from Virgil, Shakespeare, and Milton to Anne Bradstreet and Ralph Waldo Emerson.