PHOTOGRAPH BY HANNA ROSE GOODBAR
Clyde Goodbar with the Cloar painting of his grandfather, on display at the Hyde Family Foundation.
Dear Editor,
Anna Traverse’s December 2023 cover story, “An Afternoon with Barbara and Pitt Hyde” mentioned a painting in the Hyde Foundation collection, titled Joe Goodbody’s Terrible Ordeal. That painting has never been displayed in a public gallery and cannot be found on the internet. I was especially interested because “Joe Goodbody” was actually my grandfather, Joe Goodbar.
Our December 2023 issue.
I’m originally from West Memphis and met Carroll a number of times. My father worked on the farm of Charlie Cloar (Carroll’s father) and went to school with Carroll until the 1920s. I had seen the Joe Goodbody painting in Cloar’s 1977 book Hostile Butterflies, and when The Crossroads of Memory: Carroll Cloar and the American South was published in 2012, in his own words Carroll verified that “Joe Goodbody” was indeed my grandfather.
I had never known what happened to my grandfather after he left this area in the 1920s, or what his “terrible ordeal” was, and it took me 70 years to solve the mystery.
An item on my “bucket list” was to have my picture taken with that painting, which finally happened on July 22, 2024, when Mrs. Hyde’s executive secretary arranged the photograph shown here. I also hoped to use that painting on the cover of my own book about my family, Whatever Happened to Mr. Goodbar?, which I published in 2022 (below).
My link with Carroll Cloar doesn’t end there. Your readers may find it interesting that at least three of his other paintings feature my relatives. One is on display at the Hirshhorn Museum, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
I wasn’t able to use Carroll’s painting, so instead I used one of my own, showing Gibson Bayou Church outside Earle, Arkansas. The little church is about a mile south of the Cloar plantation where my grandfather and father sharecropped for Charlie Cloar. My father is, in fact, depicted in one of Carroll’s well-known paintings, Faculty and Honor Students, Lewis School, sitting alongside a younger version of Carroll himself. He was three years younger than my father.
I also have an original roster card listing all the students for that year with my father, Carroll, and a couple of other relatives. About 50 of my relatives are buried at the Gibson Bayou Church Cemetery, where Carroll’s ashes were scattered after his death in 1993. If I die in the area, I’ll be buried there also.
By the way, last year the committee that maintains the old church sold several of my books in a silent auction to raise funds for the building’s upkeep.
My link with Carroll Cloar doesn’t end there. Your readers may find it interesting that at least three of his other paintings feature my relatives. One is on display at the Hirshhorn Museum, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. My daughter is building a database on all of the Cloar works, especially those since 1977.
I know your magazine has published a number of articles about Carroll Cloar and his legacy [among them “The Art and Life of Carroll Cloar” by Marilyn Sadler, June 2011], and his followers might be interested in the facts behind Joe Goodbody’s Terrible Ordeal as well as other paintings that involve my family.
Clyde Goodbar
El Paso, Texas
