Mack's Hangar:
Gutzon Borglum
The Dreamer...
By Bob Mack, mack@fly-low.com

While researching a story on Mount Rushmore, Rapid City, SD, as a flying adventure, I stumbled on this enlightening story.

Most of us, when young, know that death is out there somewhere.  If we manage to live, sometimes in spite of ourselves, past the age of twenty-five we know that death is close.  Now we reach fifty…  at best there could be twenty more years of quality life or less.  At this point we start to slow down, looking for that easy chair when we reach sixty.

We have all known people who worked with one goal in mind, reach sixty-two and retire.  Close the business and sit on the fishing boat spending that social security money.  With that knowledge, we see a lot of those folks die within a couple of years after they close the business or retire from their job.  Dying from the absence of a challenge of doing things.

If you’re twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, or seventy…  this story is for you.  It is a story for all of us.  This story is especially for those who have closed their mind and eyes to life after sixty.  I am here to tell you that life only BEGINS AT SIXTY.

Now back to the spirit of the story.  As I said earlier, the original plan was to go to Mount Rushmore and surrounding area for an aviation story.  That story I wrote and you can read it in this issue.  The real story was not that story.  The real story is this story.  However, you say that so far all I have done is ramble about old age.  Well, read the rest of the story.

If I ask you who was Gutzon Borglum, what would you say?

Gutzon Borglum is a name I had not remembered hearing.  With that name it sounds like he was from overseas.  He wasn’t… he was from Idaho, a father and husband.  Gutzon was an artist.  In 1927, he was to take on a job that would last the rest of his life.  His work will last for 10,000 years or more.  You now have a good idea what his life’s work was to be.   Yes, it was the Mount Rushmore Monument of the four Presidents of the United States.

The project took fourteen years to complete.  Gutzon was in charge of the project and was present during those years.  He stumped for money.  He worked on the faces.  He was in charge of the men, who numbered from two to two hundred (depending on the funding available).  The work was hard; the money for him and his family was miniscule.  The pressures were great but he withstood them all and completed the project, almost.  The last drilling on the faces took place on October 31, 1941.  The project was not completed to the point Borglum had planned.   Due to his untimely death (Borglum died while on a trip to Chicago on March 6, 1941, as a result of a minor operation), lack of funding and World War II, the project was completed to the point it is today by his son Lincoln Borglum. Thus, a “Monument for the Ages” is complete.

So what makes this man so special?  He was very talented, needless to say.  What makes him so special is that in 1927 when the Mount Rushmore Project began he was fifty-eight years old.  Only a few years away from, what most of us call, the retirement years.  This uncommon man began a mammoth project the year he turned fifty-eight.  In the fourteen years following his fifty-eighth birthday he provided the world with one of the all time great works of art that will last for thousands of years.  I will never be able to look at a picture of Mount Rushmore without thinking of that fifty-eight year old man who took on the project.  He was seventy-two when he died.

I have placed his name on a plaque for my desk to remind me on those days I feel down and out just what can be done in the time remaining.  You see I am fifty-seven.  So my life must be just beginning.

And so it goes…….

“Hence, let us place there, carved high, as close to heaven as we can, the words of our leaders, their faces, to show posterity what manner of men they were.  Then breathe a prayer that these records will endure until the wind and rain alone shall wear them away.”  ~ Gutzon Borglum

Note: Information for this article taken from “Mount Rushmore, the Story Behind the Scenery,” by Lincoln Borglum.