John Collias: a thousand distinguished citizens

1918 - 2017

The start: John George Collias was born in Fort Wayne on 12 June 1918, to Greek immigrants George and Georgia Collias (one rendering of his obituary prints 1917; the funeral chapel's text, and the age of 98 at his death in March 2017, support 1918, and the leg prints 1918 with the variant named). His art education began at an Ohio art program in the 1930s, briefly, and his real schooling was the family business in Fort Wayne, painting signs on its windows. The army took him west: he arrived in Boise, Idaho, in 1942 by train, a new recruit assigned to the Army Air Corps base at Gowen Field, and Idaho kept him.

The feature: After a first Boise run in the early 1950s, when he created the Idaho Statesman's weekly hand-illustrated feature "Round About the Boise Valley," and a Chicago interlude looking for illustration work, Collias returned to Boise in 1963 and ran into the Statesman's publisher on the street. The result was thirty years of "A Portrait of a Distinguished Citizen," a weekly portrait that took half the Sunday editorial page, over one thousand features between 1963 and 1993, miners and sheepherders, governors and senators, the whole cross-section of a state drawn one face a week by a Fort Wayne man. He painted landscapes all his life, designed the Idaho Bicentennial Medal, and drew the Bronco that graced the 50 yard line at Albertsons Stadium.

The book: In July 2010 over 225 of his works were gathered in the book John Collias: Round About the Boise Valley, written by his grandson, the journalist Nick Collias. He died in Boise on 29 March 2017, at 98, surrounded, his obituary says, by family and by the artwork he spent a lifetime creating. No Fort Wayne institution holds a comparable run of his work, which is itself the fact: the city's gift to Boise is measured in a thousand Sunday pages, and the home record keeps the birth, the window signs, and the train west.

Sources:

1. Alden-Waggoner Funeral Chapel, obituary of John George Collias (published 1 April 2017) (born 12 June 1918 in Fort Wayne to George and Georgia Collias; the Ohio art program; the window signs at the family business; "Round About the Boise Valley"; the 1963 return; the thirty years and one thousand portraits; died Boise, 29 March 2017, age 98).
2. Tim Woodward, Idaho Statesman column, 2 April 2017 (the 1942 train to Gowen Field; the Bronco at the 50 yard line; the Idaho Bicentennial Medal; the 2010 book and its 225 works).