"Joe Laufer Is Ready to Observe Columbus's Feat"

by Ellen Graham, Staff Reporter

in The Wall Street Journal (May 16, 1991, pp. A1, A9)

But the official feat has run aground, with 1992 bash broke and

storm battered.

     As he stands before groups of schoolchildren in his tights,

doublet and cape, Joseph Laufer may not be the spitting image of

Christopher Columbus.  But he has the look.  The 56-year-old

amateur historian and "events person" also has some of the

explorer's pluck.  He certainly has thrown himself into

commemorating whatever it was that Columbus, an Italian, did for

Spain in 1492.  It has become one of the touchiest events in

American history.

     Some of the splashier official celebrations planned for next

year's 500th anniversary of Columbus's epic voyage have run

aground.  The Christopher Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee

Commission, created by Congress in 1984 to coordinate events large

and small, is broke.  Its chairman, John Goudie, resigned recently

amid charges of mismanagement that are currently under

investigation by a House subcommittee.  With the anniversary less

than 18 months away, the commission is scrambling to get back on

track.

     Money troubles have caused some of the states to scale back

but not cancel their own quincentenary plans.  "It's really going

to be a pretty sad state of affairs compared to what it should be,"

says Florida state senator Curt Kiser of his state's commemoration,

which has fallen victim to a budget crunch.

Tough Sell

     Nor have corporate sponsors taken up the slack.  Columbus is

a tough sell in board rooms when companies are laying off workers,

Mr. Kiser says.

     It doesn't help that the explorer has become a lightning rod

for ethnic sensitivities.  Native Americans, Hispanics and Italians

have been squabbling over the revisionist view of Columbus as a

conquistador and despoiler who can hardly be said to have

discovered America.  Accordingly, a delicate new terminology has

been crafted for all quincentenary discourse: The "discovery" of

America, for example, is now known as the "encounter" of two

cultures.

     With officialdom in disarray, it has fallen to certain

stalwarts to carry the torch for Columbus.  One is Daniel Amato, a

member of the Knights of Columbus and a collector of memorabilia

from the 1893 Chicago world's fair that marked Columbus's 400th

anniversary--a year late.  Mr. Amato has erected a Fiberglas statue

of the explorer near his mall of antique shops in Columbus, Wis. 

"Who's going to come to Columbus, unless you promote Columbus?" he

says.

     Then there is Anne Paolucci, a playwright and academic whose

New York organization, Columbus: Countdown 1992, has commissioned

literary and artistic works related to the Columbus epic.  "Our

artists are doing marvelous things, yet the flak is getting all the

publicity," she says.

     Columbus, Ohio, is staging the only major exposition in the

U.S.  Marjory Pizzuti, who is directing the city's yearlong tribute

to its namesake, says she hopes to draw tourists and make the city

"more top-of-the-mind."  Given what she calls the "ambiguity" of

the events of 1492, she also sees it as a chance "to explore the

good, the bad and the ugly of what happened."  Among the scheduled

attractions starting this October: a flower festival, a replica of

the flagship Santa Maria, body-building contests and--to honor the

Italians' development of the double-entry bookkeeping--an exhibit

of "500 Years of Accounting."

     But few have displayed the zeal of Joseph Laufer.  For the

past six years--which is nearly as long as it took Columbus to

wheedle the money for his voyage from Queen Isabella--Mr. Laufer

has been engrossed in the quincentenary: issuing a newsletter for

fellow enthusiasts around the world, creating a museum of

Columbiana behind his Vincetown, N.J., house and carrying his myth-

busting version of the explorer's story to gatherings of

schoolchildren.

     As he crisscrosses the country, he is amazed that Columbus

isn't more important to people than he is.  "That's where the

commission totally let us down," he says.  The commission "didn't

learn anything from Columbus.  He was a risk-taker.  But, now,

nobody wants to offend anybody, so as a result we get nowhere."

     The commission, regrouping under new management, insists it

can turn things around and that hundreds of local events will take

place next year.  Several newly announced national projects seek

private financing.  Jim Kuhn, the new executive director, says:

"We're very positive about the direction we're taking now."

'My Isabella'

     Mr. Laufer isn't holding his breath.  After years of pursuing

his passion at his own expense (he is on leave from a job as a

community college administrator and $50,000 in debt), he recently

found a patron.  "My Isabella," is his term for New American

Crossings, Inc., a Laguna Niguel, Calif., company that promotes

quincentenary projects.  It is underwriting Mr. Laufer's speaking

tour as a way of displaying a mural reproduction of Emanuel

Leutze's 1855 painting of Columbus's departure from Spain.  The

original, owned by investors, is on loan to the Smithsonian

Institution.  Mr. Laufer lugs the collapsible, 8-by-10-foot copy

with him wherever he goes.

     A recent stop on his mural tour was in Boalsburg, Pa., the

site of a strong tangible link to Christopher Columbus in the New

World.  Columbus never set foot in sleepy Boalsburg, but the

contents of his family's chapel in northern Spain found their way

here in 1919.  Col. Theodore Davis Boal had married into the

Columbus family while visiting Europe, and his wife, Mathilde,

inherited the chapel.  The Boalsburg museum has been designated a

National Historic Site.

     Heirlooms include an admiral's desk, an explorer's cross of

the sort used to claim new territory, and two purported fragments

of the True Cross.  Mr. Laufer was invited to kick off a year and

a half of quincentenary events in Boalsburg.

     The chapel is but one stop on Mr. Laufer's three-day swing

through Boalsburg.  Dressed in his Columbus costume, fashioned by

the seamstress who makes his daughter's prom gowns, he enthralls

several hundred local schoolchildren with his warts and all

rendition of the explorer's life.

Man of His Time

     Mr. Laufer faces up to the decimation of the Taino population

of the West Indies following Columbus's arrival there, and to the

environmental damage European settlement brought.  He talks about

Columbus as a single parent who had to leave his son, Diego, with

Franciscan priests during his voyages.  As for Columbus's all-male

crew, he explains: "They didn't know about equal rights back then."

     Mr. Laufer is a middle-of-the-roader about Columbus; his

mission is more to educate than celebrate.  Still, he has little

sympathy for the Columbus-bashers who would belittle the explorer's

achievements.  "You can't lay everything at the footsteps of

Columbus or the Spanish," he says.

     Like others associated with the quincentenary, he has learned

to watch his language.  He avoids the word "discovery," with its

Eurocentric bias.  "Celebration" and "melting pot" are other

taboos.

     However, he says he drew the line when the National Park

Service tried to edit a passage in the children's activity manual

he wrote for the agency.  In it, he had Columbus bestowing the name

"Indians" on the natives of what he thought were the Indies.  The

Park Service wanted to have Columbus name them "Native Americans."