Lines and Spaces of Peggy Levine By Gage McKinney
Reprinted from The Union of Nevada County. On July 21, 2025, the City of Grass Valley unveiled the “Peggy & Howard Levine Citizen Star” on the Walk of Fame at Auburn & Main streets.
“I love line,” said Grass Valley artist and printmaker Margaret “Peggy” Swan Levine in a 2005 interview. “I like to draw and to surprise people with my concept of space.”
Peggy began her exploration of line and space as a girl dancing ballet and continued in another media when in 1965 the San Francisco Institute of Art introduced her to printmaking. The images she etched on metal plates showed the fragility of lines and yet how lines could connect to evoke the atmosphere of rooms.
Peggy made prints of flowers, endless vases of flowers; and rooms, elaborately decorated rooms with wood stoves, books and sitting chairs; and of kitchens with shelves of jars and pots hung above an oven.
“Printmaking takes time – drawing, etching, inking, wiping,” Peggy said. Then, if she wasn’t satisfied with the results, there followed more etching, inking, wiping and printing. Making prints was more than demanding work, Peggy said. “It is a lifestyle.”
Peggy drew her images with fragile lines, but lines which exhibited a sinuous strength when connected. And the rooms she drew reflected something deeper than Peggy’s imagined spaces. They spoke of a longing for home, comfort and belonging.
Peggy’s drawings represented not merely rooms but the depths of her thoughts and feelings. They represented the interior of the human heart.
Though printmaking was Peggy’s life, it was never her living. The bills got paid, a home was made and two sons and a daughter were raised because Peggy was also an innkeeper. For 40 years she managed the Swan Levine House bed and breakfast on Church Street in Grass Valley with her husband Howard Levine, who was also an artist with a business career.
From its beginnings in 1975, the Swan Levine House always offered more than lodging and a tasty breakfast and conversation around a large dining table. It was a gallery, too, with original work of varied artists lining halls and bedrooms, living rooms and kitchen.
“The most fun is taking people through the house and seeing their response to the art,” Peggy said. Printmakers often gathered in the house and artists, writers, actors and other talented people became regular guests. Peggy encouraged them all.
Peggy expanded her innkeeping role for several years when she and Howard became managing partners, and Peggy general manager, of the Holbrooke Hotel. For Peggy hospitality was as much a lifestyle as printmaking and under the Levines’ management the hotel became a center of community life.
To Peggy the community she loved in Grass Valley was another kind of space revealed by lines. The community’s lines were its peopled, everyday, fragile men and women, who found their strength when connected.
Peggy was constantly helping others connect. In my case, when I saw her, she usually had saved a New Yorker article for me to read and had jotted down the phone number of someone I should interview for my current historical project. She was making similar connections for all her friends.
Though always soft-spoken and gentle, Peggy was a leader – grand jury foreman, school board member, chair of the city historical commission and 30-year member of the Ladies Relief
Society. She was a leader in the arts as a founder of Nevada County Arts Council, board member of Foothill Theatre and founding board member of the Center for the Arts.
In 2004 Peggy volunteered to clean up broken glass at the North Star House, a mansion designed by Julian Morgan and built by Arthur D. Foote, which had suffered years of neglect. The interiors of the North Star House, opening on outdoor spaces and vistas, appealed to Peggy, the artist who drew welcoming spaces.
Peggy found at North Star House a passion and purpose which, alongside her art, sustained the rest of her life. She had a vision of the house as a cultural center and hundreds of volunteers have contributed their talents towards making Peggy’s vision a reality.
Peggy died in 2017 of acute myeloid leukemia. A huge crowd attended her memorial at the North Star House. Today when people see Nevada County’s vibrant arts scene and wonder how it was created, one could answer without much exaggeration: it’s along the lines that Peggy drew.
WHEN MINERS WALKED
By Gage McKinney
Reprinted from “Vein Glory” column in The Empire Star, vol. 43, no. 6
“Do you remember miners walking to work?,” I asked Brita Berryman Rozinsky, a Grass Valley native who remembers earlier days. “Oh, yes,” she said. “They walked along Conaway Street where we lived, probably on their way to the Empire.” Her father, machinist Edwin Berryman, walked to the Empire with his friend, Al Hooper, who worked in the mill.
Big cities, and towns on the prairie or plains, developed in grids of parallel and perpendicular streets. Grass Valley developed linearly, along the supply route from the river at Marysville to the diggings. The miners wore paths on either side of Wolf Creek, through Boston Ravine and along the ridges of Gold Hill, Ophir Hill and the adjacent uplands. Those who came to extract riches from the earth walked in the footsteps of the Native Americans and followed the tread of wolf and bear.
At the dawn of the 20th century, they were still walking the same paths, which had been graded for horse and carriage and were soon to be rocked and paved for automobiles. They built homes along the way, determining the patterns of settlement. Most Grass Valley addresses put a miner within a mile or two of the Empire yard. Miner Albert Jerey walked to the Empire from his home near Colfax Avenue. Mechanic Oakley Johns came from another direction, from his home on French Avenue, and over a rickety foot bridge on Wolf Creek. John Hollow, a shift boss, built his house on South Auburn Street – a mile’s walk either way from his work at the mine and his evening band practice and lodge meetings in town.
Royce Clemo, another native, remembered the walking era. ”My father, Edmund Clemo, was assistant chief electrician at the Empire,” he said. “We lived at 417 South Auburn Street.” Edmund Clemo met Phil Keast every morning, and for decades the pals walked shoulder-to-shoulder.
Every morning the streets of the town filled with hundreds of miners swinging their lunch buckets, exchanging greetings and walking to their jobs. Many Empire workers lived on the streets nearest the mine, including Empire, Pine, Race, Whiting and Berryman streets, Mainhart Drive and Neville Way. Boarding houses lined Kate Hayes Street, which skirts a hill like a deer path. Around the turn of the 20th century, shift boss Alva Mitchell walked all the way from Chapel Street. In 1910 engineer Albert Richards came daily from Pleasant Street, though perhaps he could afford a horse. Walking miners were so common they were hardly noticed. Newspaper editor Edmund Kinyon noticed them when he came in 1911, bringing a prairie boy’s eyes. He found Grass Valley marvelous and strange.
The old patterns changed in the 1930s when automobile dealers in Grass Valley won national awards for sales. The miners parked their new cars beneath sheds built by the mines. Yet even then, not all workers drove. Stenographer Helen Stewart walked to work in the office, though sometimes she got a lift on the way. Miner Sam Martini was walking from Washington Street long after others were driving. In the years before Grass Valley acquired snow removal equipment, and in an era when the town saw plenty of snow, the streets were impassable after a storm. Then everyone was on foot again.
Now in our day, mending our sedentary ways, we are treading the old paths again. Even though gold mining is gone, generations of hikers and joggers are still following Miners Trail towards the Empire Mine.
REDWOODS
By Gage McKinney
Summer mornings we sat
in the shade of redwoods,
heard quail chirp in the dust.
You wore my shirt over your bikini
as you read Sophocles aloud, his words
crunching like apple slices on your teeth.
I listened, closed my eyes and imagined
the grove at Colonus.
Afternoons we waded
the San Lorenzo River where
alders drank, where boulders
braced against the rapids.
Evenings we climbed a trail
in mail-order boots.
We planted saplings in a clearing because,
you said, in them our summer would always live.
Through August we carried water, a chorus
splashing in metal buckets.
That winter you died. Your ashes lay
among stones. Now I walk
the riverbank, hearing the water
stammer against rock. This August your
tree browned, leaving mine
thick-tongued. Though it thirsts
for water I leave the buckets
hanging from a nail.
Vein glory
Orlo Steele Remembers ‘His Miner’
By Gage McKinney
In the summer of 1950, when Orlo Steele was a 17-year-old mucker, he worked at the Empire
Mine under miner Norman Wasley. Norman would pick up Orlo at his parents’ home on Alta Street
about 6 am for a shift beginning at 7. The two rode the skip down to the 4,600-foot level in the mine,
walked three-quarters of a mile, and rode another skip to the 5,000-foot level.
“Norman looked after me,” Orlo said. “He showed me how to get on the skip, and where to
duck.” At 5,000 feet the two passed the last light, and walked another ten minutes in the glow of their
headlamps. At last they reached their 10- to 12-inch ledge of quartz.
“I would help Norman set up his machine,” Orlo explained, an 85-pound pneumatic-drill,
mounted on vertical and horizonal bars. “That drill would shake your insides.”
To keep down the dust, Norman watered the rock face and working area, including the muck
pile that waited for Orlo’s shovel. Then Norman would begin drilling 20 to 22 holes. “Even though he
was four or five feet away, I could barely see him,” Orlo said. “He was in a blue haze.”
As Norman drilled, wearing no ear protection, Orlo would muck the rock from the previous day’s
work, exposed to the same noise. Orlo earned $1.10 an hour, a dime more than other muckers, because
he was shoveling upward, on his knees in a winze, a shaft driven downward from a drift.
Late in the day, Orlo tamped the dynamite into the drill holes with a wooden rod. Norman
wanted the dynamite snug, but also advised: “Tap her light.” Norman set the fuses to explode in a
careful sequence. “He did all the fusing,” Orlo said, “and could lay the rock wherever he wanted.”
From a safe distance Norman and Orlo would count the blasts to assure every round had
discharged. They heard the explosion through the rock an instant before they heard it through the air.
When mine owners praised the Cornish miner, with his proverbial nose for gold, Norman Wasley
was the kind of man they had in mind. Except for decorated service with the 333 rd Engineer Regiment in
World War II, he spent his life in the mines.
When Orlo met him, Norman was a strong, stocky man of 45, a quiet bachelor, lodging with his
brother and sister-in-law. He was a regular at church and the American Legion. He was favored to win
the mucking contest at the miners’ picnic. He won ribbons at the county fair for his flowers and home-
baked pasties.
In 1950, Orlo was just beginning. That fall he entered Stanford University, and then served 35
years in the U. S. Marine Corps and three more years in the federal government. Despite the passing
years, Orlo’s affection for “his miner” is undiminished.
When Orlo recently visited at the Nevada City home of Norman’s cousin, Bill Wasley, the two
shared stories for nearly two hours. Orlo’s eyes glowed as he repeated: “Norman took good care of me.”
Meditation On Not Being Chosen
By Gage McKinney
Written for Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Grass Valley
[Peter asked for a replacement among the apostles for Judas, who guided those who
arrested Jesus and then died.] So they proposed two, Joseph called Barsabbas, who was
also known as Justus, and Matthias. Then they prayed and said, ‘Lord, you know everyone’s
heart. Show us which one of these two you have chosen to take the place in this ministry
and apostleship from which Judas turned aside to go to his own place ’- Acts of the
Apostles 1:23 - 25
Joseph Barsabbas, known as Justus, is mentioned once in scriptures. He had
followed Jesus, and presumably was one of the seventy Jesus sent to preach throughout the
region, but he wasn’t in the inner circle. He is remembered for not being chosen to become
an apostle.
When in your life were you the one not chosen? Were you the odd one out when kids
picked teams on the playground? Did you lose a class election or fail to make cheer squad?
Did you get a form e-mail rejecting you for the job of your dreams? Did you receive a dear
john letter from a sweetheart?
We’ve all had such an experience. We have all been unchosen. The consequence is
pain, but another consequence is freedom. When we are not chosen, we are also set free.
We are freed to do the thing God actually intends for us to do. When Justus didn’t become
an apostle, according to legend, he went to Eleutheropolis, a city on a trading route. There
he became bishop. Coincidently, Eleutheropolis was called “the city of the free.” The truth
is, God has a plan for each of us and we can have faith in this – “the one who began a good
work in you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6).
Once I had dreams of a wife and a family, but by my mid-30s I was unchosen. Having
had my heart repeatedly broken, I had accepted my fate. I resigned myself to a lonely, single
life, lost in my own thoughts and eating my own cooking. Then, having given up my dreams,
I met Ilka Weber. In August Ilka and I celebrate our 40th anniversary – the best years of my life!
O God, we recognize as your servants we can do nothing worthy by ourselves: Grant us your
grace that we may serve you with a humble heart and a compassionate spirit, according to
the plan you intend for each of us; and this we ask in the name of the one who came to
serve all people, your Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.