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Uncle Addie: Adrian Lamont Biddle

Artist, Salesman, Fisherman, and the Uncle Who Always Brought the Crayons (1902–1973)

The Artist Who Needed a Living Wage

"Every calling is great when greatly pursued." —Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Adrian Lamont Biddle was a genuinely talented artist who never got to be one full-time. He had formal training at the Chicago Art Institute and the skill to back it up—he could hand-letter college yearbooks in Old English script using nothing but a brush and India ink, and he did exactly that while running a haberdashery at Purdue University in his younger days. But children came early, and art doesn’t pay the rent the way a steady job does. So Adrian took his talent and turned it sideways, spending most of his working life as a traveling salesman for the American Crayon Company, covering Indiana, Michigan, and northern Illinois. Later he narrowed his territory to just the Chicago school system.

It was the kind of compromise a lot of talented people made in that era—you sold the art supplies instead of using them. But Adrian never stopped making things. At his home on South Cavin Street in Ligonier, he painted life-size nativity figures for the yard and carved cherub caroler spindles for the porch. He lettered the kitchen ceiling in Old English edged in gold: “Food and Drink, the Spice of Life.” The art was always there. It just lived in the margins.

Ten Cents an Hour

"In the depth of a great crisis the character of a nation is revealed." —Franklin D. Roosevelt

Adrian was born on July 12, 1902, in Whitley County, Indiana, the son of Jesse and Allie Biddle, Presbyterians in Ligonier. He grew up in town, graduated from Ligonier High School, and was raised in the church—he would serve as an Elder of the Presbyterian Church in Ligonier for much of his adult life.

When the Great Depression hit in 1929, Adrian was working at the New York Central Railroad siding in Ligonier, cleaning cattle cars for ten cents an hour. It was miserable work, but it was work, and in 1929 that counted for everything. He was twenty-seven years old, a young man with an artist’s eye and a laborer’s paycheck, waiting for something better to come along.

Something better came along in the form of the American Crayon Company, and something even better came along in the form of Louisa Christina King.

Louisa

"The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of." —Blaise Pascal

On August 21, 1934, Adrian married Louisa Christina King in Detroit, Michigan. Louisa was a farmer’s daughter—the third surviving child of Volney William King and Bertha Lena McConnell King, born in 1910 in Whitley County. She had graduated from Ligonier High School in 1928, and her middle name was supposed to be Christiana, after her grandmother Christiana Gerber, but nobody in the family could agree on how to spell it, so it became Christina.

Their first child, James Arthur Biddle—cousin Jim—was born on August 8, 1935, near Lake Wawasee in Kosciusko County. Sandra Lou followed on February 7, 1937, in Elmhurst, Illinois, where the family lived while Adrian worked the Chicago territory. They eventually settled back in Ligonier, first at 911 South Cavin Street and later at 1005 South Cavin.

The Boat in the Field

"The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope." —John Buchan

Before he married Louisa, Adrian had owned a cottage on Natticrow Beach at Lake Wawasee. He was a fisherman to his bones—he knew every hole on that lake. As a bachelor he built a wooden boat with a poop deck and a special trailer to haul it. The trailer hitch failed near Cromwell on one of its early outings, and the boat ended up in a farmer’s field—the tow truck bill came to $461.62, which was real money in those days. That was the end of the boat, but not of the fishing. Nothing was ever the end of the fishing.

Lake Wawasee and the Art Supplies

"In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity." —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Uncle Addie took us fishing on Lake Wawasee often—cousin Jim, his sister Sandra, and me. In fact, he took me more than he took Jim and Sandy, because I liked fishing more than they did. Addie knew where the fish were and had standards about what he kept—he never brought home a bluegill under eight inches. He always had that knack, ever since his bachelor cottage days, and he never lost it. A day on Wawasee with Uncle Addie was about as good as a summer day could get.

He also kept us supplied with art materials—Prang watercolors, Crayonex crayons, charcoal sketching pencils, stenciling kits—the whole inventory of the American Crayon Company seemed to flow through his hands and into ours. The Decatur Evening Herald reported in May 1929 that Adrian Biddle of the American Crayon Company was offering prizes of crayons and art supplies at a high school art exhibit—that was his world, and he brought it home to us. It was the perfect job for an uncle with that many nieces and nephews. He kept Jim and Sandy and me stocked as children, and when my own children came along, he kept them supplied too, right up until he died. Three generations of kids who never lacked for something to draw with, thanks to Uncle Addie.

The Poodles

"The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too." —Samuel Butler

Adrian was fond of standard poodles—not the miniature kind, but the big, dignified ones. He had two from the same litter, a brother and sister, and later got two more puppies from another litter from the same source. The poodles were part of the household, as much a fixture of the Biddle home on South Cavin Street as the hand-lettered kitchen ceiling and the nativity figures in the yard.

Fondness

"The fault, dear reader, lies not with them, but within ourselves." —attributed to William Shakespeare

Adrian had a fondness for my mother, Lucille, that was never quite hidden and never quite acted upon—at least as far as anyone knew. But it drove Aunt Lou up the wall with jealousy, and not without reason. He gave Mom some pretty nice gifts over the years, and that was a real bone of contention for Louisa. Whether it ever amounted to more than a fondness, I honestly don’t think it did. But the fondness itself was enough to keep the family tension simmering for a long time.

The Last Years

"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven." —Ecclesiastes 3:1

Adrian worked until he was sixty-eight. In retirement he had a fishing trailer parked on a small Indiana lake and made trips to Sam’s Resort near the Muskegon River at Morley, Michigan—still chasing fish, still happiest with a rod in his hand and water in front of him.

Word came of jaundice and exploratory surgery, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. He died about six months later, on April 10, 1973, at Goshen Hospital in Elkhart County, Indiana. He was seventy years old.

Louisa outlived him by twenty years, dying of an aortic aneurysm on November 29, 1993, in Ligonier. Their son Jim died of a sudden cardiac event on January 25, 2009, in Zionsville. Their daughter Sandra died on February 16, 2021, in Warsaw, and was cremated with a graveside service at Oak Park Cemetery in Ligonier.

What I Remember

"The greatest legacy one can pass on to one's children and grandchildren is not money or material things accumulated in one's life, but rather a legacy of character and ethos, a legacy of values and education, a legacy of beliefs and principles." —Billy Graham

When I think about Uncle Addie, I see a man with a fishing rod in one hand and a box of crayons in the other. He was the uncle who took you to the lake, who knew where the fish were hiding, who made sure you always had something to draw with. He was a real artist—trained at the Chicago Art Institute, good enough to letter yearbooks in Old English freehand—who spent his life selling art supplies instead of using them, and who poured whatever was left of that talent into nativity scenes and kitchen ceilings and the small, beautiful gestures that nobody outside the family ever saw.

He was complicated, too. The thing with my mother was real enough to cause pain, even if it never crossed certain lines. But families are complicated, and Addie was part of ours—generous, talented, flawed, and always there with the crayons and the fishing poles when the kids needed him.

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Adrian Lamont Biddle (1902–1973) was born in Whitley County, Indiana, the son of Jesse and Allie Biddle. He married Louisa Christina King on August 21, 1934, in Detroit, Michigan. A trained artist and longtime salesman for the American Crayon Company, he served as an Elder of the Presbyterian Church in Ligonier. He and Louisa had two children, James Arthur and Sandra Lou. He is buried in Ligonier, Noble County, Indiana.