Profile · Neenah, Wisconsin
Howard Winchester Hawks
Hollywood director of Scarface, His Girl Friday, Red River; born Goshen, Indiana; Neenah paper-family childhood 1898–1910
$110,000
Howard Winchester Hawks directed some of the most durable American movies of the studio era—Scarface, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, The Big Sleep, Red River, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Rio Bravo—yet his Wisconsin claim is a paper-mill childhood, not a birth certificate. Jean-Luc Godard called him the greatest American artist; Leonard Maltin called him the greatest American director who is not a household name. One competitive Oscar nomination (Sergeant York) and an honorary Academy Award in 1974 bookend a career built on clean craft. He liked to say a good picture needed “three good scenes, and no bad ones.” He was born in Goshen, Indiana, on May 30, 1896. Mother Helen Howard was a Neenah native; grandfather Charles W. Howard had homesteaded there in 1862 at seventeen and built the Howard Paper fortune. Father Frank Hawks brought Goshen furniture money north in 1898, went to work for his father-in-law at the mill, and raised the boy among houses that look out on Lake Winnebago. In 1904 Frank built a rare Wisconsin Shingle-style house at 433 East Wisconsin Avenue in the neighborhood where Helen had grown up. Her health pulled the family west: winters in Pasadena from about 1906, permanent California by 1910. After they left, the house was rented to C.B. Clark Jr. and sold in 1912 to H.K. Babcock; it reached the National Register in 1997. Neenah is the mill-family childhood between Goshen and Hollywood. Write the Indiana birth first; keep the East Wisconsin Avenue years as the local tie that puts him on the city’s page.