Rosebud Virtual Cache

Welles

Context is everything when it comes to understanding literature and media. I believe in part that the same applies to understanding what shapes a person into who he or she becomes. Orson Welles, born nearby at 6114 7th Ave, is perhaps Kenosha's most famous native son. Among many achievements he co-wrote, directed, produced, and starred in the great “Citizen Kane”. To summarize briefly, the plot tries to solve the mystery of the last word uttered by the eccentric world famous businessman Charles Foster Kane: “Rosebud.”

Orson Welles was born to a wealthy industrialist father, Richard Head Welles, and an accomplished pianist and advocate of Women's suffrage, Beatrice Ives Welles, on May 6, 1915. The family was well known in Kenosha and lived at the home of Orson’s birth until 1919. Shortly thereafter his parents separated and moved to Chicago where he lived with his mother until her early passing four days after Orson turned 9 years old.

Orson's reported reviews of Kenosha varied widely, at times calling it “charming” and other times calling it “a terrible place”. I think it is not too complicated of a puzzle to understand his vacillating reviews. During his youth he lived nearby in Chicago and Woodstock, and certainly returned to Kenosha for his mother’s burial and then again his father’s burial only six years later. Who would not wrestle with the settings in which such young and profound memories occurred?

The characters in “Citizen Kane” never solve the mystery of “Rosebud” however the director reveals it to the audience as the frame moves to show “Rosebud” as the name of 8 year old Kane’s sled. To Kane, “Rosebud” marked the end of an age of innocence. I think it is not a far stretch to believe that the passing of Beatrice Ives Welles marked that time in 9 year old Orson Welles’s life.