Tar Heel P ROFILE
By Sherry Wells
The Beach Cowboy
Wayland Cato has been blazing
new trails for 44 years.
А ЧЧПЮЧ
glll/oflS licnril nil ISOlal-
L-k i'll beach on a cream-colored
-A- JL palomino . She meets her dadt-
haiit'ti partner on his bnmm-and-uhitr
pinto, ami together they nde through
splashing white waves, race along the
shoreline and trot across sand dunes
where no one has traveled since the
beginning of time. ...
This may sound like the open¬
ing scene of a love siory. and in a
way it is. It's a scene created by
artist, horse rancher, nature lover,
cowboy and trail bla/er Wayland
II. Cato III of Gloucester, and it's
a one-of-a-kind in North Carolina.
Through his business. White
Sand Trail Rides. Cato lues ful¬
filled a fantasy of his and many other
|хч>-
ple. Along a 10-mile stretch of privately
owned beach beside the Cedar Island-to-
Ocracoke ferry landing. Cato leads ama¬
teur riders on hour-long jaunts, where the
only other living things they see are sea
gulls, ducks, wild ponies, cows and goats.
It’s a clever business that only a creative
mind could invent. But Cato has all the
skills for the job.
Born in 1948 on his family's farm in
Charlotte, he was the third-generation
namesake of Wayland Henry Cato Sr.,
founder of the Cato chain of women's
clothing stores. A child prodigy in art, Cato
started painting and drawing when he was
six. At 13, he entered his first art competi¬
tion and won first place with a metal sculp-
ture in a statewide industrial arts show. The
following year, he became the only person
to win the contest for two consecutive years.
When Cato's parents discovered he had
dyslexia, they sent him to a school for stu¬
dents with learning disal>ilitics in Foil Iaud-
crdalc, Florida. While there, he earned
pocket money by painting beach scenes on
pieces of coral and selling them to tourists.
Wayland Cato leads a beach trail ride.
He became so popular that locals asked
him to make portraits of their yachts.
At 20. Cato was asked to become one of
the Smithsonian Institution's commis¬
sioned artists, but he turned down the
offer. “I knew I would burn out if I had to
make five paintings a month.” he say's.
Instead, he stumbled onto glass engrav¬
ing. While visiting his parents at their home
in Charlotte, Cato noticed his mother's
crystal collection on the mantel. Before he
knew it. he says, he found his medium.
“Something clicked when I saw that col¬
lection,'' Cato says. "I saw engraving as an
art form. I saw what they were doing, and
I knew I could do more.'
After training at the Indian Trails Crystal
Shoppe near Charlotte and selling his
work through the Cato stores, his career as
an artist tookolT. In 1977. Glass magazine
ranked Cato's diamond-point stripplcd
engraving “Night Moon” one of the top
100 pieces in the world. He sculpted art¬
work for President Jimmy Carter and
Henry Kissinger.
After seeing Bob Hope at a per¬
formance, Cato gave him a diamond-stip¬
pled piece. “Jaguar and the Butterfly.”
which tcx>k more than 3,000 hours to com¬
plete and now hangs in the Bob Hope
Museum in Palm Springs. California. Pres¬
ident Carter commissioned another work.
“In Search of Peace." for Egyptian Presi¬
dent Anwar Sadat during their mid-'70s
peace talks.
Cato's work is in the collections of singer
Waylon Jennings, comedian Steve Allen
and former Ibothall player
Joe Namath. His engraving of
the South Carolina suite seal
hangs in the state capitol.
“I just wanted to lx- the best
engraver in the world,” he
says. The dyslexia really
turned out to lx- an advantage
for me because in engraving,
you do everything backwards
and reverse."
During his heyday its a glass
artist, Cato blazed many trails.
He breathed new life into
stone-wheel engraving, an
almost lost art form. I le wrote
a manual describing his tech¬
nique of glass monogram-
ming, invented design machinery, and cre¬
ated a new art form called light fraction,
which uses die shadows made by an engrav¬
ing to give the work a greater three-dimen¬
sional effect.
In 1980 Cato collected his portfolio and
hopped on a plane to Europe. When he
knocked on die door of die International Art
Gallery Rcx-kuit in Amsterdam, the owner
looked at his work and immediately sched¬
uled him for a two-person ( hiisUnas show.
The show launched Cato’s international
career, but tragedy struck s»x»n afterward.
“I left the Roelant show and went straight
to Gatlinhurg for the International Art
Glass Show to demonstrate for a week,"
Cito says. “I had it* leave the show early lx--
cause I was so sick. I drove myself home to
Greenville (South Carolina) and then went
straight to die hospital, where I stayed for
about 30 days until the swelling in my head
went down."
He was diagnosed as having spinal
meningitis, a deadly disease from which
most people never recover. But not Cato.
I le not only recovered, but during his recu¬
peration moved to San Diego and set up a
IWn by life)
Г
if* uvl .iainr>; <4
Си о
The Sute/March 1992
34