The photo at left was taken by Father Tom in 1954. I'm on the left, with the little bobcat I found wandering in the neighborhood.Next is Nickie, with the little bison he brought to ground with his yo-yo, on the fields of West Warwick.
On the far right is DC, in the felt hat handed down to him by his sister Iris C. DC put his little project together from animal parts he found at home.
The little girl grooming her Yellow Tabby project behind Nickie is Malicia Shumpski. Her parents were Henry Wallace socialists. Malicia went on to Amherst. Today she's an organizer for the Coalition On Minority Access To Opportunity and Social Equality (COMATOSE).
Life was different then। I don't think much about it anymore.
Rhod, here's a little project I put together
as a Thanksgiving centerpiece for the kids.
Nickie
17 comments:
I remember praying that maybe Howdy Doody could be a real boy; we could be best friends and walk to school together. We would grow up - always best friends - and share all kinds of adventures. We would explore distant lands, join the Foreign Legion and save each other's lives countless times while fighting merciless heathens. We would marry identical twins. And we would kill Clarabell because that thing scared me to death.
Sig, Flub-a-Dub was a combination of eight animals. I have a name for you. Father Tom.
It was over fifty years ago and that thing still scares the crap out of me. Flu-flu-flub
I always thought of those as my happiest days. I'll never forget (sound of harps) the day a 12-year old Rhod stole a box of Oyster Crackers from his mom's cupboard and ran away to join the circus in Woonsocket. We only met again in 1990 at that Boots Randolph concert in Albany.
I still practice the black art of taxidermy but, with the kids all grown, the steady supply of hamsters has pretty much dried up.
Holy crap!
Sig, my family was so poor we couldn't even afford for me to have a imaginary friend. The closest thing I has a pre-school pal was a sheet of thick clingy plastic sheeting... and Winky-Dink.
Why were they called the peanut gallery?
Why were who called the peanut gallery? The Warren Commission?
I remember when Winky-Dink shattered my childhood! The Born Again American ( Yes he called himself that even in the 50's!) and I had just gotten home with our older brother and parents.
We raced to the TV to turn on Winky-Dink. We had found the green plastic screen screen cover but some how had lost the crayon with which to draw in the missing parts that always helped our hero do his heroic deeds!
Well the SOB made it across the bridge anyway! My childhood was never the same and shortly after that our father died.
The End!
Lock & Load!!!
I love taxidermy. I truly is one of the finest achievements of western civilization. If only there were a legal way to combine taxidermy and politics?
Well, Nick, has the steady supply of kids dried up? You always used your imagination. Come on...
(L), a regular crayon or lipstick would work. DC used lipstick to...ahem...enhance Winky Dink in ways would get him arrested even in today's anything goes world.
Trestin, glass eyes for the models you're suggesting can't be found with the right shade of cloudiness or venal sparkle. The technology has to catch up.
Nick, if you remember, I also took Daddy's huge lunch pail. I turned it over and lived in it for days on my way to Woon.
PS, the fox is stunning, even Warholian in its combination of the sinister and the mundane. Brilliant.
Trestin - The Soviet art of Poltical Taxidermy reached its zenith with the Lenin Project. Lenin was supposed to be posed upright as a heroic nude but they couldn't snap that barbed tail off.
They also wanted to enscounce Stalin in a mausoleum/theme park - "You Must Be This Tall To Be Shot," but they were afraid he wasn't really dead. They used him for nuclear weapons testing instead.
Sig, I have two years of Russian language courses, taken many years ago when our professor used the characters and words abolished by the Revolution.
Did you know that the old word for airplane was the Persian word for flying carpet?
Whatever else you say about Lenin and Stalin, they had a way of making themselves understood.
I think I might have entertained myself with a different winky dink as a kid....
as a wee tot in the ghettos of suburban DC we had a serious dearth of wildlife to taxidermify. However, high school in the arctic circle of Maine, I rode a saber tooth manatee to school.
Steve, if you're seeing saber tooth manatees, that "entertainment" when you were a kid did some damage.
Rhod - absolutely. People would stand still and listen when these men spoke. They understood exactly what these men were saying. Unfortunately these people were usually standing or kneeling in front of a wall.
Post a Comment