Art-Rockwell-The Black Eye TB

Travel bugs seem to regularly disappear from urban caches and at caching events.  Please drop this item in rural or Premium Member Only caches.  Transport the bug in the original plastic bag for as long as the bag lasts—then the chain and tag won't tangle with other items.  Otherwise, take this bug everywhere—no permission is needed to leave the US. 

This is one of a series of travel bugs made to recognize paintings or illustrations seen, and admired by the bug owner. A digital copy of this work was downloaded from the internet. It was reduced in size and proportions cropped to accommodate the laminating materials available to the owner. Regrettably these processes diminish the effort of the artist. The text below is a mixture of my own observations and material gleaned from the internet.

My grandparents had a subscription to the Saturday Evening Post until it ceased publication in 1969. When I visited them I would gather up the back issues to read the jokes. After a while I began to notice the covers. Norman Rockwell may well have been the first artist whose work I could recognize on sight. Many critics in his lifetime sniffed at the idea that an illustrator could be considered an artist. But time has been kind to him. If art is done to elicit an emotional response, then Rockwell was an artist. Never mind that the emotion was often humor or American ideals and never mind that it didn’t it require a scholar to tell you how you were supposed to interpret it.

Anyway, this illustration appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, May 23, 1953, when I was in junior high school. It reminded me of a girl, Ann Green, I knew in grade school (Washington School) in Great Bend, KS, in about 1947. I didn’t have any classes with her so my only contact  was on the playground. She wasn’t a bully but she didn’t take any crap from anyone, mostly because she could outrun everybody, boy or girl.  At that age, this was the stuff of legend. I don’t know she was ever in a fight, but I could imagine this being her when she got a little older. I have often wondered where she ended up.