Art-Rockwell-Breaking Home Ties TB02

Please drop this item in rural or Premium Member Only caches.  Do not drop it in an urban cache or leave it behind at a caching event.  Transport the bug in the original plastic bag for as long as the bag lasts; this prevents the chain and tag tangling with other items.  Otherwise, take this travel bug anywhere you wish.  No permission needed to leave the U.S.

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. The copy 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 cover appeared on September 25, 1954, at the time when my parents and grandparents began asking where I wanted to go to college. For crying out loud . . . I was just a freshman in high school and trying not to be noticed by the senior jocks! Furthermore somebody had mistakenly put me in algebra and Latin classes. I hadn’t yet figured out why 2X + 1 = 3 or why amo was different than amas. COLLEGE—I was pretty sure I wouldn’t get to be a sophomore in high school!