Art-Rockwell-Homecoming Marine TB02

Please drop this item in rural or Premium Member Only caches.  Do not place 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. 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, I had read and reread all of the Posts I could find over the years.  Sometime in the late 1950s I discovered some storage under the seat of a bay window.  Joy of joys, there was a mound of really old Saturday Evening Posts, including many with Rockwell covers.  For some reason this one stuck with me. Perhaps it was because it reminded me that I and my grandfathers were the only males in a family of my mother, grandmothers, sisters and aunts.  My dad and uncles had served in the Pacific and all came home. This illustration appeared on the cover of the Post, October 13,1945.