"Well, Mothers Do Have Their Ways!"

Claes Oldenberg Lives...

 Good "foggy and humid" Wednesday Morning, y'all.

I didn't know Claes Oldenberg was fond of making model airplanes... If you know what I mean. Claes was artist/sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring large replicas of everyday objects.

I saw this photo a couple of weeks ago and cracked up. If you were a model maker back in the Fifties and Sixties, the design on this tube of cement will send you way back.

It also reminds me of a story that I might have mentioned before where against my mother orders, I bought for 29¢, maybe 49¢, Aurora's kit of the Lockheed F-94C Starfire. I hid it inside the upright piano that no one has ever played on for years.

Long ago and far away, this model costs .49¢.

Well, mothers have their ways, don't they. I have to assume, in spite of my surreptitiously covert action, that my mom found out about the stash. It was really hard to lay low till the heat was over, but when I returned to my secret hideaway few impatient days later, the model was missing!

Where could it have gone?

I lifted the piano cover and practically climbed into it sifting in between the felt hammers thinking the small box may have slipped way down below them. I pushed down the foot pedals hoping doing so would pop up the hidden gem. But, to no avail.

Swallowing hard a month or two after I "filed a missing person's plane report", I asked my mother, with slight trepidation, if she had seen this model of the famous Lockheed F-94C Starfire. She looked at me rather confusedly. Even at an early age, I was about eight years old at the time, I knew my mother was known for her practical jokes.

But, after repeated inquiries over a series of months, I could see in my mother's eyes that she wasn't joking and was starting to show concern for my loss... and my emotional well being.

"Poor baby!"

The mystery still haunts me sometimes in my dreams. Did I actually get on my bike and ride three miles to the strip mall hobby shop between the cemeteries and the Gentilly Branch of the U.S. Post Office.

I was a regular client there. I showed up every other weekend from a weeks worth of cut lawns with money burning a hole in my pocket.

But that part of the dream never occurs. It was only of me opening the piano top and setting into the hammers the model of the Lockheed F-94C Starfire, and returning to find it gone.

A few years later, belonging to the American Society of Aviation Artists,( ASAA ) and having forgotten all about the mystery, I found a picture of the wonderful illustrator that stole my aviation soul to sent it to some nebulous dream world. Where DID that illusive 1/82 scale model of the famous Lockheed F-94C Starfire go?

Thank you, Joe Kotula... I think!

Second foggy cup!

Copyright 2023/Ben Bensen III