Brother is still prowling

By JACK RONALD
The Commercial Review
The tigers are still missing.
They disappeared 45 years ago, but my brother Steve hasn’t stopped hunting for them.
Steve was in town last week to see the David Dale exhibit at Arts Place while down from Minnesota for his 50th reunion at Earlham College.
And over lunch, he brought up the tigers.
Back in 1968, my parents moved from Jay County to Richmond. Dad had accepted a position as vice president for development at Earlham, and the move was a big one. It took them from a house that my mother’s parents had built to a new, smaller one in a neighborhood they didn’t know. And that, inevitably, meant some down-sizing.
Unfortunately, if your parents down-size when you still have things tucked away in your closet, things get lost.
Steve was in Minneapolis by then, working for The Tribune. My sister Linda was also living out of state. I was away for the summer, working at Conner Prairie as a museum guide/house painter/trail builder/jackhammer operator and so on. Only my sister Louise was still at home and on hand to protect her stuff from the auctioneer’s gavel.
I’m sure my parents looked at it as a way to clean out attics and get rid of a lot of junk. (I know our closets and attics still harbor the belongings of our grown daughters.)
But what parents might view as junk or expendable, kids view differently.
That was the case with Steve’s baseball card collection, which either went to the dump or was auctioned off by the great Grant Smitley.
And that was the case with the tigers.
The tigers were the subject of a painting that hung in our bedroom when Steve and I were kids. It was either a gift from a missionary or had been purchased at a church bazaar in support of missionary activities.
Today, it would probably be classified as kitsch or “airport art,” the sort of thing you buy when you’re in a foreign country and want a souvenir.
But to the two of us, it was a masterpiece.
Two fierce tigers stalked directly toward the viewer, their eyes gleaming hungrily. Thick bamboo rose around them. And the frame was carved to look like green bamboo.
It was a pretty large piece as I remember it, maybe 18 inches wide and 40 inches tall.
And it was just about the coolest thing a boy could have hanging on the wall of his bedroom. In theory, we shared it; but I knew in my heart that it was Steve’s.
So when it disappeared after my parents moved to Richmond, he was much more upset by the loss than I was.
(My only loss that day was a collection of Mad magazines, and some of those turned up later.)
And he’s continued to search for the tigers over the past 45 years. He actually located a similar piece — probably cranked out by the same artist working the souvenir market — in an antique store once, but the owner wouldn’t sell.
It’s possible, of course, the tigers are still in Jay County.
Maybe somebody local bought them at that auction back in the summer of 1968. Maybe they’re hanging in some kid’s room in Portland or Dunkirk. If you have a clue, let me know. It would make a great Christmas surprise for my big brother.[[In-content Ad]]