Painting is still lost in the haystack

There never seems to be a shortage of haystacks.

But sometimes the needle you’re looking for simply no longer exists.

The phone call came from Kentucky about a month ago. The caller told Maralene Giddings in the ad department that he wanted to buy a quarter-page advertisement in the daily newspaper. There was a special deal on that month, but it still wasn’t going to be inexpensive. So Maralene coached him through the process, trying to figure out what he was really hoping to accomplish.

And that’s when it started to get a little fuzzy.

He’s looking for a picture, I was told. It’s a watercolor of a soldier. And it was in Life magazine.

None of that made much sense, so things ended up on my desk. That’s often what happens when things don’t make much sense.

Maralene had a phone number, a name and even a credit card number. Trouble is, we couldn’t figure out exactly what the guy on the phone wanted.

So it was my turn to call.

It took some doing, but this is the story that finally emerged from a somewhat rambling series of conversations.

The guy in Kentucky is about my age. He had grown up in Jay County. And, in fact, he’d only been a few years behind me in high school.

Back in the mid-1960s, art class was his favorite class in school. In fact, he said, the teacher often let him do his own thing, simply because he showed so much natural talent.

I’d had the same teacher. Her name was Miss Turner for years, but after she married she was Mrs. Myers. And it was easy for me to believe she would have been indulgent when she had a self-directed student with some artistic gifts.

At some point, probably 1965 or 1966, the caller from Kentucky did a watercolor he was especially proud of. He based it — simply by memory — on an iconic World War II photograph by W. Eugene Smith that ran in Life magazine.

The black and white photo shows a weary Marine in combat gear with a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

That was the inspiration, but the finished painting was good enough that — the caller maintained — it hung in a hallway at Portland High School for several years. He’d last seen it there in 1975.

The hallway in question was a poorly lit corridor that led to both the art room and the band room. It was possible to imagine that a well-rendered piece of student artwork had hung there back in the day.

But “back in the day” was a long, long time ago, 42 years ago to be exact. And the painting itself had been done about 50 years ago.

Now, for whatever reason, the guy in Kentucky wanted it back.

He’d dropped out of high school not long after the painting was finished, and soon after that he found himself in Vietnam as a Marine, doing forward “re-con” work. As a Marine who had painted a Marine, that piece of high school artwork had taken on a greater and greater importance to him.

What he wanted to do, he said, was run an ad that featured the original photo from Life, explain the situation and try to rescue a part of his past.

That was a long-shot at best, but even that wasn’t feasible. The photo was copyright protected. We couldn’t simply re-print it in the newspaper without permission and/or paying a fee.

And then there was simply the matter of time.

Portland High School closed along with Dunkirk and Redkey and Pennville and Bryant back in 1975. Art teachers, sad to say, often clean house and throw things out.

The haystack was beginning to look enormous, and the chances that the needle had survived were slim.

Let me do some legwork, I told the guy in Kentucky.

First stop was East Jay Middle School, the old PHS building. To their credit, the staff didn’t laugh at me when I explained my quest. Then it was on to Jay County Historical Society, where I learned to my chagrin that large amounts of school memorabilia ended up in the landfill after the schools were closed. The last try was Museum of the Soldier, and that came up empty as well.

So this, dear reader, is what is left. If you know anything about the painting, contact either The CR or The News and Sun in Dunkirk. If you want to know what the image looked like, you can Google “W. Eugene Smith Marine photo” and get some idea.

If you find that needle, let me know. I’d love to be able to make a call to an old Marine in Kentucky and make his dreams come true.