If you’re new in town, you might not know about Louis Armstrong. He was a life-size statue on the stage in Old Town Square. Rocked off his foundation, he disappeared one night in 2001.
What became of him? Still missing. I’m only bringing him up now because he came up in a conversation a year ago, and I couldn’t find a single picture of him online. Then the other day I found this in my photos:
Have you seen this? Maybe in the attic of your frat house?
Until we get Satchmo back, only statues that are too big or too ugly to be stolen will be allowed in Old Town Square….
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Thank you for the pic! This is the first I’ve seen of him. I love old interviews with Satchmo: http://www.ina.fr/audio/PHD86064638/interview-de-louis-armstrong-et-improvisation-de-earl-hines.fr.html
Looks like this?
satchmo
…or something like that!
Looks like they were cast from the same mold. Slight difference is that our Satchmo had a cloth hand kerchief. Where is your Satchmo from, Bugman?
Completely irrelevant to the topic, but I keep thinking of the basement of the old Columbia Savings. The Helen Mary Green Theater, with which I did numerous shows, used to have some of its less important rehearsals in the basement there. Silly me, even with the stairs visible as soon as you walked in, it hadn’t occurred to me there would be a basement under the place.
The thing that made it interesting was the presence of a genuine fallout shelter behind an unassuming door with a CD logo (Remember those? Mom’s old radio, which was always tuned to KCOL, had two spots on the dial that said CD, where you could tune in to find out where to evacuate when hurricanes or atom bombs took your house away.). Inside were immense cans of water, stacked two or three high. It was dark in there, and I sensed I shouldn’t be spending too much time in it, so I never found out if there were other supplies to give a brief coda to the good life before civilization ground to a final halt.
I have to wonder if they’re still there, or if they were removed after the bottom ones rusted through or something.
Hey, has anybody looked lately? Maybe Satch is there now.
I had completely forgotten about him, and never realized he was stolen. Wouldn’t it be cool if he somehow got returned after all this time?!
Some rich dude in Ohio has it. The handkerchief is bronze. It may have had a white patina when it was in Old Town, but ‘someone’ could have easily sand-blasted it off (I know I would if I wanted to disguise it!)
And, just recently (reported in the Great Falls Tribune on 1/22/10), in Bozeman Montana, a 4-foot-tall sculpture of a little girl loaned out by Fort Collins artist James Haire, and valued at $7,400, was stolen from a local park by similarly rocking the statue back and forth, leaving behind a right bronzed shoe and foot.