Part 1: A Little Love~ It was in July of 1982, and my new bride and I were moving her and her two children to my apartment in St. Louis. We’d been married the week before. We were traveling from Ohio, and the drive was a seven hour trip from having spent the day cramming all of our belongings in a U-Haul truck and a car we were hauling behind it. My new stepson was driving the U-Haul with my  two stepdaughters as passengers. I drove my new bride in my car following the U-Haul. We were one big tired family before we took off for our journey around seven 0’ckock in the evening.

Part 2: A Painting~ At the time, I’d been making several art sketches and painting some watercolors of an old farm in Ohio. Of all the paintings that my new bride really liked the best was a close up porch scene of the painting displayed at the right. If you have been following my blogs, you probably have seen several different scenes painted at the farm. However, the best composition of the farm was the one my new bride fell in love with. It was packed on the back seat in the chase car I was driving on our way to our new nest.

We could never in our wildest imagination believe that an art thief would steal the painting before we could ever hang it on the wall of our home.

Part 3: An Art Thief~That’s right! The painting never made it to the apartment. Was it a professional art thief that took the painting? or just a thief? or just a thief with good taste? We’ll never know, but the painting was stolen. Somewhere out there in the big world hangs my masterpiece.

An hour before we arrived at our destination a slight whirring sound began coming from the right back side of my car. It sounded as if a bearing going bad, and I knew there was a possibility the wheel could fall off, so I signaled for my stepson to pull off of the road. It was near midnight at the time. We were nowhere near a garage to drop the damaged car off, so I decided to exchange it for the car being hauled.

Because the car was a front wheel drive, we had to attach it with the front end up and the back wheels rolling. We still feared it might lose a wheel, but we decided to take the chance. As things often do, however, luck didn’t go our way.  Sure enough, an hour later, as we were arriving at the East St. Louis Bridge crossing over the Mississippi River, the wheel flew off, barely missing us by bouncing and flying over our car. Fire sparks splattered on the highway pavement like a giant Fourth of July sparkler.

By now, it was almost 1:00 in the morning. We were all tired and miserable. The car had to be released from the hauler, since it could no longer be hauled. When we exchanged the cars earlier, we packed the damaged car with the belongings packed in the car we now drove. It was mostly nonsense things with little value. We decided it would not matter if someone broke in and stole everything in the car, forgetting that my bride’s favorite painting was laying face down beneath a pile of old clothes in the back seat. We decided to leave the car and take the girls to the apartment.

It was only a couple of hours before we arrived back where we had left the damaged automobile. However, just as suspected, the car had been broken into. The only things missing was the car’s battery and my painting.  Nothing else was touched. I have a feeling the thief took a step up in thiefdom that day, becoming a genuine, bona fide, art thief.