TheUgly Duckling, Dumbo and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer are three stories about characters who got bullied because of their looks: black feathers, big ears, a red nose.
Bullying extends to inanimate objects, too. I have owned a 500-pound cast iron Rudolph for 57 years. It has been picked on all that time as a red-nosed pile of junk.
I bought this Rudolph when I was 16. It was indeed in a junk heap in front of the feed store next to my church.
I saw something in it that nobody else did. I saw a sculpture.
It was being sold as a machine. It had been a dry cleaning tailor’s press made by the Hoffman Company, and it had five pedals used to run the machine. Its dry cleaning “pads” (which actually pressed and steamed pants and jackets) were missing.
Nobody wanted the machine because it was manually operated and, in 1960 when I was 16, the rage was for everything to be electricified.
Poor old Hoffman.
With its five pedals I called it “The Tails of Hoffman” after the opera The Tales of Hoffman.
My parents thought I had lost my mind. I’d paid my entire week’s salary for Hoffman, $15 from the Stop and Shop where I worked as a bagger for 16 hours after school.
That’s how much I wanted that crazy object.
As I said, my parents thought I was nuts until I painted the Hoffman tailor’s press.
I painted it deer tan and white, and gave it a big red nose.
Suddenly my parents saw what I saw: It was Rudolph the Red- Nose Reindeer, a 500-pound cast-iron version, but Rudolph nonetheless.
The song says, “All of the other reindeer used to laugh and call him names. They never let poor Rudolph join in any reindeer games.”
In other words, he got picked on.
My parents didn’t pick on him exactly, but they didn’t “see” him till I painted his nose red.
Others did pick on him.
He stood in my parents’ yard in Mt. Carmel, Conn., from 1960 to 1992, when my father died.
I had Rudolph moved to my Vermont house that year along with my parents’ furniture and he has been here ever since.
That’s 32 years in Connecticut and 25 in Vermont outside in the elements.
The snow has actually reached up to his chin in Vermont, but his red nose always showed.
About being picked on: The moving company charged me $75 extra to add him to the moving van. The driver called Rudolph “that thing” and dropped him, breaking one of his “antlers” (a cast-iron arm for the dry cleaning “pad”).
The real estate agent in Vermont who sold me my house called him “Rudolph the red-nosed junk heap” and over the years many passersby have asked me, what is that “thing” in my yard?
As happened with my parents years ago, the minute I say “Rudolph” they “get it”.
It’s ironic isn’t it?
Rudolph in the Christmas story was picked on for having a red nose. My sculpture is picked on until his “red nose” is pointed out and unlocks his identity.
Like the characters in those three children’s stories, my sculpture has been ridiculed for his looks, too, for his entire life, or at least since I created him.
And let that be another story with a lesson: If you appreciate art, you will see reindeer when others do not.
Paul Keane lives in Hartford.