Your inquiry re "Tex Powell and the Weather" has touched off more than one recollection of my days with the Stamford Museum and Nature Center. Last time ...the seal pond and the monkeys...

This time ...Ivan Sanderson.

Remember him?

Very famous Nature Dude and sort of the forerunner of Marlo Perkins (way back when: I date myself); or this recently deceased Australian crocodile guy, Steve Irwin, is it? etc. etc... You know "Nature Talk Show" types....

Anyhow, he and Luhde were old pals from way back as I recall it all. So, one time the Museum began to "fill up" with Southeast Asian statuary and ancient Indonesian carved objects. For sale: Inquire at desk sort of thing. Every morning when I arrived to do the weather show, there a was another Hindoo goddess with arms akimbo and all - carved in ancient stone and sitting there on view. (There was a big alcove type place where all this stuff was being show-cased....)

So once I said to Luhde - "What's with all this hootchy-kootchy carved stone maidens and all you stashing around in here?"

So he sidles up to me and says, "Tex... just between you and me ... not to go any further ... this stuff coming in from Ivan." (Ivan then being somewhere over in Far East...). Then looking furtively around he revealed: this stuff was coming from ancient temples in the jungle and all that kind of thing. "You know - archaeology and all that like you interested in... you know..." And he trailed off.

"Hey," I said - "I just walk plowed fields here in New England and stuff. We never find hootchy-kootchy maidens and all - just projectile points and stuff..."

"Well", he sighed, "It's like this: it comes in the feed for the Bronx Zoo hippos".

I said, "Run that by again, Ernie..."

He said, "The hippos and maybe some other critters at Bronx Zoo they have to have special bales of water reeds and grass and stuff from the river deltas in order to survive, and Ivan is sending this feed stuff back to them in bulk shipments now. He gets all this statuary you see from ...around and all... and so they wrap it up in the feed bundles and when it gets to the Bronx - then they open it all up down there and I told him send the statuary up here and I will try to get rid of it..."

So far as I know, this gig went on a quite a while and then dribbled off into obscurity... but this is true story!

bernie-the-raconteur