The new Ray Bradbury sculpture/statue is now in place and dedicated in his home town of Waukegan, Illinois, a lakeside town about 30 miles north of Chicago. Designed by Zachary Oxman and made by E & E Metal Fab. near Harrisburg, the ‘Fantastical Traveler’ memorial was unveiled for Bradbury’s 100th birthday in August 2019. It’s only had local media coverage, so far.

Locally funded by $125,000 in donations, the memorial heralds a planned 3,500-sq.ft. Ray Bradbury Museum in the town’s disused Carnegie Library. In the meantime the town hosts an annual Ray Bradbury ‘Dandelion Wine’ Fine Arts Festival.

The work was inspired by Ray Bradbury’s 1971 celebratory poem for NASA’s Mariner 9 mission…

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If only we had taller been

The fence we walked between the years

Did balance us serene

It was a place half in the sky where

In the green of leaf and promising of peach

We’d reach our hands to touch and almost touch the sky

If we could reach and touch, we said,

‘Twould teach us, not to, never to, be dead

We ached and almost touched that stuff;

Our reach was never quite enough.

If only we had taller been

And touched God’s cuff, His hem,

We would not have to go with them

Who’ve gone before,

Who, short as us, stood tall as they could stand

And hoped by stretching tall that they might keep their land

Their home, their hearth, their flesh and soul.

But they, like us, were standing in a hole

O, Thomas, will a Race one day stand really tall

Across the Void, across the Universe and all?

And, measured out with rocket fire,

At last put Adam’s finger forth

As on the Sistine Ceiling,

And God’s hand come down the other way

To measure man and find him Good

And Gift him with Forever’s Day?

I work for that

Short man, Large dream

I send my rockets forth between my ears

Hoping an inch of Good is worth a pound of years

Aching to hear a voice cry back along the universal mall:

We’ve reached Alpha Centauri!

We’re tall, O God, we’re tall!

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S.T. Joshi has undertaken a whirlwind tour of Lovecraft’s places, in the company of a documentary film crew, ranging from Quebec to New York City to Providence. His most recent blog post has an account of the trip.

At the conclusion…

In Providence I was happy to hand over to an official at Brown University a check for $10,000, constituting the initial sum raised by the sale of the library of W. H. Pugmire.

…in a week or two we expect to have still more books [of the Pugmire library] posted on the website, including some very choice items indeed. So keep a sharp eye peeled!