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"Search for the Rock Star's Stash"
Meeting #12 actually turned out to be QUITE a nice surprise for everyone. In the beginning, we were just anticipating a normal "meet-n-greet" type meeting with member Tony Carducci at his house. You know, checkin' out his Joe collection, eating pizza and trading. And we did do all of that. But what we had forgotten was that there is an important connection between the Quad Cities and the early 1960s development of our favorite 12" hero--the Rock Island Arsenal (see entry marker below).
If you remember, Joe's head creator, Don Levine, had required the loan of actual, 1:1 scale weapons, uniforms and gear to accurately rescale and reproduce Joe accessories at 1/6th scale. And after some phone calls, he was given actual military blueprints from the Springfield, Massachusetts Armory and then all the ACTUAL weapons and gear he could haul off in a truck from the Rock Island Arsenal in Moline, Illinois (a few miles from Tony's home).
We drove to the Arsenal, and a funny thing happened. The guard at the gate stopped us, peered inside the vehicle carefully studying us all, and then ONLY asked for Tony's ID! Tony, as you know, is the only one of us who's still held on to the long hair style of his youth. All of us "short hairs" had to suppress our laughter until we had cleared the gate. It was like, "OK, OK...Let's see some ID, you long-haired
hippy!" ;-) Here's some pictures of what we discovered at the Museum:
SEARCH FOR THE ROCK STAR'S STASH!* We had a great time at the museum getting in touch with GIjOEs roots. By now we were pretty hungry, so we returned to Tony's house for pizza and more Joe fun. Tony's wife Charity very graciously provided our lunch (THANKS AGAIN!). Once we had refueled, we went into Tony's secret garage Joe room. The room was small, but the collection was HUGE! I think Tony said he had over 250 figures now. He's a "take 'em out of the box" type of collector who enjoys setting his Joes up and photographing them for unique (PG-13) fantasy comics. After taking the pictures, he adds dialogue balloons, and burns the entire project onto CDs. Hilarious! Here's some pictures of Tony's "Secret Stash!"
SHOW-N-TELL This month's show-n-tell was full of neat stuff. Take a look at some of the items that were shown off this time:
TRADE-A-PALOOZA After the snow-n-tell was completed, we began our "dump it out" trade-a-palooza. We all dug through the piles and Mark ended up snagging a desert jeep from Don, some Blackhawk comic books from David, and some 1/6th guitars from Tony. David picked up a figure and some gear, and some Miss Fear boxes from Mark, Tony and Don got...I forget. But it was all a great time. Most trades were completely CASH-FREE and everyone was very happy with their new stuff. Don capped it all off with offering his FREE cot kit as a door prize! (VERY generous.)
ON THE ROAD AGAIN... What a great meeting! After the trade-a-palooza we loaded up all of our newly acquired Joe goods and started for home. Since we all live in different cities throughout central Illinois, our club is by nature, a traveling club. Unlike clubs located in big cities where members live close to each other, we have to "hit the road" every meeting in order to keep up with each other and get together. With gas prices rising, we found an efficient way to do this by devising a carpooling route that began in Tuscola and included stops along the way in Champaign, Bloomington, Morton and finally Silvis. We all split the fuel cost and enjoyed the extra "yak time" carpooling provided along the way. Our thanks again to Tony and his lovely wife Charity for hosting this month's meeting in Silvis, Illinois. And to Don Hanke for doing all the driving. He had the farthest to go, starting out in Tuscola. Thanks guys! We all had a blast and hope to see everyone else at the next meeting. Until then, Go Joe!
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Many of those original
research items are now actually kept in the 
