Lost Picasso Found in Trashed Apartment

In this episode of Simple Joe, I’m starting with a look back at the rough-and-tumble early days of passenger air travel before checking the weather in Falkenstein, Germany, and Cincinnati, Ohio. We celebrate birthdays including cartoonist Mort Walker, actress Eileen Brennan, Beach Boys co-founder Al Jardine, Charlie Sheen, and Olympic snowboarder Shaun White, then look back at Richard the Lionheart’s coronation, Frederick Douglass’s escape from slavery, and NASA’s Viking 2 landing on Mars. I also revisit a childhood memory involving Welsh rarebit and Gomer Pyle, talk about the very humbling experience of bowling when everybody is watching, and then dig into Thursday’s Story Behind the Headline: the remarkable discovery of a missing Picasso hanging behind a bedroom door in a trashed Milwaukee apartment. The artwork had disappeared from a gallery eight years earlier, was worth tens of thousands of dollars, and somehow spent years hiding in plain sight before a landlord found it while cleaning up after an eviction. The story leaves plenty of unanswered questions about how it got there, who originally stole it, and what happens to it now. Along the way, I wonder about the valuable things people unexpectedly discover in thrift stores, yard sales, old houses, and maybe even their own homes, and I wrap things up with the reminder to make the day memorable for yourself and somebody else, because memories are better than stuff.

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