I grew up in a quiet town in Iowa. Down in this pastoral park there was an old black train bridge spanning a small creek. It was the perfect easel for all the brilliant kids who loved to spray paint smutty words - you know, every town has a place like that. Well, the first year (high school seniors), my three buddies and I snuck down one night with black paint (the color of the bridge) and painted over all the offending words. The second night, after the paint had dried, we went back down with white spray paint and repainted all the smut - but cleaned it up. Now the bridge said, "Fudge, Gee Whiz, Shucks," etc. We envisioned the local news headline the next day to be "Fort Dodge Terrorized by Puritan Gang".

But that's not the end. The next summer, we chose to do something on a grand scale. We measured the dimensions of the bridge, built stencils over six feet tall, constructed a rope harness so that we could lower a person over the top of the bridge, put two of us in the creek with a ladder so we could climb up and stabalize the lower section of the stencils, and proceeded to paint, in exactly perfect proportion "LIONEL".

Fast forward...that was 1969. At our 20th reunion - it still remained. The city fathers chose to leave it as a landmark...at our 25th, some enterprising young folks had cleaned it up and repainted it - letter for letter using our carefully placed lettering.

When I die, this is truly my legacy.