An American named Lewis Carpenter was hired earlier the last century to teach English at a school near the town of Poprad in the region formerly known as Czechoslovakia in central Europe. Carpenter was from a little Bohemian village called Freemont about five miles from downtown Seattle in northwestern Washington state.

Suddenly, for reasons that have nothing to do with this story, Lewis Carpenter got himself fired and was told to go home to the United States.

He remembered a fifty foot iron statue of a young Vladimir Lenin that had adorned the center square of Poprad, a statue that had been torn down, toppled really, when Czechoslovakia was a country to be concerned about — and consequently fragmented and done away with by the Russians.

Lewis Carpenter, since he was going home anyway, thought the people of Freemont, near Seattle, would like having “a piece of the U.S.S.R.” in their town square, especially if it were for free.

(The statue of Lenin was sculpted in iron by Emil Venkov, a Bulgarian with no credentials whatever, at a time when Lenin was a very young man and unrecognizable as the eventual founder of the U.S.S.R.)
The statue of Lenin lay where it had been toppled, face down in the mud where it remained to rot and rust — but Venkov somehow got word “that a CRAZY American wanted to buy it”, and the price shot up to an amazing thirteen grand!

As that was about the total Carpenter had in savings, he turned it over immediately to Venkov — never for a moment did Carpenter consider what it would cost to have the forty-one ton statue broken down into three pieces, packed up properly, then transported across Europe, across the Atlantic, through the Caribbean, through the Panama Canal, up the Pacific, all the way to the port of Seattle, then across land to Freemont, the Bohemian village — this came to the staggering sum of $65,500!

After much soul-searching, Lewis Carpenter finally mortgaged his house and took an advance on his retirement fund, and for many years the fifty foot and forty-one ton statue of a very youngish Vladimir Lenin stood majestically in the square of Freemont, Washington — and no one had the faintest idea who it was!

Ironically, Lewis Carpenter was killed in 1994 in an auto accident, and the statue, laying for years in a nearby junkyard — finally recognized — is now for sale by the Carpenter family for a cool quarter of a million dollars. (To date, nobody has made an offer.)

Copyright © 2014 by Robert A.Mills,all rights reserved,may not be published, nor re-written nor broadcast without the author’s permission