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Dinosaurs - Quantity over Quality

We moved to a new house the next year. It was situated on a hill above a busy intersection. My daughter, recalling the bunny of the previous year, asked me to build a snow dinosaur (by coincidence my elementary forté). 

Things have never been the same since.


Keely Welty's first TV interview

I wanted to build a Tyrannosaurus Rex which would loom over the cars driving up the hill by our house. I used a snow scoop
to haul snow from my back yard to my front yard. Instead of risking a hernia by lifting huge snowballs I just pushed snow over a slippery ramp of snow. 

Unfortunately my Rex was more of an iguana. It didn't tower at all. It just lay on its belly. To create the illusion that it was an active rather than a passive beast I decided to take the snow under its chin and turn it into a stegosaurus. Now my Rex looked a little more as though it was moving in for the kill.

This was the last time I ever sculpted something from memory. 

The following year I wanted to improve on my lame dinosaurs. At the First snowfall I made a tyrannosaurus. This time I used a three inch plastic tyrannosaurus as a model. As Christmas drew near I decided to add a Santa Claus.

We got more snow after Christmas. I knocked off Santa and added a second triceratops.

We got more snow so I decided to build a real towering Tyrannosaurus Rex looking down at the two tricerotops across from the steps.

So I had a tableau. A Rex was looking for a meal as a triceratops mom and her child were scurrying down our hill. This seemed like a good commercial opportunity to my children who set up a cocoa stand out front.

This photo demonstrates my first snow sculpting strategy. I aimed for quantity not quality. I was seventeen years younger than I am today and was less worried about my back.  These were so big that I had to cross the street to see where I should carve things.

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