Bill Charnley

February 26, 2004 - William & Bill

In 1928, long before Forest Gump made his first million, 199 runners raced across the country from Los Angeles to New York to promote the recently constructed Route 66. It was kind of a “get your kicks” kickoff! $25,000 of prize money was offered. 55 men finished the 3,422-mile race. One of those finishers was William Morady, a native of Philadelphia living in Newark, New Jersey.

William Morady’s name would have faded into the past like the Burma Shave Signs along route 66, if it weren’t for a documentary /web site devoted to the race, and the souvenir pins collected by Santa Barbara artist Bill Charnley. Bill found the pins at the Rose Bowl Swap Meet a few years back. There were six of them for sale and he thinks they couldn’t have cost more than $1 each.

Bill creates “works of assemblage”. Just like MacGyver can make a machine gun out of drain pipe and toaster, Bill can make amazing works of art out of things you might find in a construction dumpster or a junk store.

Other items used in his art include Kid’s blocks, clutch parts, furniture rug protectors, toy soldier molds, springs, keys, latches, drawer pulls, crown molding, toy cars, and junkyard scraps. He even has a bunch of music box insides that play “You Are My Sunshine”.

In the art piece shown above, the six William Morady pins are placed inside individual cups of an old six-cup cupcake pan.

You can see the Moradys and Bill’s other artwork at the new Gallery Paseo Nuevo, an eclectic showcase of artwork that opened this month. A good time to go to the Gallery would be Saturday night between 6pm and 9pm for their Grand Opening. Not only will there be lots of good art to look at, there will also be lots of good stuff to eat and drink, too. Tell ‘em Ed sent you!

The dedicated staff of edhat.com tried to talk Bill into doing something with the items we collect for our daily edhats. For instance, we have 32 unique bottles of water in our office. Bill took a pass on the water bottles but left it open for some other collaboration in the future.

A large number of edhat.com subscribers were able to “Google” William Morady and find out his claim to fame. In the tiebreaker only EdsUp guessed 6 as the number of times Morady can be seen in one place in Santa Barbara. EdsUps win her choice of movie tickets, coffee card, or See’s candy. In our post game interview with EdsUp, she told us that she picked six because it “sounded like a good number.”

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