Article originally ran
in the October 20, 2004 edition of the Corydon Democrat
Batman
logo says, ‘I love you’
By Jackie
Carpenter
It is the story of a childhood hero and
one of true love, one that later left this real-life Batman fan with another
symbol: that of a bleeding, broken heart.
He is 43 and divorced. He lives in Jeffersonville, but his heart remains in Corydon, along with
the Batman symbols he painted at the Corydon-Interstate-64 interchange and on
both lanes of S.R. 135 west of town, at Hayswood hill.
We begin at the beginning.
"Every kid had a childhood hero," he said. "He was mine. So
many times my mother had to come and get me, hanging from a tree with a blue
towel tied around my neck. If you had that towel on, that cape on, you thought
you were a super hero."
When he was a kid he and his three brothers and a sister
grew up in Jeffersonville, but, luckily, he
said, his grandfather lived in Central. "We came down every summer; that's when
I first hit Jocko's. My best friend moved here when I was going into junior
high.
"I came down every summer and spent the summer with him; his
parents were like my parents."
His best friend, though, was killed in an automobile
accident on S.R. 62. "Growing up, you only have one best friend; you can never
replace him; you never have another friend like that."
Batman-fan grew up, married and had a daughter, and then, as
is often the case these days, a divorce. He had custody of the child and his
parents cared for her while he was away, working on a barge eight months out of
the year on "the river."
He blames the divorce on seldom being home.
Nevertheless, he said, "I was a happy person."
And then one day it happened.
"The (Harrison) county
fair was going on. You know how it is — everybody's happy at the county fair."
As he left the fairgrounds, driving north on Capitol Avenue, Batman-fan passed Alstott's Ace Hardware at
the corner of Capitol and Poplar.
"On the corner at Ace Alstott's, she was standing there with
a girl standing beside her, holding her hand. On her hip was another little
girl. My heart skipped a beat.
"They say when you find the girl you are going to live the
rest of your life with, you just know," he said. "I believe that; I'm a hopeless
romantic."
Batman-fan spent a month looking for the girl of his dreams.
When he saw her go into a building in downtown Corydon, he waited outside,
pretending to look at her car. "When she came out of the building I asked her if
she was interested in selling it. We had our first date Oct. 16, 1991, and a year to that day we were married."
But the river rose up again and swallowed his heart. "Being
gone all that time, things happen," he said. "She found someone else and moved.
She took my heart."
That's when the first symbol appeared on the interstate,
Batman-fan said, because she would know it was left by him, a hopeless Batman
fan. "I knew when she would come home to see her parents she would see the
symbol. I was hoping her heart would smile just a little bit."
(I can't tell you how he did the painting, because that
might encourage some youngster to try his hand. And that would be too dangerous
on a busy interstate.)
Time passed and Batman-fan got a call from the woman's
brother, who said their grandmother was ill and in the hospital and his sister
wanted him to know. "I came up here and sat with her every night until her
grandmother passed. She gave me a book, The Notebook, by Nicholas Sparks. It was
the best book I ever read. It touched me deeply."
Time went by, and fair time rolled around again. Now, it
makes him sad.
"I found out she was divorced and back in town. I knew where
she was living, and I knew she would have to travel that road (135) coming and
going to work. That's why I painted the symbols on that road. She would have to
pass over them all the time."
He said, "Batman was a good guy. He always was a good
person, but he never got the woman.
