CHRISTMAS PANTS
I told you about a pair of guys who had exchanged the same pair of moleskin pants for over a decade. Each year they tried to outdo one another with the only rules being they couldn’t damage the pants and they had to use scrap material. I’d left the story with Kunkel having received the pants in a safe which had been welded shut. His gift-giving cohort, Collette received them back in a metal box which had once been a 1974 Gremlin. A note attached to the 2,000-pound scrunched car advised Collette that the pants were inside the glove compartment. He countered with an 8’ high and 2’ wide tire filled with 6,000 pounds of concrete. On the outside Collette had written, "Have a Goodyear."
A 17.5’ red rocket ship in ’ filled with concrete and weighing 6 tons. A 4-ton Rubik’s Cube made of concrete, baked in a kiln and covered with 2,000 board feet of lumber. And a station wagon with 170 generators welded together were just some of the ways this gift was conveyed. In 1989 the giving came to an end when Collette tried to encase the pants in 5 tons of jagged glass.
In the pouring process an over sized chunk of glass fractured and transformed the pants into a pile of ashes. The ashes were deposited into a brass urn and delivered to Kunkel along with this epitaph: Sorry, Old Man Here lies the Pants. The urn now graces the fireplace mantel in Kunkel’s home.