CUYAHOGA FALLS: The girlfriend only lasted a few months.
But the butterfly that Gene Talbott carved into a Cuyahoga River boulder in pursuit of her heart may be eternal.
Recently, Talbott was curious about whether visitors to the Gorge Metro Park ever wondered about the hand-chiseled piece of art he left behind nearly half a century ago.
It’s far below the cliff where the trail leads north of the dam, just beyond a narrow wooden boardwalk that winds along a portion of the dirt path. Yet it’s clearly visible, because some unknown daredevil repainted it long after Talbott’s initial paint faded away.
On a recent visit home, Talbott, who lives in Greer, S.C., took his grandchildren on a hike to see his butterfly.
Talbott stopped a park ranger and mischievously plied him for information about the carving, only to be told that nobody knew who the ancient artist was. One legend, the ranger told him, has the mysterious carver jumping into the river after completing his work, never to be seen again.
Talbott chuckled at the stories, then revealed himself as the 21-year-old love-struck youth who crawled over a drainpipe and clambered down the cliff to the rocky shoreline in 1973 with a hammer, screwdriver and a grid drawn over a picture of a spicebush swallowtail to help guide his hand.
Talbott, now 65, still has the photos he took of the process: the chalk outline, his girlfriend posing on his drawing and the finished, colorful production, complete with their names: Gene T. and Diane K.
It took two days to complete his work, interrupted only once by a park ranger who thought Talbott’s bag of spray paints was concealing beer.
He took Diane K. to see it the second day as he finished it off in metallic red, blue and purple and added the admittedly sappy sentiment “On the wings of love” in a painted script.
“She really liked it. She sat on it so I could take a picture, and we had a good time that day,” he recalled.
He was living in Akron’s Kenmore neighborhood at the time, and met Diane K. during spring break in Fort Lauderdale. When he learned she was from Parma, he pursued her after he got back home. They spent the summer together, going to Cedar Point, hanging out and doing all the typical things that 1970s kids did when they were going steady.
Things went so well, in fact, that by the fall, he was ready to pop the question. He had the staff of a restaurant bring out a cake with icing that asked: “Will you be my bride?”
Everyone stood speechless, waiting for her answer. The waitresses encouraged her: “Yes! Say yes!”
But she didn’t say anything. The waitresses went back to work, and a discouraged Talbott eventually learned that Diane K. had been dating two men all along.
By November, he’d given up. He wrote her a breakup letter, moved on and never heard from her again.
A year later, he met the “pearl of a girl” who would become his wife, now married 41 years with seven children and 17 grandchildren together.
Her name is Karen. Her middle name is Diane. That butterfly with the “Diane K” now seems just a little dyslexic.
However, the names are no longer visible. They are hidden beneath a newer coat of paint that tells Talbott someone still appreciates the piece of his heart he left behind during that summer romance.
Given how far the boulder is below the walking trail, “you probably wouldn’t see it at all if somebody hadn’t kept painting it,” said brother Dave Talbott, 61. “That’s really neat that someone cared to do that.”
Paula Schleis can be reached at 330-996-3741 or pschleis@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/paulaschleis.