At a cost of more than $12, I have now completed a Level 1 survey of the Lamb Chop Factoid and am satisfied that a Level 2 survey will not be necessary. Inquiries concerning a possible JFKA-affiliated blood-stained Lamb Chop puppet were made to the National Archives; the Sixth Floor Museum; the salt caves outside Lenexa, KS; the Doll Museum in Rochester, NY; the Portland (OR) Puppet Museum; and, of course, the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta.
Only one formal response was received. Longtime NARA archivist Gwendolyn Forsyth was kind enough to respond by email to the effect of “WTF???”, which your intrepid factoid-buster (
moi) understood to be a negative response to the inquiry. My agent in Dallas, Harrison Jesus Wadsworth, got only as far as
“Hey, has anyone heard of Lamb Ch…” before he was escorted from the premises of the Sixth Floor Museum by a uniformed security guard.
An extensive survey was conducted of items and auction catalogs from the estates of both Shari Lewis (
i.e., Phyllis Naomi Tarcher) and Soupy Sales (
i.e., Milton Supman). The administrator of the estate of Mr. Sales, one Soupy Jesus Horowitz, directed us to YouTube clips of Mr. Sales' droll and diverting “White Fang” (see below), but in none of these hundreds of clips does anything resembling Lamb Chop appear.
I also asked my longtime colleague, Jake Jesus Maxwell, to undertake a forensic analysis of all extant images, including electron microscope scans and, of course, the use of the famed VP-8 Image Analyzer that has contributed so meaningfully to analysis of the Shroud of Turin. Mr. Maxwell identified in Mrs. Kennedy’s arms a bouquet of the perennial herbaceous flowering plant in the family
Asteraceae commonly referred to as “mums” and a sprig of another Asteraceae family member commonly referred to as “asters.” (Mr. Maxwell finds it highly suspicious, as do I, that two members of the Asteraceae family “just happened” to be in the limousine at the same time, but this is a factoid for another day.)
Alas, Mr. Maxwell was unable to find Lamb Chop in whole or part in any of the extant images. He did provisionally identify a tiny gunman in the sprig of asters, but he concedes this could be a beetle (Latin
Scarabaeidae, comprising some 35,000 species). In any event, this too is a factoid for another day.
Thus concludes the Level 1 survey, and the Lamb Chop Factoid is hereby classified as busted unless and until such time, if any, as compelling new information comes to light, in which case a Level 2 survey will be undertaken.
