history & fiction: The Thinker

Most of the historical events in the book are dated accurately: students took over Columbia on April 23rd; Cleveland police and Black nationalists had a deadly shoot-out in Glenville on July 23rd; the Chicago police charged the bandshell audience on August 27th. But dates don't make fiction.
People want to know the history behind the novel's account of blowing up the Thinker at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The plaque under the statue states it was the work of "vandals" at about 1:00 am March 24th 1970, and states that the vandals were never found. An Art Museum staff person told me they used a nine-inch pipe bomb. Until she did, I was imagining a bundle of dynamite sticks. Wrong. Explosives stuffed into lead pipe with a ten-foot fuse did plenty of damage.
I've found The Thinker fascinating since I was small. Look at him, a giant man pondering all the trouble in the world -- and he's naked, completely exposed!
It made sense to include the Thinker in a novel of 1968, the year so much exploded. For the first couple of drafts the actual explosion was in an epilogue, because the book had to end in December '68. I was sticking close to historical fact, and my characters were stewing around like real people do; the plot wasn't working, however. One of the jobs of fiction is to transform inner stewing and sensations we live with all the time into events, dramatic and decisive. Vague longings become action. The novel still lacked that inner engine that a novel has to have, thrumming along with the pulse of the reader. I talked about the difficulties with writer Rodger Kamenetz, who suddenly said, "Ivy gets to blow up the Thinker." Gets to.
When I swallowed and digested that enormous idea, I realized I could put the bomb in Ivy's hands at the beginning of the book and move the explosion back sixteen months (what's sixteen months, after all?). And suddenly the book had a solid shape and an image of the naked giant permanently changed and pondering empty space. In deciding to keep the statue the way it was, Sherman Lee had recognized The Thinker as Cleveland's icon for the era. How could I not use it?