Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree or in jail, would be welcomed home on their return. In October 1971, newspaper columnist Pete Hamill wrote a piece for the "New York Post" called "Going Home". In it, he told a variant of the story, in which college students on a bus trip to the beaches of Fort Lauderdale make friends with an ex-convict who is watching for a yellow handkerchief on a roadside oak in Brunswick, Georgia. Hamill claimed to have heard this story in oral tradition. In June 1972, nine months later, "Reader's Digest" reprinted "Going Home". Also in June 1972, ABC-TV aired a dramatized version
An Oak Tree Catholic background and was an altar boy. He sees belief of both artist and viewer as having a key place in art, and that in "An Oak Tree" he had "deconstructed the work of art in such a way as to reveal its single basic and essential element", namely this belief. "An Oak Tree" was a turning point in his artistic development: prior to it his concern had been deconstruction, and afterwards he was "trying to put the pieces together again." Subsequently, using the rationale of Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain", he worked with drawings of utilitarian objects and flat areas of