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HAMILTON — Two historic works of art, partly a gift to Hamilton High School from legendary humorist Will Rogers, have come home from an extended Florida vacation to be a permanent part of the Robert McCloskey Museum in Heritage Hall.

In 1928, the Hamilton High School History Club brought Rogers to Hamilton for an appearance and also helped arrange some other stops on his tour, according to museum committee member Richard Haid.

"They made $300 off the Will Rogers lecture and decided to buy the Venus de Milo, which was made of Carrera marble," Haid said. "Will Rogers was so impressed by what they'd done that he donated $100 to purchase a pedestal for her."

McCloskey, a 1932 graduate of Hamilton High School who later on became an award-winning children's author, may have been inspired by those two sculptures.

"We have several drawings in the museum of funny-looking heads on pedestals," Haid said, and so he did some research and discovered mention of two statues on either side of the stage of the old Hamilton High School, later Harding Junior High School, on Dayton Street.

Eventually, he was directed to Lou Florio, former Hamilton High principal and football coach who had retired to Florida, who not only identified the statues — a bust of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius in addition to the Venus de Milo — but had them in his possession.

In 1982, when the school was being razed, Florio went to watch some of the demolition. All that was left was the auditorium, where the two sculptures still beside the stage.

"I asked the wrecking company if we could get the statues down," he said. "He hesitated, but then said if we could get them down, we could have them."

He only had one hour to pull it off, however, but with the help of a friend with a crane, he took them home with him, and when he later retired to Florida, drove them down, too: "Venus was in the back seat and Marcus was in the front," he said.

But with the McCloskey connection and the historic link to Will Rogers, Florio donated the statues to the museum in Heritage Hall, the former municipal building noted for the McCloskey designed bas reliefs on its facade.

To honor the homecoming, Haid commissioned 15-year-old Hamilton artist Izzy Jones to re-create a drawing from McCloskey's book "Homer Price," where the character poses behind a headless statue. In Jones' rendering, however, the head has been cut-out so that visitors to the museum can have their photos taken.