Pointe Artist's Portraits Take the Long Way Home.
(Detroit News, Wednesday, November 13, 1985.)
Some like to put messages in bottles and toss them in the sea to find out what happens.  Grosse Pointe artist Jim Pallas likes to paint life-sized replicas of real people hitchhiking and put them on highways with return addresses printed on the back. He's finding out what happens to them, too. They don't get there.
So far he has painted replicas of his deughter Lydia, wife Janet, artist friend David Barr, TV and radio personality Sonny Eliot, a shapely Lebanese dancer and six others - including News staff writer James Kerwin.
Motorists apparently have given all the artworks a ride. They have returned just three - excluding Eliot's and Kerwin 's.
"How could anyone part with that face?"  Kerwin's wife Florence asked, referring of course, to the one on Kerwin's portrait.
AN APT QUESTION, for Kerwin hardly could. It was a year after Pallas bestowed the portrait on Kerwin that the reporter gave in to the artist's repeated insistence that it was "time for the test."
Pallas had asked to sit the portrait on some roadside "up north." The reporter argued it had become too much a part of the family.
Regardless, early one morning Kerwin placed his portrait on a southbound rest stop of route 1-75, near Vanderbilt, about 270 miles north of Detroit. It had a request on the back that the painting be delivered to The Detroit News. A half hour later, the rest stop caretaker drove in, spotted the mock-up, checked it, and left chuckling to perform his daily chores. He said that when he returned at noon, it was gone.
That was 11 days ago.

NOT TO WORRY; there's hope, said artist Pallas, a Macomb Community College instructor. He relates that he. created a replica of his father-in-law, Jim Laur who operated a business supply shop on Detroit's east side before he retired The address on the portrait's back was that of an lllinois relative. It took six months to get there. A couple picked up the portrait in Michigan, took it along to their winter quarters in Florida, stayed the winter and delivered it in the spring.
 The portrait of Eliot was picked up and was seen being dragged into the Detroit Historical Museum, where for a time it stood in a corner before vanishing.
It seems clear delivering hitch-hiking portraits can take time.
PALLAS HIMSELF: notes that he left a self portrait in a Paris subway station for delivery to a frend in Switzerland. That was early this year. "Parisians were chuckling over it, but I'm not sure what they did with it," he recounted, seemingly undismayed.
Reporters may tend to be more cynical. Kerwin said. "Hitchhiking is risky even if you're made of plywood."