By Trudy Tynan
Associated Press

STOCKBRIDGE, Mass. — Red-haired, freckle-faced Reid Huffman — sporting a dress shirt and slacks that were only slightly rumpled from climbing an outdoor sculpture — politely peered up at a painting in the Norman Rockwell Museum.

Staring back out of the canvas was a nervous, red-haired, freckle-faced kid facing his dad with his report card.

And in a wide-eyed double-take that transformed art into life, the 10-year-old boy from Burlington, N.C., discovered the New England artist whose gentle portraits of ordinary American life spanned the first half of the century.

"He's cool," Reid says, acknowledging with a shy nod that he could relate to the scholastic predicament Rockwell depicted.

"Painfully," adds his smiling father, Damon Huffman.

Museum curator Stephanie Haboush Plunkett comments, "Young people today have no trouble relating to Norman Rockwell. His messages are timeless."

More than 185,000 people annually visit the museum here devoted to the artist, who spent the last 25 years of his life in this small New England village painting Boy Scouts and kindly country doctors and using his neighbors — the storekeeper, the police chief, the paperboy — as models.

Many of the children in his paintings are pigeon-toed. So was the artist.

Rockwell died in 1978 at age 84.

Still, it sometimes seems as if the lean and lanky man, who became one of America's most popular artists, could come bicycling up the road by the Red Lion Inn at any time.

"People feel like they know him, because of the Saturday Evening Post covers. It's like coming to see a friend," says museum guide Marge Blair of Stockbridge, who did know Rockwell and his wife, Molly. She says Rockwell used her son as a model for Huckleberry Finn.

"This isn't your typical art museum," Blair says. "You always hear people laughing and reminiscing."

The museum, which moved in 1993 from a tiny historic home on Main Street that Rockwell and his wife helped save, houses the world's largest collection of Rockwell's work, including more than 570 original paintings and drawings, and an archive of more than 100,000 photographs, letters and other items.

Rockwell's studio, moved intact to the museum and open from May to October, remains as he left it — with a partially completed painting on the easel.

Mimi and Harold Baumgarten of Spring Valley, N.Y., married 55 years, held hands as they strolled through a downstairs display of all 322 of the covers Rockwell painted for Saturday Evening Post from 1916 to 1963.

"It brings back a lot of memories," Baumgarten says.

A special holiday exhibit, which runs through Jan. 28, features 27 paintings Rockwell did between 1948 and 1957 for Hallmark Christmas cards. They range from jolly Dickensian Santas to weary Dads balancing on rickety stepladders to trim the tree while children, dogs and cats raise havoc.

A traveling exhibit of 70 of Rockwell's most famous paintings has been moving from city to city.

Another special exhibit, which runs through May 28, marks the first time the U.S. Postal Service has exhibited its collection of 125 pieces of original postal stamp art.

It features a saluting Boy Scout that Rockwell, who became art editor of the Scout magazine at age 19, painted for a four-cent stamp commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Boy Scouts of America on Feb. 8, 1960.

It also displays his five-cent commemorative, released Oct. 26, 1963, to mark the centennial of city mail delivery. Rockwell's mustachioed mailman is an ordinary Joe slogging on through the rain, tormented by children, with a dog nipping at his heels.

"It was the first humorous postage stamp," Plunkett said. "When we went to pick up the artwork it was hanging in the postmaster general's office."

If you go:

The Norman Rockwell Museum, on Route 183 in Stockbridge, Mass., houses the world's largest collection of Rockwell's work, including more than 570 original paintings and drawings, and an archive of more than 100,000 photographs, letters and other items.

Getting there: From the Massachusetts Turnpike, take Exit 1 (West Stockbridge) and follow signs to Route 183 heading south.

Hours: Open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. May through October. Open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays November through April and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekends and holidays. Closed Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day.

Admission: $9 for adults. Visitors 18 and under get in free with an adult.

Information: (413) 298-4100;