Mass. high-schooler brought Norman Rockwell's "Rookie" to life

Finally tonight, a Norman Rockwell painting called The Rookie sold at auction today for $22.5 million. Rockwell died in 1978, but The Rookie is still around. He told Lee Cowan the amazing story of how he was drafted. I was 18. Oh my goodness, you were The Rookie. Sherman Safford's moment of immortality began in his high school lunch line. I was hungry. It was noontime. Went down to the cafeteria, and sitting next to a friend of mine was a fellow smoking a pipe. But you knew he was somebody. Yeah, I knew, oh, he had to be somebody. Nobody smoked in that building. That pipe-smoking fellow was Norman Rockwell, the artist famous for celebrating small-town America. He was finishing an oil painting for a 1957 cover of the Saturday Evening Post. The topic, baseball. The scene, the arrival of a young rookie in the Boston Red Sox locker room. The players were all real, but Rockwell needed a cheerful nobody. So he plucked Safford out of that cafeteria in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and paid him $120 to play the hayseed. What do you think he saw in you? I think he saw a raw bone kid, a young kid that was athletic, skinny. The hair is what grabbed his attention right off the bat. It was pretty shooky. I mean, he put a hat on me because it looked so bad. Rockwell often based his paintings on photographs, a technique he talked about with Edward R. Murrow on the CBS broadcast, Person to Person. You don't just take a photograph and tint it. You reassemble it and change it and so on. We found Rockwell's photos from his shoot with Safford sitting in the archives at the Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. This must have been the first time that I posed. Safford's suitcase was a picnic basket he borrowed from his mother, the glove he borrowed from a buddy. The bat he made in woodshop. The result was a home run. The rookie is just one of 323 covers Rockwell painted for the Saturday Evening Post, but during his lifetime he rarely got the kind of recognition that auction houses are giving him now. He has stamped his image of America everywhere. But you're now part of that. And I'm part of that, and that is just too cool. Sherm Safford doesn't know where he'll be hanging next, but he knows that moment all those years ago, for him, is still priceless. Lee Cowan, CBS News, Stockbridge, Massachusetts.