A Roosevelt Mimic Plays Him for Posterity
ROCK TAVERN, N.Y. — Double bully!
It was like seeing double as Joe Wiegand beheld a life-size bronze statue of Theodore Roosevelt being completed recently at a foundry in this town outside Newburgh.
“They nailed it,” Mr. Wiegand, 47, said of the likeness achieved by the sculptors.
Mr. Wiegand should know. He makes a living dressing and speaking in the role of Roosevelt at events — a Roosevelt repriser, he calls it — and is such a dead-ringer for the 26th president, down to his robust build and mustache, that he was hired to model for the statue months earlier....