In looking for today's Spark topic, we were interested to
see that on March 26, 1937, Crystal City, Texas erected a statue in honor of Popeye the Sailor.
That struck us as odd, seeing as how we had visited Chester, Illinois
(hometown of Elzie Segar, creator of the man who is "strong to the finich") last year, specifically to see their statues of Popeye, Olive Oyl,
and J. Wellington Wimpy. "Surely," we thought, "there couldn't be two.
Popeye's well-known, but he's not that popular, is he?"
Imagine our surprise to find that there are not just two statues of the
cycloptic sailor, but four, with Alma, Arkansas and Springdale, Arkansas joining the fun (though we think the original Alma statue looked
more like Mr. Clean than Popeye, and the last has gone missing). It got us to wondering what other wonders we'd been
missing in this great land of ours.
We knew about -- and have even visited (as did another vistor) -- the giant statue of Superman in Metropolis, Illinois,
but we didn't realize that Metropolis (a community of only 6,500) also
boasted a giant statue of a grocery bagger as well as the grave of Robert Stroud, the "Birdman of Alcatraz." We'd also visited Collinsville, Illinois to see the world's largest bottle of ketchup (though we were mighty disappointed to find there was no
gift shop. What’s up with that, Collinsville?). What we didn't
realize was that Illinois must be suffering from some sort of inferiority
complex, as it's also home to the world's largest statue of
local-boy-made-good Abraham Lincoln, a series of giant generic guys and gals
in and out of bathing suits, and the tallest totem pole east of the Rockies.
Of course, the Land of Lincoln isn't the only home of "what the hell is that?"
attractions. There are the dinosaurs
in Cabazon, California (made famous in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure); the Mother Goose House in Hazard, Kentucky; the five-story-tall muskie that houses the Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame and
Museum in Hayward, Wisconsin; the Big Duck
of Flanders, New York; or Lucy the Elephant in Margate, New Jersey -- a monument that used to be a hotel. (And need we
mention the late, lamented Bull Dog Café
in Los Angeles?)
Not all the monuments are animals, though. There's the aforementioned ketchup bottle, but there's also the "Shoe House" in Hellam, Pennsylvania
(and, yes, an old woman
did live there); the Castroville, California artichoke;
a giant baked potato in Blackfoot, Idaho; an office chair
in Anniston, Alabama; a chest of drawers in High Point, North
Carolina; a milk bottle
in New Bedford, Connecticut, and a paper airplane in Mukilteo, Washington. There's also a penny
in Woodruff, Wisconsin that claims to be the world's biggest, but Batman
might disagree.
Some folks plan their vacations around seeing such sights (not us, of
course...), but it's just as delightful (if not terrifying) to stumble across
Mickey Rooney's giant head unexpectedly. We don’t know what it is in the
American character that makes us want to eat in a giant hat
or go gawk at a giant orange,
but it's a treat to find a town or a company that commemorates something in
that way. Herr Doktor Sigmund Freud
might have something to say about this quest for size, but sometimes a giant ear of corn is just a
giant ear of corn.
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