The OddWay News
Case Study No. 17 · · 4 Min Read
Twenty-two giants in this index are the same statue. A cancelled order in 1962 left one fibreglass mould in a Californian workshop, and everything after it — the cowboys, the Vikings, the coal miner in Utah — is that mould with a different head.
Stand in front of the coal miner in Helper, Utah and then in front of the Viking in Bangor, Michigan, and you will notice something before you can explain it. They are the same size. They stand the same way. The left hand is turned palm up and the right hand palm down, as though each was built to hold a length of pipe across the body.
They were. Every one of them was.
Bob Prewitt made fibreglass animals in southern California. Horses, steers, giant chickens — the kind of thing a rodeo man with spare capacity between contests might fall into making. Around 1962 an order came in for a twenty-foot Paul Bunyan, and he hired a sculptor named Bill Swan to build the mould.
Then the customer cancelled.
What happened next is where the accounts stop agreeing. One version has Prewitt loading the finished giant onto a truck and driving Route 66 until somebody bought it, which is how it ended up outside the Paul Bunyan Café in Flagstaff, Arizona. Another simply records that the café was the customer all along. The date moves between 1961 and 1962 depending on who is telling it, and the original order is placed in Sacramento by some and nowhere in particular by others.
The part nobody disputes is the mould. It existed, it had cost money, and it was sitting in a workshop with nothing to do.
A boatbuilder named Steve Dashew bought Prewitt's business — in 1963, or 1964, again depending on the source — and renamed it International Fiberglass. Boats are made of the same stuff, and the work is seasonal; a sideline that used the same materials in winter was worth having.
The Bunyan mould came with the purchase. Dashew started telephoning businesses to ask whether anybody wanted a giant.
One of the early ones went to a petrol station in Las Vegas, and the owner told a trade magazine his sales had doubled. Dashew later described what followed as the invasion. Fill in the beard and it is a cowboy for Phillips 66. Change the chest and the headdress and it is an Indian for Mohawk stations and Pontiac dealerships. A horned helmet makes a Viking for a carpet company. The arms came off and bolted back on, which is why so many of them are holding something absurd: a muffler, a tyre, an axe, a golf club, a hot dog.
Nobody called them Muffler Men at the time. That name was coined in the 1980s by the people cataloguing what was left, who kept finding them outside exhaust shops.
The figures stand between eighteen and twenty-five feet tall, and this index holds twenty-two, across sixteen states. Once you know the posture you cannot stop seeing it.
Big John in Helper, Utah is a coal miner, in a town that was a coal town. Chief Pontiac stands outside a transportation museum in Pontiac, Michigan. The Joor Muffler Man in Escondido has been outside the same California shop for decades. And the Paulverizer in Buena Vista, Virginia is a cyborg, which is not a variant International Fiberglass ever offered — somebody did that later, to a statue that had already outlived the company that made it.
International Fiberglass closed in 1974. The 1973 oil crisis put the price of resin up, and the interstates were pulling traffic off the roads these things were built to be seen from. A giant only works if somebody is driving past slowly enough to look at it.
Estimates of how many survive vary — around two hundred of the originals is the figure most often repeated, from a production run that ran into the thousands. The original moulds are gone. Broken, or lost; the accounts differ there too.
In Sparta, Wisconsin there is a field behind a fibreglass workshop with the moulds lying in it. Not International Fiberglass's moulds — a different company, making the same kind of thing — but the same idea, retired: a giant chicken on its side, half a cow, a face staring up at the sky out of the grass.
It is the only place in this index where you can see the negative rather than the statue. A thing shaped like the absence of a giant, which is what every one of these started as.
Go and look at the field. Then go and look at a Muffler Man, and notice that you are looking at the same object.
