The Fat Man Delivers Christmas
December 1994. Two weeks before Christmas. The Fat Man and I roll into Hendersonville, Tennessee. We’re hauling precious cargo, and the townsfolk line up along Highway 31 to wave us in. They get right up close, but I believe I have the best view, right there in the plate-sized rearview mirror of that Silver Eagle: fifty-three tour buses, ponderous and sleek (most belonging to country music artists, but a few the property of drivers on the NASCAR circuit), curving out of sight behind us, snaking through the darkness like a giant string of holiday lights towed down the slow lane by the very hand of God. Garth’s bus is back there, and Wynonna’s. Reba sent one, and so did Brooks & Dunn. The marquees at the brow of each vehicle read like the weekly Top 40. But this parade isn’t about big names. This parade is about kids, and Christmas. And it’s about people like the Fat Man.
The bus driver they call the Fat Man was born Gene Reed. Been driving a bus for thirty-one years. He’s hauled Ferlin Husky, Nat Stuckey, George Jones, Mel Tillis, the Forrester Sisters, Joe Stampley, Brother Phelps, Ricky Van Shelton, Van Halen, Kiss, 2 Live Crew, MC Hammer, Boyz 2 Men. Voice like a Dixie back road: all gravel and drawl. A raconteur’s love of holding the stage. Quick on the trigger with an infinite range of ripostes, nearly all of them unprintably earthy. And one of the founders of Christmas Is for Kids, the event that drew me to Hendersonville. Christmas Is for Kids began in 1981 when Reed and a group of nine buses arranged to transport twenty-five disadvantaged children to a special Christmas dinner and shopping trip. The volunteer efforts of the drivers, artists, and chaperones, combined with the cooperation of regional school officials, eventually transformed the first humble outing into a major event. The buses rolling through Hendersonville tonight carry 358 children. “We pick up our kids and meet at the First Baptist Church,” says the Fat Man. “The church puts on a meal and entertainment. Santa Claus is there. Then we come on up here with these buses in a convoy. And man, they give us the street.”
Outside my window, a parked pickup truck beeps and flashes its lights. Our three young passengers are in the rear of the bus—site of the artist’s master bedroom—watching cartoons, so I wave from the copilot seat in their place. A small part of me hopes I’ll be taken for a star.
Before we set off in convoy, the children were given an after-dinner tour of Trinity City. Formerly known as Twitty City, in honor of Conway Twitty, whose home was on the grounds, the expansive complex was soaked in white Christmas lights; every tree was incandescent, every structure was outlined in twinkles. I kept hearing the words “Look! Look!” The children wound their way around flickering garden paths, across miniature walk bridges spanning a manicured stream, through sheltered courtyards. Fairy-tale scenes were arranged in diorama at each bend in the path. Many of the children chattered noisily. Some darted out of line. A pair of children in snow jackets left the tour to fool around in a garbage can. A tiny child, hand engulfed by a driver’s beefy palm, stood transfixed in the face of it all, head tipped back, mouth parted, eyes wide. I looked at that child, and my throat hurt.
We left through tall gates and walked to the buses.
A lengthy wait ensued while the convoy was organized and the police escort arranged itself. Our kids wrestled in the aisle, and Reed spotted them in the mirror. “Awright, you kids, cut it out ’fore I snatch y’ nekkid ’n’ blister yer butt!” The giggling never let up as they ran off to the television in the back of the bus, to watch The Simpsons. Impatient, Reed keyed his CB mike and sang, “Sha na na na, Sha na na na, move ’em on out.” A sardonic drawl came back at him: “What’d you do with the money I sent you for singin’ lessons?” Reed cut him off. “I took your wife out, and I shoulda took the singin’ lessons!” He turned to me. “I guess he’ll ask me that again.” Throughout the evening, the CB babble of boisterous good ol’ boy bluster never stopped. We finally got the OK to head out. Reed celebrated the move with a heartfelt ditty: “Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’, although my ass is swollen…” The kids were still in the back.
Out on the road, the CB traffic continued.
“I’m on the right side of ya, hauler!”
“Don’t put no Prevost bus in there!”
“Let’s slow ’em down, get ’em t’ gether, tighten up!”
“Them Prevost, they’ll run ya crazy!”
“Aw, yer a walkin’ crime against nature!”
“Slow ’em down up there, slow ’em down!”
“OK, awright.”
We wound around a long bend and Reed pointed out the door to the mirror. “That’s a mess o’ buses, buddy.”
The convoy reaches the Kmart on the east end of town. The buses arrange themselves diagonally, in rows. The children are met by volunteer chaperones and taken to the store. The previous evening, in the same parking lot, the public was allowed to poke around the buses, examine the airbrushed murals, plush carpets, gleaming makeup mirrors. The accumulated funds finance a shopping spree for each child. The Fat Man shakes his head. “You’d think you’d hand a child fifty dollars, seventy-five dollars, the first place they’d head would be the toy department. But most of ’em won’t buy no toys—they’ll buy ’em somethin’ to wear…a pair of shoes…it’s just somethin’ amazing to watch, man. It kinda restores your faith.”
It’s not all joyous. Some of the older kids know what’s going on. Inside the store, their gazes slide to the tiles if they catch you looking. They hunch their shoulders a bit, move over an aisle. A photographer has accompanied me on the trip. He has taken pictures of the buses, the convoy. Inside the Kmart, he can’t bring himself to uncap his lens. But back on the bus, the little girl who has been riding with us rushes aboard to show her purchases, and her eyes are clear and bright as she displays a necklace for her teacher, a trinket for her brother. She allows as how she can’t wait to give them away, and then bounces back to watch cartoons again. Her bag remains on the table. In addition to a few toys, it contains socks, a shirt, a pair of mittens. The Fat Man was halfway through a decidedly ribald anecdote when the little girl returned. He draws a slow breath. “You really wanna see happiness in sadness, pain and sufferin’ turned to smiles….” He trails off, the sentence, like the anecdote, left unfinished.
The Fat Man drops me off back at the First Baptist parking lot. In the rear of the bus, the children are dancing around the bed. They holler a Merry Christmas at the photographer and me, then go back to dancing. The photographer and I will drive all night. We have to be in northern Wisconsin by morning. “Keep ’er outta the buckwheat,” hollers the Fat Man. He waves, and the pneumatic door closes with a hiss. The air brakes release, and the diesel swells. The bus swings in a wide circle and glides away.
Somewhere in the middle of the night, I suppose about Indiana, I tell the photographer about the child with the wide eyes. How I was suddenly at the edge of tears over the simple wonder of the image. I tell him how I can’t get around the troubling thought that this night of fantasy might only highlight troubles at home. I tell him how I can’t understand why all this goodness leaves me unsettled. The Fat Man sees happiness in sadness…somehow I’ve gotten it backward.
They came to Hendersonville again this year. Fifty-one buses. Three hundred and two children. And the Fat Man was there. He’d driven 165,000 miles since his last Christmas Is for Kids. Enough mileage to circle the earth six times and most of a seventh; endless miles spent fighting inclement weather, artless motorists, clutch-shredding grades…the clock. But when he pulled that land yacht into line and rolled it sweet and easy up Highway 31, it was smooth sailing.
Man, they gave ’em the street.
1995
Big Things
The literature of the crude, instinctual colossus appealed to an urban audience by virtue of exoticism and, perhaps, fanciful nostalgia, the implicit contrast between the American Adam and the cosseted society that craved word of his untrammeled exploits. The giant was always a significant other, from another kind of place.
—Karal
Ann Marling, The Colossus of Roads
Thank you for your inquiry requesting information about our “Fiberglass People Attractors.” Enclosed please find our price list and brochure showing some of the hundreds of items that we make. As you can see, we can make anything Large or Small.
—Jerome A. Vettrus, president of FAST Corp., in a letter accompanying sales brochures
I do want the FAST Corp. to know that we are very proud of the New Giant Skier Statue. We have already received a tremendous amount of publicity from the skier and know it will be a huge promotional asset now and always. Again we thank you for your fine and detailed work.
—satisfied customer, in letter to Jerome A. Vettrus
Big Boy stood six feet tall. Weighed three hundred pounds. Stood there grinning at Toledo with that double burger hoisted high, those big blue eyes round as bowling balls, those red-checkered overalls fit to bust, that flip pompadour big enough to surf. When the men—boys, really, ten of them—showed up in the darkness, Big Boy’s expression never changed. They ripped his feet from the concrete; he kept grinning. They tossed him in the back end of a pickup; he kept grinning. When the truck pulled up to an apartment on the west side of Toledo, he was still grinning.
Then things got ugly.
“What’re we gonna do with him?” said one of the men. A number of suggestions were made. None caught anyone’s perverse fancy. After all, pulling stunts with the Toledo Big Boy wasn’t somebody’s big new idea. “Nine times out of ten, if the Big Boy is missing, he’s usually down at the University of Toledo,” restaurant manager David Nelson would say upon discovering his missing mascot. “During fraternity season, they do that as a prank.” The ten men huddled again. Then one spoke.
“Chop him up!”
And chop him up they did. A hacksaw was secured. Fiberglass particles filled the air. Big Boy’s head tumbled from his neck. Then an arm came loose, severed at the shoulder. Next, a leg. When the bone-hollow sawing sounds ceased, only Big Boy’s hamburger remained intact.
In a macabre twist, the first to learn of Big Boy’s death by dismemberment (after the bandits) were members of his own family. At Big Boy restaurants throughout Toledo, his brothers looked down in the pale first light of morning to see bits of their luckless relative at their feet. A head, an arm, a leg, each tagged with the message “Big Boy is Dead.” At one restaurant, Big Boy’s severed right buttock was discovered with a newspaper ad taped in place: “Strip Steak $2.29 a pound.” Not a good way to start the day, espying bits of a family member in the yard. Nonetheless, the relatives have maintained their sunny dispositions. Grinning like Big Boys, all of ’em.
As often happens in cases where criminals show off, criminals feel the need to talk, and two weeks after Big Boy bit it, his killers were corralled. Big Boy was worth about four thousand dollars and it is safe to say that will be divided ten ways. It seems unlikely that anyone will do any hard time, although one of the suspects, a Mr. Martinez, may wish to do so and apply it toward his degree; he is a criminal justice major at the University of Toledo.
The point of this parable, however, is not the fate of the perps. Nor do I wish to further flog the fanciful notion of oversized fiberglass figure as decedent. The significance of Big Boy as part of colossal Americana kitsch, however, is worth pondering. Why did the abduction and subsequent mutilation of a mass-produced corporate logo attract national press attention in publications ranging from People to The New Republic? Why do we care about big things that really aren’t big things at all? Would we have cared if someone abducted a set of Golden Arches? Hacked up an Arby’s sign? Not likely. But take an object we are all familiar with, blow it out of scale, and suddenly we are fascinated by it. Or at least most of us are, the odd criminal justice major excepted. But why? In The Colossus of Roads, Karal Ann Marling offers the following considerations:
Regardless of its particular purpose, the colossus is always a place in itself—a stopping place in time, where the everyday rules of reality are suspended and an idyllic dream commences. Grotesque scale demands a pause—for edification, for commerce, or for the fantastic fun of it.
The pause. That’s it. That’s why they stick giant Big Boys on top of restaurants. That’s why the Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame in Hayward, Wisconsin, is housed in a 145-foot-long, walk-through fiberglass muskellunge. So you’ll pause. And when the good citizens of Rothsay, Minnesota, got together in 1976 and built themselves a nine-thousand-pound replica of a male prairie chicken posed in the throes of a mating dance, they for dang sure figured on getting people to pause. To quote Marling again:
The publicity value of roadside curiosities, it would seem, increases in direct proportion to their curiousness.
Homemade nine-thousand-pound prairie chickens in love—now that’s curiousness. But what qualifies as collosi? Marling sniffs at the idea of Big Boy as colossus. “He’s actually quite small…six feet tall, I believe.” Yes. But he weighs three-hundred-pounds and perches atop restaurants. As boys go, that’s colossal.
Some colossi are unmistakably colossal. Like the fifteen-foot-tall Paul Bunyan built on the shore of Lake Bemidji, in Minnesota. The winter of 1937 had been hard on the citizens of Bemidji; the mercury plunged to record depths and took business with it. Alternately fretting and telling tall tales around backroom stoves, the locals hit upon an idea. Why not enlist the services of a tall-tale hero of the times, Paul Bunyan, to lure commerce back to the frozen Bemidji environs? And so the hardy Bemidjians whacked together an ungainly, oversized Bunyan. It worked. Paul (joined one year later by a giant mobile Babe the Blue Ox mounted on a Model A chassis) got people to stop. To pause.
In 1978, the citizens of Blue Earth, Minnesota, paused—together with the governor, Miss Minnesota, and Miss America—to watch as a fifty-foot Jolly Green Giant rose high over their little town. The Jolly Green Giant took his place on a hut-sized concrete pedestal right at the location and time the eastern and western ends of I-90, the longest freeway in America, were joined. The cars flying by on the clean white concrete had little reason to stop in Blue Earth. Local merchants hoped the Giant would make the difference.
One of the largest and most uniquely functional colossi in America is the aforementioned hall of fame muskie in Hayward. Half a city block long and five stories tall, the “Giant Walk-Thru Muskie” dominates the hall of fame grounds. Visitors can ascend from within the fish to stand in its gaping maw, far above the ground. A number of couples have wended their way through the bowels of this gargantuan fish to be wedded in the lower lip. Looking into each other’s eyes, the bride and groom pledge themselves to a lifetime of loving and cherishing while neatly framed by a predatory hedge of knee-high teeth.
If the Jolly Green Giant ate hamburgers, he’d probably want the one sitting in the grass along Highway 21, just east of Sparta, Wisconsin. Trimmed with cheese and fat dollops of ketchup, the burger is roughly the size of a Volkswagen. A few feet away, an ice cream cone large enough to hold Rush Limbaugh (sans ego) collects rainwater. The cone is shadowed by an elephant and two porpoises to the north. Atlas rises against the sky, crouched as though he had the weight of the world on his shoulders, despite the fact that the world lies in fiberglass pieces at his sandaled feet. Behind Atlas and his shattered world, a great unpainted menagerie ranges around a two-acre grassy clearing: reclining bears, laughing dolphins, a seal big as a steer, a steer big as a corncrib. A six-foot Michelob bottle is canopied by chokecherries. A twenty-five-foot tall “beach boy” lies flat on his back, with one hand extended to the sky. The hand is cupped in the form of a C, ready to cradle a giant can of beer.
Throughout the clearing, stacked and leaned amongst the figures, are strange husklike sections of fiberglass. From the outside, they suggest the shape of familiar things, but the lines are obscure and rough. Closer inspection reveals that the underside of each husk is finely detailed; these are the forms used to create six-foot six-packs, elephantine elephants, giant fish, giant giants—whatever your heart desires, in
gargantua. Dropped at the feet of the creatures they created, the brownish forms take on the appearance of freshly shed exoskeletons.
Stepping through the exoskeletons, reconciling the adjacent Wisconsin cornfields with the presence of a supine, grinning whale, the curious visitor might likely overlook the narrow, unassuming concrete block shed at the edge of the field. Two large red fiberglass letters stand out against the white-painted blocks: F and A. Missing are an S and T; together the four letters stand for Fiberglass Animals, Statues & Trademarks. There have been three fiberglass companies in Sparta since the late ’50s. The first, Stouffer’s Advertising, originated as a sign company. When a California company hit upon the idea of promoting their restaurants with a sculpted caricature of an “all-American boy,” Stouffer’s got the job. Thus was Big Boy born, and thus did Sparta begin its run as the nation’s primary source of fiberglass sculpture.
When Lady Bird Johnson crusaded to rid the nation’s highways of all things unsightly during the late ’60s, times got tough for billboard companies. Armed with their experience creating Big Boys, Stouffer’s converted to the production of “dimensional animals and statues” exclusively. In 1975, the company changed hands and operated until 1983 as Creative Display. It was during this time that the Jolly Green Giant and giant muskie were created. In 1983, Creative Display artist Jerry Vettrus became president and owner of the firm, which then became known as FAST Corp.
“I got into it by accident,” says Vettrus. His office is a narrow, cramped affair, stacked high with paperwork, scattered with statuettes of past and present projects. The walls are papered with pictures of his creations. And he did get into his profession by accident. It all began when he drew a picture of a dead dog.
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