Visitors to Harvey the Giant Half-Human Rabbit (at Harvey Marine in Aloha, Oregon) may notice a small wooden board stretched from leg to leg between his knees. This unique feature isn’t for bracing the statue. It was put there to support an outboard motor.
According to Mark Harvey, his father Ed owned a marina on a nearby lake at the same time that he owned the fiberglass Big Friend statue that would later become Harvey the Rabbit. Ed knew from his boat-building business that fiberglass would float. Perhaps curious to test the outer limits of buoyancy, Ed attached the wood brace, strapped on an outboard motor, and drove the statue to Lake Oswego in 1971. “I was only three years old,” Mark said, “but I remember the statue laying on its back, floating like a motor boat, and my dad trying to run it around the lake.”
(This story reminds us of the 1964 newspaper accounts of San Francisco’s seaworthy Muffler Man.)
We asked Mark why his dad went to so much trouble to conduct this odd experiment. “Just for the hell of it,” Mark answered. “That’s a good reason to do anything.”
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