Giant creatures dot our landscape with alarming fecundity, but interspecies mixtures are rare. That's surprising, considering that one of the nation's favorite titans is a big man with a rabbit's head. It guards the entrance to Harvey Marine, outside of Portland.
Ed Harvey is a visionary and free thinker who sees nothing odd in running a marine supply business in the middle of Oregon farm country, miles from the nearest body of water deep enough for a boat. He was just starting out when, as Vicky McCurry, his manager remembers, "the Columbus Day Storm in '62 blew down half of everything in Oregon, including lots of service station men." [Franchised kin of the omnipresent Muffler Men] One big fellah was brought to Ed's shop for repair because Ed was an expert fiberglass boat builder. "But then, nobody came to get him. They deserted him. Maybe the bill was too high."
The homeless gas guy lay in Ed's back yard for a few years and then Ed had a brainstorm. "Jimmy Stewart was this drunk, and he had an imaginary friend, a giant rabbit named 'Harvey' he was always talking to," Ed explained. "That's where the idea came from. At boat shows we'd have a guy walk around in a rabbit suit. Then we got the idea to put a rabbit head on the big man."
[Tipster Larry Gundersen notes: Actually, Harvey, in the Jimmy Stewart play/movie, is a "pookah" in the shape of a rabbit.]
Harvey has been a traffic-stopper ever since. Ed estimates that 50,000 cars drive by every day, and about 1 out of 20 either honk or yell greetings to the bunny-headed he-man. That's 2,500 people a day who consider Harvey something more than fiberglass, and that's not counting those who write letters to Harvey when they're unhappy or sad. Vicky finds the notes stuck in the door when she comes to work in the morning. Apparently many others subscribe to the belief that waving at Harvey prevents flat tires.
A crisis struck in 1987 when Ed decided give the landmark a face lift, which coincidentally meant that Harvey would be headless over Halloween. Ed playfully put a giant pumpkin in headless Harvey's upturned palm, but the locals apparently missed his Washington Irving allusion and besieged the store with alarmed phone calls. "We had all the TV stations out here," Ed recalled. "People calling, 'Will you explain to my kids why this rabbit has no head?'" Children in the local elementary school reported having nightmares.
Things have been fairly calm since then, though Harvey's been reported holding a Christmas tree, and holiday-appropriate turkey, heart, and American flag. Vandals came by one night a couple of years ago and stole one of Harvey's ears, but the police found it a couple of miles down the road. Harvey Marine was quickly awash in get-well cards and flowers. "It's unreal," Vicky says. "I don't know what would happen if he was to go away."
