Muffler Man - Bunyan

Cheshire, Connecticut

Arm position: std.

Accessories: American flag

Of Necessity, a Patriot

The town of Cheshire enforces a law that no sign can be more than seven feet high, and most signs in town seem cut from an identical mold with knob-topped bedposts on either side and a Georgian sunburst "window" on top.

When the lumber business that is now the House of Doors put a 26-foot-tall Paul Bunyan muffler man on their front lawn in the early 1980s the town was up in arms, so the Sirois brothers, who own the business, replaced the axe with an American flag. "You can build a flagpole as high as you want and the town can't do anything about it," they told us.

The muffler man, they proudly claim, is now "an official landmark."

Since those early conflicts, and in the wake of the Muffler Man's very important role in a post-9/11 world, the flagpole gambit seems to have been dropped, with no ill effect on the big guy.