Manny, 12-Foot-Tall Fish

Eufaula, Alabama

The town of Eufaula sits next to 45,000-acre fish-stocked lake and claims to be the "Big Bass Capital of the World." Yet despite Eufaula's pride in its statue of Leroy Brown, Famous Fish, the town decided that Leroy wasn't enough to lure visitors downtown. So in January 2018 it unveiled "Manny," a 12-foot-tall leaping largemouth bass, just across the street from Leroy Brown. The leaping fish was sculpted in fiberglass by the same Alabama company that made Dancin' Dave, Human Peanut down the highway in Headland.

Manny was named in honor of the late fishing legend Tom Mann, Eufaula's most famous citizen, angler TV star, and the caretaker of Leroy Brown. Tom's daughter attended the statue's dedication, and told a story from the late 1970s of a group of Eufaula visitors that was so smitten by Tom that they failed to recognize the man standing next to him: then-President Jimmy Carter. Eufaula mayor Jack Tibbs asked the dedication crowd, "When people find out you're from Eufaula, what do they ask you?" They answered in unison, "Did you know Tom Mann?"

Mayor Tibbs has said that Eufaula at first planned to make Manny bigger, but then determined that 12 feet would be the perfect size for tourists to get all of the fish and their friends in a phone photo without having to stand too far away.