Umpy Goomba, Olmec Head

Umatilla, Florida

In the early 1990s Jonathan Harrington was in his thirties and living in his parents' house. As he later explained to a local reporter, he felt like doing something interesting. He got together with an artist friend, Dick Retey, and together they built a six-foot-high Meso-American Olmec head (It helped that Dick had worked as a stone mason).

The pair spent several hundred dollars creating the head out of foam, masonry, and concrete. They modeled it on a photo of a real Olmec head projected onto a piece of plywood, giving it a stern face and a detailed hemet. About three-quarters of the way into the project Jonathan suggested throwing the head into a lake, but the two men instead completed the head and placed it in Jonathan's parents' yard. It still stands there today.

The head's name, Umpy Goomba, is not Olmec.