Steve Dashew impact on popular culture

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modernbeat

Member
Joined
Apr 6, 2020
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Location
USA
I learned something new today. Steve Dashew was responsible for the popularity of the giant fiberglass "Muffler Man" statues scattered around the USA.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muffler_man


History
Boatbuilder Steve Dashew established International Fiberglass in 1963 by purchasing and renaming Bob Prewitt's workshop, Prewitt Fiberglass. The oversized fibreglass men, women and dinosaurs began as a sideline.

The first of the figures, a Paul Bunyan holding an oversized axe to promote a restaurant, was created by Bob Prewitt in 1962 for the Paul Bunyan Café on Route 66 in Flagstaff, Arizona.

As the fibreglass moulds for this initial figure existed when Dashew acquired the company, similar characters could be readily created by keeping the same basic characteristics (such as the right palm up, left palm down position in which the original Bunyan lumberjack figure held his axe) with minor variation...
 
I remember seeing a few of these around Southern California when I was a kid. One was a muffler man and another was a golfer at a pitch and put in Orange County.

I never would have guessed it would have been linked to Steve Dashew. There is a lot of lost boatbuilding history in SoCal.
 

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