12/1/2023 0 Comments Sequel pro icon![]() ![]() When it became clear Rusty wasn't coming back, he built another. He was last seen wearing goggles, swimming trunks and an inflatable swimming tube that looked like a zebra. He became a "neighborhood icon," Herman laughed.īut on the first weekend of August, after eight years, someone stole Rusty. A church borrowed him for a weekend function. An old lady came each time he changed costumes and took his picture. An elementary student sent him a Christmas card. Herman's father was a sculptor and he inherited that creativity. "That's how I tell people how to get here," he said. He topped it off with a brake rotor - an iron boater - and put Rusty out front by the road. He used exhaust tubing for limbs, a muffler for an abdomen and a Lexus resonator for a head. So when the place opened in 2004, in an effort to draw eyes and business, Herman built Rusty. The building - near the South Old Kings Road intersection, west of the railroad tracks - doesn't look like a car shop. Herman is a 48-year-old mechanic who owns Pro-Tech Automotive on Sunbeam Road. "I started thinking about what I was going to tell them, you know?" he said. When he vanished, Herman thought of calling the police. At some point or another, that's how he's going to end up." He named him that, he said, because "it just seemed natural. "I thought, Who on Earth?" Lantz Herman said last week, remembering the morning he found out. Someone stole him.Ĭheck out more photos of the making of Rusty Too He fell over in a wind storm on another occasion and dented a truck. ![]() Judging by the skid marks, he was dragged across a parking lot. ![]() He was hit once by a car, once by an 18-wheeler. Traffic sometimes slowed, people looking. He spent nearly a decade standing on a Jacksonville sidewalk. Rusty was 7 feet tall, weighed 150 pounds and had a 24-inch waist. ![]()
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