Setting the Record Straight on Harvey the Rabbit

Growing up in Reedville, Harvey was, of course, a favorite of mine, and recently I decided to spend some time researching him.

I started with the Washington County Cultural Resource Inventory Report, created in 1983, but the deeper I dug, the more I found parts of it to be incorrect. The report claimed Harvey was originally a promotional statue of a Richfield service station attendant, located at a station in Tigard, until it was damaged by the Columbus Day Storm in 1962. According to the report, it was then moved to Harvey Marine Boat Works for repair but never claimed, and since it was effectively abandoned, it became the property of Ed Harvey, who in the 1960s replaced its head with a rabbit’s.

What I’ve since learned tells a different story. According to the granddaughter of the original owner, Harvey didn’t start out at a Richfield station in Tigard at all, but at a Texaco distributor, Peavey Oil Company, in McMinnville. He began life as what Texaco called a “Big Friend.” High winds may well have damaged him at some point, but it couldn’t have been the 1962 Columbus Day Storm that brought him to Harvey Marine for repairs, since he wasn’t even made until 1966. He must have been repainted at Harvey Marine to more closely resemble a sailor, since he was originally dressed in a dark green uniform. And it wasn’t until 1974 that his head was replaced with the rabbit head made by Harvey Marine; before that, an Oregon Journal article simply referred to him as a “huge waving man.”

So what’s the real story behind the Texaco Big Friends? In late 1965 or early 1966, Texaco contracted with International Fiberglass of California to produce three hundred twenty-two-foot-tall fiberglass statues of a Texaco service station attendant, with an option to order 2,700 more. Steve Dashew, owner of International Fiberglass, hired sculptor Sacha Schnittman to design the statue, and Schnittman put a great deal of care and detail into it.

Texaco’s advertising campaign at the time featured television commercials and banners depicting a friendly service station attendant in a dark green uniform, white shirt, tie, and hat, and the fiberglass statues were meant to tie in with that same campaign, placed at service stations across the country. International Fiberglass sold a trailer and platform with each Big Friend to make it easy for area representatives to move and display them at different stations. The statues sold for $5,000 each, about $40,000 in today’s money, and began appearing at Texaco stations in September 1966.

Many station owners worried about the statues toppling over in severe weather, and the area service reps didn’t much care for having to move them around either. By early 1967, Texaco decided the risk outweighed the benefit, ordered station owners to stop using the Big Friends, and had them destroyed. The company ended its contract with International Fiberglass and had the mold itself destroyed. Within a few short months, the giants had all but disappeared. At the time, statues had only just been installed in California, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Iowa, Nevada, Arkansas, and Florida. Only a handful escaped the mass destruction, Harvey among them.

Incidentally, I suppose you could say Harvey and the A&W Family in Hillsboro are members of the same family, since both were built by the same maker: International Fiberglass, of Venice, California.