Toting a 28-foot-long, 12-foot-wide, 11.5-foot-tall plywood potato around the county requires one long truck and many permits.
Left to right: Kevin Schelen, Rachel Schelen, Rebecca Schelen, Donna Schelen, Charlotte Litton and Kayla Loesch / Photo by Roger Starkey
The average person may not know that permits are needed to haul the Great Big Idaho® Potato around the country, or that the 72-foot long truck is often required to avoid cities by using an interstate bypass. One ill-humored official with the Ohio Department of Transportation was keenly aware of those facts, and made sure the three-person crew toting the 6-ton uber tuber on a cross-country tour paid for their mistake of making a wrong turn near Columbus, Ohio.
Recently, truck driver Larry Bathe missed a turn outside of Columbus and The Famous Idaho® Potato Tour team found themselves stuck in the middle of evening rush hour traffic. As the truck idled in bumper-to-bumper traffic, team member Ivan Nanney recognized a great photo opportunity. He jumped from the truck and snapped a picture of the vehicle and its potato payload with downtown Columbus in the background. It was a fateful move.
The ODOT official, the type of person tater team members like to call a “tater hater,” saw Nanney leave and re-enter a vehicle that he knew did not have a permit to be on Interstate 70 in Columbus, Ohio. Perhaps in a bad mood from the bumper-to-bumper traffic, perhaps someone very dedicated to permits, or maybe annoyed by Nanney, whom he would later call a “yayhoo”, Nanney said, the official contacted police, who pulled the truck over.
Bathe was issued a $200 ticket and forced to leave the trailer, with tater, overnight in the parking lot of an ODOT building. Team member Krisitie Wolfe called the parking lot “potato jail.”
The team returned the next day to bail their friend out of potato jail and continued their five-month, 26-state tour. They arrived Tuesday at the World’s Largest Catsup Bottle® to the delight of a steady stream of visitors who were not turned away by the heat, President and CEO of the non-profit World’s Largest Catsup Bottle Inc., Mike Gassmann, said.
“We might end up baking that thing before the day is over,” Gassmann said.
The plywood potato has a steal frame and is coated with sprayed-on concrete, so it survived the heat, much to the joy of Charlotte Litton, of Cahokia, who came to see the potato and catsup combination, as well as take a stroll down memory lane.
Litton grew up on the hill overlooking the old Brooks Catsup factory, where her father, Howard Grafe, worked. Now 75 years-old, Litton remembers her father carrying catsup home from the factory.
The hill, she said, was referred to as “ice plant hill,” because two ice plants sat at the intersection of South Clinton Street and Illinois Route 159. As a child, she and friends would go sledding down the street, right into 159.
“Someone would look out and let us know when it was clear to go,” Litton said. “In the ’40s and ’50s, there wasn’t much traffic.”
While visiting the spud and the bottle, Litton won a portable DVD player. She, her daughter and her daughter’s family, from North Richland Hills, Texas left before Nanney climbed the Catsup bottle.
After Nanney descended the 170-foot tower, the tater team set their sights on Dunwoody, Georgia, their next stop.
