The Blue Whale: A Giant Anniversary Gift
Near Tulsa, Oklahoma
The eighty-foot blue whale sitting beside a pond in Catoosa, Oklahoma was not a business plan. It was a gift. Hugh Davis, a zoologist, revealed it to his wife Zelta on September seventh, nineteen seventy-two, their thirty-fourth wedding anniversary.
Zelta collected whale figurines, so Davis sketched out a concrete version and spent two years with a friend, Harold Thomas, welding the steel framework and hand-mixing cement one five-gallon bucket at a time. The finished whale is twenty feet tall and eighty feet long, perched over a swimming hole the family used for years. After the Davises closed it to the public in nineteen eighty-eight, the whale fell into disrepair, until Catoosa residents restored it in nineteen ninety-seven.
It became one of Route Sixty-Six's most recognizable folk-art landmarks, proof that the best roadside monuments were rarely planned.
