What’s next for the famous I-135 chimney sweep statue downed by Tuesday storms?
Brady Baus, who inherited the famous chimney sweep statue on I-135 just south of McPherson when he bought his business in 2015, says he knew that his ward was on borrowed time.
Just over the past several weeks, he’d redoubled his efforts to find a way to save the roadside attraction, which he’s learned over the years is very, very important to the McPherson community.
Then, early Tuesday morning, a nasty storm that swept across south-central Kansas took the statue out. Wind gusts that reached nearly 60 mph in McPherson toppled all 28 fiberglass feet of him.
Late on Tuesday afternoon, Baus finally had time to talk about the saga of a day he’d had, ever since he’d learned that the chimney sweep had been nearly swept away.
Baus, the owner of Chimney & Stone Specialists in McPherson, hadn’t had a chance yet late Tuesday to see the damage for himself. Though all he really wanted to do was drive to the site and collect the pieces of the chimney sweep — whose legs were obliterated and chimney broom shattered in several pieces during his losing battle with the storm — the weather hadn’t calmed down enough to make the trip practical. Lightning and rain continued throughout the day on Tuesday, Baus said, and he was concerned he’d get stuck if he tried to drive a trailer up to the statue.
But, Baus said, his plan for now is to still try to rehab the chimney sweep, which has been sitting between mileposts 56 and 57 on I-135 since April of 2000. For the last several months, Baus has been trying to figure out exactly how to do that — and has been talking to people who think they can help. He was getting close to making a decision about what to do when the storm hit, he said.
But it’s not going to be as easy as people seem to think.
“People will say, ‘You just need a couple of ladders and some Bondic,’” Baus said. “And it’s like, ‘No, we’ve got a bigger problem.’”
The statue first started showing major signs of deterioration a little over a year ago, Baus said. He went to check out the statue, which spent the first 29 years of its life dressed as a chef and stationed outside McPherson’s Happy Chef restaurant at I-135 and Highway 51, and he discovered that his shoes were starting to buckle.
Every time Baus checked after that, the damage was worse. It appeared that the statue was breaking down from the inside out, and recently, it had begun to tilt precipitously to the left.
About a month ago, Baus spoke to local television stations about the predicament. He wanted to save the chef but didn’t know how, and estimates he was getting from people across the country who did such work were astronomical.
After the reports aired, though, he heard from an artist based near Dodge City. Her name is Inga Ojala, and she had experience. She’d famously done the restoration work on the 20-foot-tall La Salsa Muffler Man sculpture that actor Dennis Hopper gifted to the Dodge City when he died in 2010.
Ojala traveled to McPherson and crawled up inside the sculpture. She knew what to do, she told Baus, but she’d have to fix the sculpture one half at a time for a fee of about $60,000. Baus liked Ojala and was about to make a deal with her, he said, when he heard from someone at Kansas State University’s Salina campus who thought restoring the statue could be a good project for the school’s composite technology students. Baus had just sent measurements and information about the statue to the school when the storm hit.
“But now we have this new wrinkle that he’s now on the ground in 26 pieces and not up there leaning sideways,” Baus said.
His first step, Baus said, will be to collect the remains of the chimney sweep and take them back to his warehouse. After that, he said, he’ll continue his conversations with the people who’ve said they might be able to help put him back together.
But sometimes, Baus said, fans of the statue don’t realize what a big and unusual job the restoration will be.
“I really value the nostalgia and the history of it being in McPherson since 1970, but when you would drive out there or take somebody out there to see him, it’s overwhelming,” Baus said. “He’s huge. He’s enormous.”
The iconic chimney sweep started its life in 1970 as a dancing, spoon-waving chef perched outside the Happy Chef, a 24-hour greasy spoon restaurant that was popular with people in McPherson.
In the summer of 1999, the restaurant suddenly closed, and the Minnesota-based chain that owned it said the chef would be destroyed if no one wanted to take it. At the time, the Happy Chef statue was one of only three remaining in the country.
Several people wanted it, though, and a bidding war broke out. The winner was Vaughn Juhnke, who owned Chimney Specialists at the time and was a longtime fan of the Happy Chef restaurant. He gave the statue a $3,000 makeover, replacing his chef’s hat with a plastic stovepipe hat and his spoon with a chimney flue brush. In April of 2000, Juhnke had the redesigned statue installed on the highway beside a billboard advertising his business.
When Baus bought the business, he also got the statue. And though he loves it too, it’s created issues he never imagined he’d face as a businessman.
Over the years, many people have insisted he maintain the statue. Few have offered ideas about how to do so, he said.
Baus, though, says he understands how important the statue is to people who have spent years living near or driving past it.
“It seems like public feedback is, ‘You’ve got to fix him,’” Baus said. “I’m trying to keep as many people happy as I can.”
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