The Forevertron &c

The Apollo anniversary hubbub is over, but I found one more site with some astonishingly good images -- some famous, some of which I've never seen, all in large format. This is a kind of publishing that the Internet is good for.

Two years ago, returning home from Baraboo and the Dells, we arrived at the home of the Foreverton, only to find the place closed. I knew that I had to try to see it again, and our jaunt up to Wisconsin Dells last weekend was the perfect time, since the Foreverton is only about 15 miles south of the Dells on US 12. Actually, it's part of a larger collection of items at Delaney's Surplus, a junkyard.

Michael Feldman (host of Whad'ya Know?) and Diana Cook, writing in the first edition of Wisconsin Curiosities (2000), take it from here: "It's a fantastic garden of scrap metal, now assembled into giant insectoids and birds; a philharmonic-sized bird orchestra; and the 250-ton Forevertron, the world's largest scrap-metal sculpture, according to the Guinness Book of World Records."

Here are some scrap-metal birds:

And a scrap-metal insectoid:

The Forevertron itself is so large that it was hard to get the whole thing in one image with my primitive camera. So I took shots from different angles. Note the car helpfully parked near the sculpture in the first pic, to give a sense of scale.

More on the creator of the Forevertron, Tom O. Every, is at this article from the PBS series Off the Map. He might have been the one in the wheelchair, sitting near the massive sculpture under shade made of scrap metal, but he was talking to other people, and I didn't have a chance to ask him anything before we left.

Still, I've been to the coolest spot in Wisconsin. House on the Rock might be cooler, or at least stranger, but I haven't been there yet. I need to find out. Just another reason to visit Wisconsin again.