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Talent's almost-lonesome icons Photo by Steve Johnson Patty and Tom Sehloff's quirky 12-foot lawn art, Big Toe (right) and Axle Roddess, have become Talent landmarks. Auto-part statues stand out By MARK FREEMAN FOR RENT: Charming two-bedroom, one-bath cottage in Talent, with two-story shop in back yard. Must be able to care for two 12-foot metal lawn statues. Tom and Patty Sehloff likely will place a classified ad like this when they rent their Talent Avenue home this summer, handing over day-to-day life with Talent's most quirky and visible landmarks: 12-foot statues of a man and woman built from old car parts welded together. They have elicited cheers or sneers by everyone from Japanese picture-takers to unamused Talent homemakers during the seven years since Tom Sehloff trucked them home from an abandoned Klamath Falls junkyard and set them so prominently in his front yard. The Sehloffs will be moving on soon, but the rusty relics will remain. "They're genuine, exotic American folk art, and they seem happy here, so I'll leave them here," says Sehloff, 52. "The renters will have to take over this sort of caretaker thing -- although there really isn't much care required." And there isn't much else like these statues left in Talent. "Tig" Dunham's bombastic signs disappeared after his 1998 death, and downtown's twitching cowboy sign for old Jittery Joe's junk store has been replaced by a more upscale antique emporium. With the possible exception of the Fiat mounted atop a telephone pole at Jim's Better Buys on nearby Highway 99, the Sehloffs' twin tin towers are perhaps the last of Talent's icons. "They're landmarks, icons," says Sehloff, an old car buff and self-employed junk hauler. "You don't see stuff like this around much anymore. You don't see it much anywhere in America." Except, maybe, Klamath Falls. It was at Axelrod's auto-wrecking yard in Klamath Falls where the two statues were born from boredom. First came "Big Toe," the anatomically identifiable male statue, in 1983. Big Toe has a Chevy truck hood for a chest, an oil-can head, tail pipes for arms and a pair of Volkswagen valvecovers for ears. His piston nose shows his sternness, while his timing-chain mouth is all smiles. Big Toe's sidekick has "Axelroddess" burned into her base, but Sehloff calls her Gretta. She, too, has a truck chest, but has twisted chrome bumpers for arms, soft gas-cap eyes, straight metal rods for hair and an ignition coil for a nose. Some of the parts date to the 1930s. Both figures are signed "J," their assumed artist. "J. must have been pretty proud of his work to sign them," Sehloff says. He first spied them in the late 1980s and tried to coax them away from Axelrod, who closed his business in 1992. The statues stood in the vacant lot for several months before the former owner gave them to Sehloff. He hauled them over the Cascades on a flatbed trailer, and plopped them at the intersection of Talent Avenue and Creel Road, where they stood as American Gothic-style lawn art in front of the Sehloffs' home. "Just having a bunch of car parts is one thing," Sehloff says. "But when they're assembled in a way you can relate to, it's a beautiful thing." Not everyone saw their beauty at first. Frank Falsarella, a Sehloff neighbor, was Talent's mayor when the statues came to town. Several people asked if the city could force Sehloff to remove them, or at least move them, but "our legal people said it was freedom of expression," Falsarella says. The quibbling quieted, and now they've seemed to grow on the town -- and Falsarella. "They don't bother me," he says. "It's some form of art, I guess." The statues now regularly draw crowds, and Sehloff routinely sees people on his lawn snapping pictures. Once, a busload of Japanese tourists showed up. Another time, several dozen members of a motorcycle club parked their Harleys for closer looks. "I appreciate them for what they are and what they bring out of people," Sehloff says. "You know how things become less disgusting and more landmarks? Now, I think there are very few people who think of them as obnoxious," Sehloff says. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 2000, Medford, Oregon USA