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Gargantuan rubber water fowl towers over terrified Mercer County Fair. The world's largest rubber duck will be up for the rest of the fair.
CELINA - Mama, the world's largest rubber duck, is used to making a splash, but for the first time, she's here in Celina, right by Grand Lake, which may be too small for even her.
Duck owner Craig Samborski of Minnesota has been taking her all over the country, but for today and Wednesday, she'll be stationed inside the Mercer County Fairgrounds, bright, beaming and yellow.
The duck, made out of rubber vinyl fabric, is 61 feet high, 64 feet wide and 74 feet long. Although she takes about an hour and 15 minutes to be fully inflated by four large Hurricane fans, she is surprisingly light for being six stories tall: The duck itself weighs about 700 pounds, but the 20 concrete blocks she is anchored to tips the scales at 33,000 pounds.
Gargantuan rubber water fowl towers over terrified Mercer County Fair. The world's largest rubber duck will be up for the rest of the fair.
Despite being anchored, Mama is susceptible to wind, which proved to be an issue on Saturday when high gusts ripped the D ring where a stitching line goes up the duck, Samborski said of the serious damage.
Luckily, a passerby knew someone who works at Celina Tent, a company that manufactures commercial and military-grade tents, and the company had Mama brand new by Sunday.
"Everybody's so nice here," he said. "I mean, my goodness, we're from Minnesota, and you know, there's Minnesota nice, but the people here make us feel (welcomed). We're trying to think, 'How do we repair this thing in Celina, Ohio?' It turns out (that) right across the parking lot is the company that makes all the tents for the military. We couldn't have had this problem in a better place."
When Mama ripped, Samborski said Celina Tent personnel assembled two seamstresses to chemically weld and stitch the fabric back together.
"When you go to New York City, that stuff doesn't happen," he said. "We feel super at home here. What a cool fair."
Mama's existence as a rubber duck was purposeful, he said, although how Mama came to be is interesting.
The world's largest rubber duck towers over people posing next to it for a photo behind Market Hall at the Mercer County Fairgrounds on Monday afternoon.
Samborski said he produces festivals for a living. About 10 years ago, he was promoting a tall ship festival in Los Angeles when he and a colleague "were drinking fairly heavily one night and he dared me to do it."
"I drank enough that I said, 'That's a great idea.' The next morning, I was like, 'What did I commit myself to?' Eight weeks later, that showed up," he said, pointing to Mama.
Normal-sized bathtub-style rubber duckies.
"If you think about it, globally, a rubber duck is very iconic," Samborski said. "I can show a kid in Siberia a little rubber duck and a kid in Bali a rubber duck and they know exactly what it is without having to speak any language. It's one of those few things that whenever I see a rubber duck or most adults I know see a rubber duck, you remember having a rubber duck as a kid. Literally everybody exposed to a rubber duck had one. There are very few things in the world that are like that, so the duck made a lot of sense."
He also wanted the iconic yellow color to personify Mama.
The duck, which was built by a Brunswick native, costs six figures and is an expensive endeavor, Samborski said. The business includes the duck itself; her baby, a 10-foot-tall rubber duck named Timmy; merchandise; insurance; traveling accommodations and his employees.
Mama is called as such because when Samborski debuted the duck in Los Angeles, he brought Timmy to the city hall as publicity. The mayor's wife loved the baby duck and kissed it.
"We knew we had to call her Mama because she had a baby," he said.
"It's crazy," he said of the experience. "Wherever we go, we (see) insane amounts of people. 99.9% of the people who come up and see us about the duck love the duck. People who come to see a giant rubber duck are pretty happy people."
Mama is waiting to meet new faces behind Market Hall at the fairgrounds.
