Stolen Moments With Bob’s Big Boy and the Garden Gnomes of France

Statue of Limitations: It’s time to put kidnap victims back on the sides of milk cartons. But not to help locate missing children. The new problem is AWOL statues.

Across the nation and around the globe, there is a little publicized but growing plague of innocent statues being kidnapped and even dismembered by ruthless criminals.

For example, Garden Design magazine reports that France is being terrorized by Le Front de Liberation des Nains de Jardin (the Liberation Front for Garden Gnomes), a group that steals lawn statues, takes them to a secret camp for “liberation rituals” and repainting, then leaves them in odd locales--squatting on cliffs, crouching along highways or floating aboard rafts on lakes.

“We are fighting against bad taste as embodied by the garden gnome of the proletariat household,” said the group’s leader.

Such rhetoric has inspired imitators in other lands, including Germany, where a similar group abducts gnomes and sends the owners snapshots of the missing statues posing at famous landmarks around the world.

In the U.S., the situation is graver. In Tucson alone, the problem is so dire that the Arizona Daily Star recently devoted a lengthy article to the trend. The main focus was on the kidnapping of a Ronald McDonald statue with “flaming red hair, a bright yellow jumpsuit, striped socks and red clown shoes . . . last spotted joy-riding on East Broadway in the back of a silver-blue CJ7 Jeep.”

It was the second time Ronald had been abducted since 1997. But the article also detailed a frightening pattern of other statue thefts. Among the victims: Tony the Wonder Horse, who disappeared from a monument to actor Tom Mix (a second Wonder Horse was kidnapped a few years later, also never to be seen again); a pair of wooden lions stolen from the sanctuary at Mission San Xavier; several cast-aluminum fish abducted from a sculpture at the University of Arizona; a carved wooden bear chopped off at its feet and swiped from a business; a Bob’s Big Boy mascot taken from the front of a restaurant (and recovered in pieces days later); and giant statues of Winnie the Pooh and Tigger spirited away from a Christmas display.

Unfortunately, such crimes are happening all over this formerly great land of ours. A review of Times archives uncovered a parade of thefts, including a 4-foot-tall Pillsbury Doughboy, a 700-pound captain with a parrot on his shoulder, assorted religious statues and a 250-pound fiberglass dolphin that once stood at Marineland.

But most authorities either ignore the kidnappings or brush them off as the work of harmless pranksters. Nothing could be further from the truth.

According to psychiatrists, people who abduct statues suffer from a rare obsessive-compulsive disorder. “Most had cold and distant parents, and are trying to re-create that relationship with a statue,” said Dr. Sigmoid Flexure, author of “Men Who Love Statues and the Statues Who Are Indifferent Toward Them.”

Thus, statue-napping “is really a cry for love.” And unless something is done, no inanimate beings are safe, including the Statue of Liberty, Mt. Rushmore and Vice President Al Gore.

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