OFF THE BEAT: MINI STATUE OF LIBERTY IN THE DAUPHIN NARROWS

(VisitHersheyHarrisburg.org)

I ask lovable and heroic, or unbearably irritating – depending on where you stand politically – political activist Eugene Stilp which was the riskier endeavor: to sneak an unauthorized, 450-pound replica of the Statue of Liberty onto an 8 ½-foot-wide piling in the windy rapids of the Susquehanna River in the middle of the night in 1986, or to burn a composite Confederate/Nazi flag near a NASCAR race in Alabama last month. He answers, “The Statue of Liberty in the river was put up to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the real Statue of Liberty in the NYC harbor. Using the combination flag that represents the confederacy and represents the Nazi belief systems by joining the two flags together – one image on each side – is a totally different type of event. I don’t think there’s a risk involved in either one.”

Seriously? What do you consider risky?

The mini Statue of Liberty that currently stands in the Dauphin Narrows outside of Harrisburg, PA, about a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Binghamton, is the second to be constructed by Gene Stilp and his crew. It is much more substantial than the first which stood 17 ½ feet tall and was only intended to last from July 4th to Labor Day. Stilp allowed her origins to remain a mystery but, “People liked it so much we let it stay,” he says. The plywood construction housed inside an outer covering of venetian blinds stayed erect for six years before succumbing to the tremendous winds over the rapids. In 1997, the current 4-ton, 25-foot-tall Statue was, as Gene describes, “flown in by helicopter and bolted,” into the pier. He relates, “We had a very skillful pilot…His vertigo level was at a maximum, he said.” It wasn’t until 2011 that Stilp revealed that he was the force behind the creation and installation of both statues.

Gene Stilp is a practicing attorney, well-known as a thorn in the side of public officials and judiciary who operate on the edge of or attempt to circumvent the law. He calls them “fights for justice,” and what I haven’t captured here is the fact that his earnestness causes thoughts to sputter out with a lot of disfluency and repetition in his expression of concepts and intentions. But when he sums it up for me with, “I just don’t like to see corruption, that’s all,” in that succinct sentence, there is no disfluency between his words.

He famously uses attention-getting props to make his point – like the giant, inflatable pink pig he used to protest greedy, secretive legislative pay raises. With his wife of more than 25 years, Judy Richard, as part of his creative team for environmental issues, Stilp says, “Right now, we’re building three new sperm whales for use on the West Coast because of ocean degradation,” and he lists other inflatables, and/or designs for them, available for groups around the country to use to raise climate change awareness and protest harmful environmental practices: caribou, manatee, salmon. Inflatables are easy to move far and quickly, as needed.

He is also pleased to be the designer of the Flight 93 flag because he thought it was, “important to have something that people could hold and fly in their own hometowns,” to honor the heroes of Flight 93 in the 911 attacks.

Oh, and the only reason the mini Statue of Liberty’s torch doesn’t light at night is because he knew there would be crashes on Route 322 from the excitement of the sight.