HIS ‘TWO FRIENDS’
Mike M: ‘Was his neck hard to do?’
Jimmy: ‘Not very hard, no..’
Mike M: ‘Jimmy was your neck hard to do!’
Jimmy: ‘My neck was much harder!’
Mike Murphy then marvelled at the ‘amazing construction’, akin to a tepee-cum-miniature house, with a windmill on top and gnomes, ducks, penguins and a mountain goat climbing its sides. Again, Jimmy had an unorthodox method of construction.
“It was down the town where people were demolishing the old houses, you know, way back about 20 years ago, and the rubble that they were taking out of the rooms and everything, they had no place to dump it, so I obliged. And I had a big hole here and I kept throwing all the stuff into it and it went up so high,” he recalled.
“And I got my two friends up there (the gnomes), they’re helping me doing the paint job, you know, yeah, and I put a couple of the penguins on top. And here you have the mountain goat, climbing up the side, you know!”
BIG TOM OR J.R.?
The interview then took a leaning on all things musical, in Mike Murphy’s eyes at least!
Jimmy: ‘What do you think of this fella Mike? Who do you think that guy is?’ Mike M: ‘Big Tom?!’ Jimmy: ‘Ah no, Big Tom has got nothing on this ould man. That’s the Incredible Hulk, there’s six bags of cement on him and about 40 pounds of steel. Take about eight days to do that because you got to leave it set, and you put it on piece by piece. Yunno?’
Mike M: ‘And who have we here now?
Jimmy: ‘Oh, this is J.R. Ewing’
Mike M: ‘I didn’t know J.R. had a horse!’
Jimmy: ‘Ah, he has a horse alright. He goes riding in his pleasure moments when he don’t have anything to do with the women. Why don’t you take a ride on him? You should be able to get up on that’
And Mike duly obliged. Intrigued to understand Jimmy’s motivation to dedicate his time to creating the wonderland, Mike asked him why he did it.
“Oh well, I get a certain amount of pleasure out of it,” responded Jimmy. “And I love animals in a way and then I got a great like for children, you know, and I see the pleasure the kids get out of riding these animals. It’s much better than to go to the zoo or anywhere else.”