Nearly 6 years, skeleton display delivers witty references
By Kayla Dwyer
Manny Julio’s nearly six-yearlong tradition of creating an elaborate, punchy and pun-filled skeleton display outside his Upper Macungie Township home every one or two weeks started the same way as his drywall business about 40 years before: on a whim, and without much prior experience.
He was never an artist, yet there he was in April 2016, painting a copy of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” using house paint so a skeleton could have an existential crisis. He has dressed skeletons up as Rockettes for Christmas, had them share romantic dinners for Valentine’s Day, and put them on an operating table as a skeleton nurse pumps them full of the anesthetic ether, for Easter.
One of his simplest displays earned him a flash of social media stardom: seven skeletons in a row, looking exactly the same except the labels above them — white, Black, straight, gay, religious, atheist, pirate. A picture of the display posted to his Facebook page, ItSkeletal, in 2018 was shared 560,000 times and attracted nearly 5,000 comments.
“Everybody had something to say about it,” said Julio, 68 and now retired. “I mean everybody.”
But those aren’t the people he does this for. His Facebook page, where he posts every display — and often reposts years later — had a very small following the two years before that viral post.
He does it every week for those like the woman who stopped this week with her two children to tell Julio, as he was outside getting his mail, that they purposefully drive this way home from school to see his display.
“People go, ‘Don’t ever stop what you’re doing,’ “he said. “It’s probably one of the reasons I keep doing it.”
His corner of Upper Macungie, near Fogelsville, is quiet and relatively private, unlike the location of the Lehigh Valley’s recently famous skeleton, Skelly, in Catasauqua. Julio doesn’t want an onslaught of traffic to put a stop to what he’s doing, which is why he did not want to share his address publicly.
There was no significant impetus for how his hobby began. In the summer of 2015, while driving to one of his construction jobs, a picture came to his mind of a typical living room scene in the home of a late 1950s or early ‘60s American family: the child sitting cross legged in front of a big tube TV, the father on the couch with a drink after a day at work. This was a mental picture from his childhood.
“I’m thinking of this and I went, ‘It should all be skeletons, because it’s in the past,’ ” he said. “‘I should make this and put it in my yard.’ ”
It is as simple as that.
“I just thought, I have to make this,” he said.
He did think neighbors might fear for his mental well-being if he put out a skeleton display in the middle of the summer, so he waited until that Halloween. Many passersby stopped to take pictures and ask Julio, “What are you doing next?”
“There was no next,” he said, recalling those conversations. But their questions gave him the