By Teddy Grant
10-year anniversary of the Duck’s L.A. debut
Home can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. If I think hard about it and squint my eyes, the image of “home” in my mind is Mom and Dad standing at the front door of my birth home, each with arms open to welcome me home from school, or travel, or wherever I'd been doing who-knows-what. The long Minnesota welcome is followed by an even longer Midwest meal that starts with grace, ends with blueberry pie, and is loaded with potato salad and green-bean casserole in between.
As much as that single version of coming home is very rigid in my memory, there are variations of this concept. For example, I write this article from the Delta lounge at MSP International Airport. Anywhere I travel, Delta offers me a sense of “coming home” as I await my flight to or from my or someone else’s home. The “help yourself” buffet of cheese, meat and crackers is as constant as Mom’s potato salad. The person greeting me may not reach out with a big hug like Mom, but the sense of security and inclusion is as genuine.
In all my years of leaving and coming home, I’ve thought of one thing that gives people a universal sense of home: the yellow rubber duck. This simple child’s bathtub toy is present in cultures all over the world. Its familiar and safe undertone reminds most anyone of their childhood at home and with family.
One man brought this idea of the familiar rubber duck to a global scale. Florentijn Hofman is a Dutch artist originally from Rotterdam, Netherlands, who came up with the idea of magnifying a simple bathtub toy to a scale larger than life. After searching the globe for what he considered the perfect version of the yellow rubber toy, he settled on a design that came from a toy company in Hong Kong. His artistic concept is one that promotes the idea of a global community in which a rubber duck is a symbol that most any culture can recognize and relate to. A yellow rubber duck means the same to a child in Europe as it means to a child in South America or in Asia.
Since its first appearance in 2007, Hofman’s duck has made a name for itself all over the world. Following In France, the duck appeared in Brazil, Japan, New Zealand, Japan again, Belgium, Australia, Hong Kong and more. It was not until September 2013 that Hofman’s duck made its way to the United States by way of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where it appeared as part of a citywide celebration. An estimated 1 million people came to see the duck, which stood at 45 feet tall.
Autumn 2024 marked the 10th anniversary of my journey to build the world’s largest rubber duck in Los Angeles, . in which I had little help from incomplete plans written in Dutch, a significantly underfunded budget, and the endless distractions Southern California offers a young man whose curiosity is too easily scratched.
To celebrate this milestone, I have shared excerpts from my book, The Duck: A Field Manual to Building the World’s Largest Rubber Duck, which captures a version of the true story of my leaving “home” to build the world’s largest rubber duck in 2014.
There are many pieces required to build the world’s largest rubber duck. The first and most obvious is the big yellow duck. People often ask me what the duck is made of. I tell them it is very similar to a bouncy house found at a child’s birthday party, only it is much heavier and much more expensive. The yellow fabric itself weighs nearly a half ton and is shipped on a standard wood pallet in a tightly wound yellow ball from its manufacturer in Ohio. This particular “inflatables” manufacturer can, and has, constructed pretty much any shape or animal imaginable out of heavy-duty vinyl-like fabric that can be inflated with air. Super Bowl logos, school mascots and now the world’s largest rubber duck are all examples of their work. The inflatable yellow fabric cost nearly $70,000 and took nearly two months to manufacture before arriving in L.A.
The second piece required to build the world’s largest rubber duck is a very heavy steel pontoon that, like the yellow fabric, must be custom built. Many people don’t understand this concept. The popular opinion is that the duck is just one single piece of plastic inflated and sealed just like a much smaller swimming pool toy. This is far from the truth. The pontoon diameter is roughly 50 feet wide and, when assembled, makes a perfect circle. Around the entire circumference is a 24-inch-wide tubular pontoon, which has been filled with compressed air and sealed. However, the pontoon is shipped in four separate identical pieces atop an extra-long flatbed trailer. The steel pontoon system alone weighed approximately one ton and was made at a steel fabrication shop in Irvine, California. This company typically makes heavy-duty structural members for large buildings but made an exception in the duck’s case. The pontoon cost approximately $75,000 and just over a month to fabricate.
The third and final component of the world’s largest rubber duck is a handful of miscellaneous parts that are required to bring everything together. This includes two industrial-sized blowers that are constantly running in order to keep the yellow duck fabric inflated, a gas generator and backup generator to power the blowers, large plastic garbage cans that act as ballasts when filled with water to help balance the inflated fabric during strong winds, numerous extension cords, a handful of miscellaneous tools, a few thousand feet of synthetic line to tie the edge of the yellow fabric to the steel pontoon, and lastly 100 or so 2-inch x 10-inch x 12-foot-long wood planks that are laid across the top of the steel pontoon to create a platform that is entirely enclosed by the inflated yellow fabric.
Standing inside the world’s largest rubber duck is like being inside a Gothic cathedral with a tall steeple that towers over you some 60 feet in the air. From inside the inflatable creature, the duck’s face looks like a kind of eerie jack-o’-lantern looking down on you. Both the giant duck and I will be on display for each of the hundreds of thousands of families who will patiently wait in line to enter the festival and catch a glimpse of the world’s largest rubber duck sandwiched between a handful of wooden tall ships. With over a billion-dollar annual operating budget, the Port of L.A. is dubbed “America’s Port.” This is where the story takes place. A story, based on true events, of how two friends from Minnesota embarked on a journey to build the world’s largest rubber duck.
My friend, Kip, is a former rock-and-roll producer whose hard edge is softened only with brown whiskey and who is perhaps chasing memories of his yesteryears while on tour with A-list rock bands. As his much more impressionable junior, I crave adventure, or at the very least a new horizon on which to watch the sunset, preferably over the Pacific Ocean. While in L.A., I discover a new life outside the only world I knew: the more modest Midwest United States. Snowdrifts are replaced by palm trees. Not only does it seem I fall in love with the City of Angels as I explore it from the sun-soaked seat of a 1985 California-red Mercedes Benz convertible, but I fall in love with a woman whose lipstick matches the same loud red hue. I would have never met this woman without leaving the world I knew in Minnesota. But it is a 60-foot -tall children’s bath toy that pushes me to my limit and perhaps a little beyond, all while under L.A.’s media microscope.
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DUCK FACTS:
- L.A.’s rubber duck cost roughly $300,000 to build.
- The duck stood roughly 60 feet above the water line.
- Its estimated weight is 3,000 pounds.
- The duck does not have an engine. It is pulled by tugboat.
- It takes about an hour to inflate using two blowers.