Local artist brings Bob’s Big Boy statues back to life in Burbank

A neighborhood artist is bringing a bit of the previous again to Burbank, rejuvenating the long-lasting statues outdoors of Bob’s Massive Boy totally by hand. 

Sheila Lehman is a restoration artist who took on the tall activity, repairing the statue as soon as synonymous in California with massive burgers and household eating. 

“The again of his head was smashed in and this plate was very broken,” Lehman stated whereas displaying off her work to CBS News Los Angeles, outdoors of America’s oldest Bob’s Massive Boy location on W. Riverside Drive. 

She’s refurbished each of the seven-foot tall statues outdoors of the restaurant, which additionally performed a component in her personal historical past. 

“Everybody has a narrative. I used to go there in grammar faculty, my household would go there, I had my first date there within the Fifties,” Lehman recalled. “Everybody has a giant, massive story in regards to the Bob’s Massive Boy.”

Maybe essentially the most difficult a part of the restoration was the statue that towers over the restaurant’s entrance. She says that after seven layers of paint, overlaying gaps crammed with epoxy and different supplies, it ought to look identical to the finished statue outdoors of the burger joint that she accomplished a number of months earlier.

“It was a whole lot of prep work,” Lehman stated of the statue on the roof. “He was fairly broken, had fallen over.”

Lehman stated that her ardour for statue restoration started with one thing a lot smaller, when she helped refurbish a statue for her church. Since then, she’s helped tons of of people that ship her household heirlooms from across the nation. 

“I understand how essential they’re to the individuals,” she stated. “It is insufferable to take a look at a household heirloom that’s damaged. You are like, ‘Oh my gosh, that is my grandmother’s and now the hand is damaged off.’ You simply cannot stand it. … Folks can throw something at me that they’ve and I can repair it.”

Final 12 months, a special Bob’s Massive Boy statue was severely damaged during a car crash in Downey. Since then, group members have rallied to lift cash for its restoration, even giving it a brief makeover for Halloween to masks the harm.