Saturday, April 1, 2017

Bigfoot brings family to Amesbury, Massachusetts


The creature has towered intermittently over Elm Street between Drew’s Tire and Auto Center and Hockmeyer Studios for four years. Over the past two weeks, Bill Drew’s 8-foot-tall wooden Bigfoot has returned – but this time he’s not alone.

By Jim Sullivan from Newburyport News

“They have got a program on TV called ‘Finding Bigfoot,’ but they have never had a family on that,” Drew said. “I’ve got a family.”

Drew’s towering Bigfoot has been joined by a 6-foot-tall wife and a 3-foot-tall son.

“I don’t know where he found them. Somewhere up in Canada, there was a family roaming around or something,” Drew said. “I guess he just picked them up.”

Drew, a lifelong Amesbury resident, has been in the auto repair business for more than 40 years and enjoys woodworking in his spare time.

“I do it for maybe one or two months in October or November,” Drew said. “I do all kinds of different types of cutouts from animals to people to Christmas things. I have done some stuff for the senior center and have done Christmas angels. I’ve got things all over town.”


With his grown children living out of state and having moved into a condominium complex, Drew has spent the past five holiday seasons creating various Christmas-related cutouts that he said seem to move around his complex each night.

“I usually move them to where all the kids live,” Drew said. “They all like it but even the adults get into it. I have moose and deer, and all kinds of things. If I don’t move them close enough to their houses, they say something.”

The giant Bigfoot – “He’s a full sheet of plywood” – made his first solo appearance in front of 85 Elm St. after an early February blizzard four years ago.

“Well, you see them on TV and everything and I said to myself, ‘Well, that would be something different to cut out,’” Drew said. “Moose travel down this far south and deer. I guess he needed a vacation.”

Bigfoot likes the cold, probably because he needs a good foot of snow to stand up straight, Drew said.

“He’s a Northern guy,” Drew said. “We bury him about a foot into the snow. Then, he needs a couple of braces in the back. Sometimes, we nail him to trees or to a fence. Whatever we need to do.”

Although last year’s relatively mild winter kept the large crypto-hominid from making an Elm Street appearance, with last week’s blizzard and subsequent cold snap, Drew decided Bigfoot would make his big return this year.

Even though the Bigfoot family members like to stand on a tricky, curvy corner, Drew said he’s received nothing but compliments. But with spring officially here and baseball season on the way, he will probably take his creations down over the next week.

“I went to the bank this morning and the girl there said, ‘Oh, I love your Bigfoot,’” Drew said.

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