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

By Joy Benedict, Joy Benedic

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    BURBANK, California (KCAL, KCBS) — A local artist is bringing a piece of the past back to Burbank, rejuvenating the iconic statues outside of Bob’s Big Boy entirely by hand.

Sheila Lehman is a restoration artist who took on the tall task, repairing the statue once synonymous in California with big burgers and family dining.

“The back of his head was smashed in and this plate was very damaged,” Lehman said while showing off her work to CBS News Los Angeles, outside of America’s oldest Bob’s Big Boy location on W. Riverside Drive.

She’s refurbished both of the seven-foot tall statues outside of the restaurant, which also played a part in her own history.

“Everyone has a story. I used to go there in grammar school, my family would go there, I had my first date there in the 1950s,” Lehman recalled. “Everyone has a big, big story about the Bob’s Big Boy.”

Perhaps the most challenging part of the restoration was the statue that towers over the restaurant’s entrance. She says that after seven layers of paint, covering gaps filled with epoxy and other materials, it should look just like the completed statue outside of the burger joint that she completed a few months earlier.

“It was a lot of prep work,” Lehman said of the statue on the roof. “He was quite damaged, had fallen over.”

Lehman said that her passion for statue restoration began with something much smaller, when she helped refurbish a statue for her church. Since then, she’s helped hundreds of people who send her family heirlooms from around the country.

“I know how important they are to the people,” she said. “It’s unbearable to look at a family heirloom that is broken. You’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is my grandmother’s and now the hand is broken off.’ You just can’t stand it. … People can throw anything at me that they have and I can fix it.”

Last year, a different Bob’s Big Boy statue was severely damaged during a car crash in Downey. Since then, community members have rallied to raise money for its restoration, even giving it a brief makeover for Halloween to mask the damage.

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