Bye-bye, Boris: West Central Spokane landmark moved to Mead’s green pastures

The West Central Neighborhood awoke Monday to find a beloved resident missing.

A patch of dirt is all that remains in the corner lot where Boris Borzum, a 16-foot-tall steel statue, stood for over a decade at College Avenue and Summit Boulevard.

Over the years, he puzzled many onlookers.

“All of our grandkids and everybody got a big kick out of him,” neighbor Brian Bedard said. “He was a landmark; a lot of people stopped, took pictures, read the inscription. They didn’t quite understand what he was representing, or where he came from, but he was a landmark.”

Boris’ disappearance has neighbors wondering what may be next for the milk jug-shaped steel man.

“We were out walking the dogs this morning and had to text our friends and say, ‘Where’s Boris?’ ” said West Central resident McKenna Culbertson.

Culbertson hoped he had been relocated for some maintenance and would be back one day. Her neighbor Elijah Miramontes shared a similar sentiment as he looked at the vacant space Boris once occupied Monday morning.

“Bring him back home,” Miramontes said. “He didn’t deserve to go.”

Despite the neighborhood’s wishes, Boris will not be moving back.

“The Big Man,” as he was affectionately called, was uprooted by a crane and trucked north to Mead on Sunday, where he will be transformed into a likeness of former President Donald Trump, said Kellen Ward, Boris’ new owner.

“He’s going to get a face-lift,” Ward said.

Ward acquired the statue from Good Neighbor Companies, the developers who acquired the property Boris once overlooked from longtime West Central resident Kay Howard. Howard asked the company to find the statue a new home instead of scrapping it when she sold the land earlier this year, said the company’s owner, Joe Richter.

Howard, soon to be 83, said she didn’t have the funding to move the statue herself, and wanted to ensure the Spokane novelty didn’t end up a heap of scrap metal.

The statue needed to be moved to make way for the townhomes the company hopes to put on the property that overlooks the Spokane River, Richter said. The company also acquired the lot east of Boris’ former home, but has yet to file any building permits for the properties.

Richter said his first choice was to have the city rehome Boris to a public space, but the city wasn’t interested. Ward, who enjoys metal detecting, had contacted Richter to see if he could search the property after the sale, and the transfer fell into place from there.

“I was born and raised in Spokane,” Ward said. “I had no intention of letting somebody buy him and scrap him. It’s a cool piece of history.”

Ward’s interest goes beyond his future plans for the statue, he said. He’s a conservative and wants to transform it, but he’s also partial to its craftsmanship as a metal worker. He owns and operates Lowrider Ranch Hydraulics on the property near Mead where Boris now stands.

While Howard is glad Boris has found a new home where he’ll be visible to the public, she said she’s not a big fan of the former president.

“No president should have the issues in the home like he did and act like he did,” Howard said. “But Boris is still going; that’s all I can say.”

Howard views the relocation as the next chapter in Boris’ life, one that has “a lot of stories,” she said. It’s not the first move, or the first makeover, for the 5-ton man.

The story of Boris

Boris was created in 1975 for the late Wally Taylor, owner of Empire Boring, a local company that did horizontal underground drilling for the installation of pipe, conduit and cables. The statue stood at the company’s location on Barker Road in Spokane Valley, and later near Felts Field on Trent Avenue, before the company was bought in the 1990s and relocated out of town in 2010.

Howard said the statue’s first and last name, both plays on the word “boring,” came from Taylor, who was never one to shy away from a joke. Taylor would list his own number under Boris’ name in the phone book as a laugh, and as a way to filter his own calls. If someone called and asked for Boris, Taylor would know it was a stranger or a salesperson.

Howard and her husband, Don, were good friends with Taylor, as well as with Jerry Shoemaker, the company’s foreman. Shoemaker was over at the Howards’ house for dinner one night discussing what to do with the statue when inspiration struck.

“I just looked at my husband and said, ‘Put him in the yard, either side of the house,’ ” Howard said.

Boris was trucked over to the house and erected the next day, and has brought her family a lot of joy since, Howard said.

She raved about the interactions she would have with visitors as they stopped to take a picture, when the Bloomsday organizers created a giant running bib to adorn him with, or the time she had to hang off one of his steel legs to paint over “an extra appendage” someone had graffitied between Boris’ legs.

“He’s known worldwide,” Howard said. “I’ve had people from Canada, China, from South America; it just goes on. I’ve met so many different people from different countries coming down and asking about him.”

Boris was originally painted yellow and held a pipe with a boring bar through it in his right hand. By the time he arrived at Howard’s house, the hand, pipe and bar were missing, and his exterior was painted white and navy blue.

In 2018, and with assistance from local firefighters, Howard adorned the stump where the hand once was with a large model airplane to honor her late friends Taylor and Shoemaker, both pilots.

It “just feels right,” she told the newspaper at the time, adding that Boris stood in the flight path for Spokane International Airport and Fairchild Air Force Base.

The plane has now been replaced by a Trump flag.

Howard said Taylor, Shoemaker and her husband would all be glad to know Boris is still standing nearly 50 years later, even though another makeover is in the works.

“It’s better than him being crushed,” Howard said. “I think Wally would be really happy knowing he’s still out there. I know Don and Jerry would be.”