Wayne Lobb outside his shop with one of his Citroen work vehicles. Photo / Supplied
Wayne Lobb outside his shop with one of his Citroen work vehicles. Photo / Supplied
Stratford said goodbye to one of its most colourful, energetic and community-minded characters when Wayne Lobb died on September 7.
A qualified craftsman plumber, Wayne took over the business started by his father Gordon in the mid 1980s, but probably had a higher profile as a copper sculpture artist andsportsman.
Son Hasely says his father had been a skilled sketcher and wood whittler for as long as anyone could remember and his first animal creations were a pair of soldered small tin tigers Wayne made for his mother, Ngaere.
The tigers Wayne made for his mother. Photo / Supplied
Once he began fashioning shapes from salvaged copper hot water cylinders and header tanks there was no stopping him. He started making things for his own house garden, and was soon doing commissioned work for others, such as dragons and bears lurking in the shrubbery, and sea monsters to go in ponds.
His most famous creation was a floodlit life-sized King Kong with flashing eyes mounted on the roof of the King's Theatre in 2005, with a biplane flying circuits around his head.
The sculpture was created for the midnight first Taranaki screening of Peter Jackson's remake of the classic movie.
Wayne hoped Jackson might want the sculpture for his memorabilia collection, "but I'm not prepared give him away". While Wayne put a negotiable $40,000 price on the gorilla's head, to this day it remains in the Lobb garden.
King Kong in the Lobb garden today, still waiting for an offer from Peter Jackson. Photo / Supplied
For a working journalist like myself, Wayne Lobb was big news then. He was featured in a range of magazines and trade publications as well as newspapers.
Wayne once told me that he started in 1998 with two copper cylinders that became a hippo wood box, then made a rhino to hold a brush and shovel.
His copper art "just grew out of control. It gets in the way of the plumbing, which tends to be hugely boring."
His workshop on Broadway, next to where FieldTorque is now, looked like a taxidermy museum and some of the displays had functions: you pulled Mike Tyson's arm and it started Angelo Dundee chain-smoking; twist the elephant's right testicle and water ran into a tea kettle.
At the same time Wayne was also an extremely fit and active mountain biker, hockey, badminton. Squash and volleyball player and in high grades too. This was despite having to cope with a colostomy bag that had been fitted after bowel surgery (not cancer).
However, the workshop proved his undoing. He lost his balance one day (and this was possibly the first sign of Parkinson's disease that eventually took his life).
"I was falling and my head was going to be cracked open on the concrete floor, I managed to twist my body but landed on my hip and cracked the thigh bone."
He set about trying to get fit again and could be seen trotting along the main street using a wheeled walking frame. He did eventually get back on a bicycle but never really recovered.
He was a life member also of the Stratford Tennis Club, Combined Sports Society and the Citroen Car Club (he owned many Citroens). He built a 14 hole lawn golf course around his house. He once lugged a tennis net to the Mt Taranaki summit for a high altitude game.
He and Judy were into ballroom dancing and rock 'n roll, even reviving the parish ball so they had somewhere to dance. It is claimed somebody once declared that "henceforth all balls shall be Lobbed".
While Wayne Lobb was often in the public eye, there was one thing he kept to himself: his age. It was nobody else's business, he maintained. Even his family were kept in the dark, so there were no symbolic candles on his birthday cakes. Wayne took his secret to the grave, with his age even absent from his death notice.
