Today on Monday Mysteries we discover the mysterious McKinleyville Totem pole.

McKinleyville is a town a few miles north of Arcata, CA, where we’re currently staying. For a town that’s not very big, it has a very tall totem pole at one edge of a Safeway parking lot.

I know, that doesn’t make sense. But that’s what it is: a very tall totem pole in a Safeway parking lot.

Totem Pole, Safeway Lot, McKinleyville, CA

The sign on the base doesn’t tell you much more than that, except to claim it is the world’s largest totem pole:

Sign on Totem Pole, McKinleyville, CA

Note it does not claim to be the world’s tallest totem pole, however.

Oddly, the totem pole has its own Facebook page, as it turns out, but I didn’t find it that useful in figuring out what the heck this totem pole is doing in an urban parking lot.

However, if you click here you can read an article that explains that it was originally erected to garner publicity for the small strip-mall connected to the Safeway – the idea was that if they put the world’s largest totem pole there, people would come to shop at the stores there.

Or something.

That article has more information about the carvers, and a video of them re-carving a “new” one when the old one started to fall apart. However, there’s no explanation of how they came to carve a totem pole for something in this part of the country.  I mean, I don’t believe there is any tradition of totem poles among the Native American groups in this area; the main totem pole building people are in Northern Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. But since I haven’t looked that up, I might not be right about that.

But if there is a tradition of Native American totem poles in this area, you’d think a mention of that would have made it on to the sign.  Of course, the sign is busy giving you the size information about the pole: note that it’s the largest in the world. Not the tallest, just the largest.

Ah well. Today’s Monday Mystery has some loose ends that need to be solved, but I’ll leave our tall totem tale here, with the knowledge that there is really big totem pole in a Safeway parking lot in McKinleyville, CA.

—————

BTW, the people interviewed in the article make a big deal about how “biggest” is — well,  if not “better”, at least as good as “tallest”.  But size doesn’t matter — at least not to this 5′ tall-when-I-round-up blog poster.

Nor does it matter in the following related-to-Broadway songs…

First, from the musical Barnum, we have Tom Thumb singing Bigger isn’t Better:

Next, watch as the 4’11” Kristen Chenoweth celebrates how size doesn’t matter to the Drama Desk awards:

Enjoy.