What happened to the frozen whale that used to visit the State Fair?
One of the strangest attractions to ever hit the fairgrounds, ‘Little Irvy’ made a big impression.
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The State Fair is packed with strange attractions. But one aquatic amusement from yesteryear was so unusual that it is still stuck in the minds of some Minnesotans: a dead, frozen whale.
The 38-foot-long sperm whale named “Little Irvy” weighed more than 20 tons. It was refrigerated in a massive tank and trucked all over the country and Canada starting in 1967. Visitors would pay to go in and see the frozen leviathan.
“If you can prove this whale is not real, we’ll give you this truck,” the attraction’s sign said.
It’s been three decades since Little Irvy last appeared at the Great Minnesota Get-Together. Reader John Joachim thinks about that whale and its striking baby blue truck.
Joachim asked Curious Minnesota, the Minnesota Star Tribune series driven by readers’ questions, where the whale went.
”Old timers should recall that gimmicky display,” Joachim said.
Although definitely memorable, Irvy drew mixed reactions.
Former Star Tribune columnist Nick Coleman wrote in 2006 that “I have a hard time coming up with anything cooler that I ever saw at the fair.”
But a fairgoer told the St. Cloud Times in 1994 of her disappointment after paying $1: “I’ve never seen a whale,” she said. “I thought it was going to be alive.”
The whale found a final resting place in California, although a trove of memorabilia (including one of Irvy’s teeth) ended up in Minnesota.
”Little Irvy is more than a friend. Hell, he’s my partner,” owner Jerry “Tyrone” Malone said in 1995.
Why a frozen whale?
After securing a refrigerated truck, Malone waited four months to find the appropriate whale. The size of the truck limited his options: the whale had to be 20 tons or less.
In 1967, Malone purchased the commercially caught carcass of Irvy the whale for $6,000. At the time, the U.S. was set to make whaling illegal. Despite the name, she was a female sperm whale.
She would have been on her way to becoming dog food. But Malone saw a potential business venture.
He envisioned freezing a whale and turning it into a traveling exhibition. “Everyone I talked to thought I was a kook … [but] this was something I knew I had to do,” Malone told the Phoenix New Times.
Purchasing Irvy and getting her into the truck was a complex process, said Ken Harris, one of Malone’s former employees who now lives in California. The U.S. Department of the Interior first gave Malone permission to purchase the whale and use it for a display.
“Then, they cut the top of the trailer off, took a crane, lowered Little Irvy, flash froze her, and put the top on,” Harris said.
Little Irvy was blasted with 80,000 gallons of liquid nitrogen over the course of a week. To prevent decomposition, the whale’s temperature could not rise above 10 degrees.
Finally, after Malone had frozen the mammal and had it safely in the truck, he and Irvy traveled the country drawing crowds at fairs. While on the road, Malone kept Irvy cool by using a reefer, a refrigerated trailer often used for transporting perishables. Harris said it cost Malone upwards of $16,000 per year to keep Irvy frozen.
Irvy went on many adventures, and Malone often made a point to stop at the Minnesota State Fair, Harris said. “That whale’s got more miles than most truckers in the world have,” he said.
The Minneapolis Tribune included the whale in a 1969 roundup of attractions for “animal lovers of more specialized taste,” suggesting a visit to “‘Little Irvy the whale’ — 38 feet long, regrettably deceased.”
Malone dropped Minnesota from his circuit for a time starting in 1982. But when the exhibit returned to the State Fair in 1993, the Star Tribune took note, writing, “it’s back!” and adding that Irvy was “still frozen after all these years.”
The end of Irvy’s travels
By the ’90s, Irvy had stopped drawing crowds.
Malone largely kept the whale on ice. He became known instead for collecting fancy semitrailer trucks, racing them and doing tricks, Harris said.
After Malone died in 1997, his family decided to bury Little Irvy in Tulare, Calif., Harris said.
The buried body of Little Irvy is “no doubt a gift to the archaeologists of the future,” Harris told Truckers News in 2010.
Minnesota trucking company owner Gary Ries, a friend of Malone’s, later received Irvy’s truck and trailer. They’re now parked in Hastings, Minn., along with many of Malone’s other trucks.
Ries also has rare memento of the one-of-a-kind attraction: one of Irvy’s giant teeth.
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