Anchorage Daily News

In Anchorage and a thousand towns across America, there's a certain niche in local advertising where jingles are king and gimmicks never die.

Buddy Bailey and his basketball live there. As does mattress mogul Ted Sadtler with his spastic dancing and stable of cartoon barn animals. And Cal Worthington too, that classic used-car charmer with his inscrutable dog Spot. ("Open till midnight, bring the key-ids, we'll see ya heer!")

But if there's a ground zero for local hokum, it would have to be a stretch of Old Seward Highway, right near Y2K Liquors and the Pack Rat Mall, where a triad of flooring businesses battle for dollars, each hitching its fortunes to the allure of a larger-than-life mascot:

There is Giant Don. There is Big Bob. And there is Jungle Jim.

Just who are these flamboyant front men of berber and laminate? Where did the icons come from? And does having one really help sell flooring?

Dave Heafer is the latest in a string of people who've owned Giant Don's. He's very happy with the business concept.

"I paid a lot of money for that name," he said.

It's homespun. It's a little funny. It's something people remember, he said.

"Don is giant. He is a giant person in this marketplace. ... He's twice as big as anyone," he said.

"The bigger the name, the bigger the deal."

In the beginning, Giant Don was an oversized lumberjack clumping through a forest of carpets. These days he's a cowboy riding through the night astride rolls of Congoleum.

"He morphed into a cowboy about six years ago," Heafer said.

No particular reason.

"It was just a weird commercial I did."

WHERE'S DON?

There's a universal phenomenon in places like Don's, Bob's and Jim's, where customers assume that someone who works there must actually be named Don, Bob or Jim. There is no Don working behind the counter at Giant Don's, but people ask all the time. If there is a real person who inspired the mascot, Heafer's not saying. He prefers Don's origins to remain a mystery.

Just down the road at Jungle Jim's, the story goes the opposite way. There is no Jungle Jim cartoon character swinging on vines through dense linoleum foliage. The name came from a previous owner, Greg Morrisette. Jungle Jim is a family nickname from his father's youth.

"Let's just say in his younger days he was given that name because of hard drinking and things associated with that," Morrisette said.

When Morrisette owned the business, people started calling him Jim, and he went with it. It was like a little tribute, he said. He still gets it on occasion, even though he sold the store.

Current owner Andrea Orton appreciates the store's history, but these days she's not going for the old Jungle Jim discount flooring image. She wants a more upscale clientele. Some people won't even come in because the name turns them off.

"They'd rather go to Florcraft," she said. "It sounds so much more elegant, doesn't it?"

Orton fully intends to change the name, she said. What will they call it?

"Town and Country."

She's still on the fence about whether to spell it "towne," with a snooty "e" on the end.

CARTOON CHOIR

Old Seward is home to funny-named flooring businesses because of economics, she said. It's driven by the idea of drawing everyone looking for flooring to the same general location, to businesses that have the same general feel, she said.

"Like if there's a Lowe's, there must be a Home Depot."

Big Bob's, it turns out, is a franchise. The real Big Bob is named David Elyachar, though he generally goes by Big Bob. He's from Kansas.

His cardboard likeness -- of a middle-aged man with a goatee, holding a cartoon parrot (the bird says "cheap, cheap") -- stands watch over the sample racks. He does his own commercials, which are played in towns across the country.

"He's huge down in the states," said David Schuld, a manager.

In one, Big Bob conducts a cartoon choir made up of rug rolls singing Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody"; in another he plays a fortuneteller who sees cheap carpet in the future.

Big Bob's works as a brand because it's catchy, Schuld said. His daughter, a toddler, loves to sing the Big Bob's fight song, which is "Big Bob's, Big Bob's, Big Bob's, Big Bob's," chanted at increasing volume.

THE COINER OF NAMES

Thomas Thomas (yes, that's really his name), now with Kash's Carpet in the Valley, is kind of the godfather of weird carpet store names. He had Signs Carpets (it was in an old sign business, and the name was a cost-saving measure) and Colonel Abner's (Kentucky Colonel was taken). He also named Giant Don's. Naming is in his blood.

"You heard of the Chubby Chicken?" he said, meaning Chubby Chicken's Cheap Cheap Carpet, in business for a while in Fairview, complete with a giant chicken statue.

"That was my brother."

First and foremost, you have to run a good business, he said. The next most important thing is the name. The best names conjure up a mythical character, like Giant Don or Chubby Chicken. It doesn't hurt if there's something in the name that makes it sound like people are going to get a good deal too. A name rubs off on a place and people who work there, so you have to be prepared for that. People nearly always assume that the namesake is an employee, he said.

So, what if he had to name a carpet store today? He thought about the question for a minute then settled on "Dirt's Cheap Carpet." The idea of it cracked him up.

"Pretty soon they'd be calling ... 'Is Dirt there?' "

Find Julia O'Malley online at adn.com/contact/jomalley or call 257-4591.

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