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In typical dad fashion, Hugh said, ‘Sure, sure, I’ll get round to it, I’ll get round to it,’ and did nothing for years.

But then, in 1972, when Blaine was drafted into the army and sent to Vietnam, Hugh finally fulfilled his promise. He had a friend who was a welder – the first giveaway that he might be a lunatic and could embark on something seriously stupid. (I’m a welder; I know these things.) As the welder set to work on a large steel framework, everybody’s first thought was that Hugh must be building an aeroplane. But then Hugh started to cover the frame with concrete. He mixed 126 sacks of the stuff and pushed it into place with his hands. Once it had set, he painted it all light blue.

On their wedding anniversary, Hugh unveiled his concrete creation to Zelta. His lavish gift was a blue whale. In total it had cost him nearly two thousand dollars, a lot of money in the early 1970s.

When I first drew up beside the concrete cetacean, I have to admit I was a bit disappointed. Some kids were happily fishing off it, but the whole place looked a bit forlorn. This is just a park with a blue whale made of concrete, I thought. Who the hell cares? There was a wee cash desk in a wee log cabin, and a bloke came out to explain what it was all about. That happened quite often on Route 66: as soon as I stopped anywhere, someone would turn up, say hello and start chatting. They were usually very friendly, and this man was no exception. Dressed in a straw hat, Hawaiian shirt, gold watch and big glasses, he introduced himself as Blaine Davis – the fella whose badgering had prompted his dad to build the whale nearly forty years earlier.

Now about sixty years old, Blaine gave me a charming guided tour of the whale. We walked across a lawn towards the water’s edge. Then, like Jonah, I entered the beast through its mouth. Inside, there was a ladder up to a space in the top of the whale’s head – a huge room with a wooden floor where children could play and meet and scheme in the way that kids love to do. It was the best kids’ gang hut I’d ever seen. Obviously, Blaine himself didn’t play in it when he came back from Vietnam, but I’m sure the local kids had a whale of a time in it. (Sorry about that, but I couldn’t resist!) Hugh also rigged up some plumbing which allowed the kids to be squirted down a slide and into the pool. And there were some diving boards – one on the side of the whale, a high one off its tail, and three more dotted around the lake.

Hugh and Zelta opened the whale to the public, and for a couple of decades it was a popular local spot. Over the years, thousands of people visited it and had a grand old time. It was so successful that they eventually closed the zoo. But by the late 1980s, when litigation culture was starting to get a grip on America, their accident insurance premiums became prohibitive and they were forced to shut the whale, too. By then, a lot of locals had swimming pools in their backyards anyway, so they no longer wanted to come to the swimming hole.

The blue whale and the park around it fell into disrepair. Nature took over, and for a while it looked like the Catoosa Blue Whale would crumble to dust. But then some locals, people who had fond childhood memories of jumping, diving and sliding off the whale, got in touch with Blaine and asked if they could form a group to preserve it. They drummed up sponsorship from a chain of hotels on Route 66 and set to work. Nowadays, the whale even has its own Facebook page.

‘We had a big sit-down dinner here last Thursday night,’ said Blaine. ‘First time we’ve ever had one of those. Tables, chairs, steak cooked right here on the site and everything. We had over a hundred people here.’

I think it’s terrific that the whale has once again become a focus and asset for the community.

‘That’s wonderful,’ I said.

‘We had live music, a string quartet and everything, down here playing music.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, yeah. We invited wine vendors from