Jim Gary, who died Saturday at 66, was a self-taught welder of life-sized dinosaur sculptures made from auto parts he scavenged at junkyards in his native New Jersey.

The pieces, many of them gleaming pink and green with coats of luminescent auto paint, were exhibited at museums around the nation and abroad.

Gary’s motivation was to amuse and inspire, and it was not unusual to see small children reacting to one of his sculptures as if it were a friendly television dinosaur.Yet he was far from unaware of the ironic undertones of constructing extinct giants out of the parts of junked cars. He preferred to use the parts of American cars because of their greater heft, and when he met Lee Iacocca at a 1990 exhibit of his work at the Smithsonian, he told the former Chrysler chairman that “Chryslers make the best dinosaurs.”

Gary grew up in rural Colt’s Neck, N.J.,one of 11 kids.The family grew its own food, and from age 11, Gary lived with a neighboring couple who employed him to do odd jobs. He began tinkering with bicycles, and by the time he was old enough to drive, he was able to build his own cars. In school, he excelled in shop class, and produced winning entries in local crafts fairs.

After four years in the Navy, Gary worked as a mechanic and then for Jobs Corps, a government training program. When he finally left his government job, in about 1970, it was to pursue his weekend hobby of mechanical sculpture full-time.

Working primarily in metal, Gary sold his work from a Red Bank gallery, as well as on the streets of New York. The sculptor Jacques Lipchitz found him there displaying “Universal Woman,” a female torso delicately welded out of steel washers, and informed Gary that it was mounted incorrectly. Once he figured out who Lipchitz was, Gary changed the sculpture’s base.

After finding success in shows in the metropolitan area, Gary began receiving commissions for whimsical furniture and stained glass sculptures.Brewers hired him to construct huge holiday wreaths made from their original cans.

Gary created other animal forms — 4-foot-long ants, and giant dragonflies on poles — but it was his dinosaurs that captivated most people. While appearing relatively true to actual dinosaur skeletons from a distance, Gary’s assemblages rewarded closer viewing. A 14-foot-tall Tyrannosaurus rex had feet made of brake shoes, a head made of two joined oil pans, and ribs made from leaf springs from an old truck suspension.He said it could take as many as 10 cars to construct a single dinosaur.

In an Associated Press interview in 1990, Gary spoke about his first impressions of an automobile junkyard: “It reminded me of an elephant graveyard. Just as elephants went to the graveyard to die, those old cars went to the junkyard to die.” But Gary was no paleo-polemicist: “It is not my intention to suggest the auto industry is going the way of the dinosaur,” he said.

Although Gary had significant success from the early 1970s, it was an exhibit at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia in 1979 that brought him national attention. Soon after, his work appeared on the cover of National Geographic World magazine, and in other national publications. Requests for shows began pouring in from around the nation, as well as Australia and Japan.

Aware that his dinosaurs had a special appeal to youth, Gary frequently visited New Jersey classrooms, and was featured on “Captain Kangaroo,” “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” and many other television shows.

Gary worked feverishly in a small workshop he installed in a former chicken farm in Farmingdale, N.J., easy to find because of the 34-foot red apatosaurus in the back yard, which he draped with Christmas lights during the holidays.

When he worked, friends would stop by with food or coffee, to make sure he had enough fuel to keep going. He was self-taught, both as an artist and as a technician. At one point, while experimenting on welding brass, he inhaled a large amount of zinc oxide and was partially paralyzed. He cured himself by drinking quarts of milk.

Gary also built the machinery used to move his massive sculptures, including a crane adapted from a 1960 Pontiac, and special trailers that trucked the monsters to exhibitions, posed so prettily that they attracted honking crowds of motorists.

Jim Gary
Born March 17, 1939, in Florida; died January 14 at Central State Hospital in Freehold, N.J., after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage; he leaves no known immediate survivors.