Seaside Aquarium

Vickie Forney, seafood manager at the Seaside Safeway grocery store, rescued a 25-pound lobster in 1993. “He had to ride in the back seat of my car,” Vickie described to the local paper. Had she not intervened, the chonky lobster would have likely ended up as the centerpiece of a Valentine’s Day dinner table, but thankfully for the sizable shellfish, Vickie had been on the hunt for a gigantic lobster to donate to the nearby aquarium. To aid in her quest, she had asked her seafood supplier to get in touch immediately should one come in, so when this big fella was caught in New England, Vickie got the call, and its cross-country journey began.

The considerable crustacean was carefully packaged, FedEx’d to the northern Oregon coast, picked up, chauffeured in the back of Vickie’s car, and delivered to his new caretaker, Tom Thies—an “all-purpose aquarist” at Seaside Aquarium.

A local nun won a contest to name the lobster, and he became Victor—as in “victory over death” but also honoring Vickie, his savior. Safeway employees and aquarists alike proposed that Victor was the largest living lobster in captivity.

Those claims remain unverified, but we do know that an absurd tragedy struck the following Labor Day weekend. An aquarium worker was taking tickets when she noticed a stranger strolling out the exit with Victor under his arm. She called the general manager, who emerged with a baseball bat. A confrontation on the promenade caused the man to drop Victor, who initially seemed fine, but closer examination revealed his shell had cracked. He died four days later, succumbing to internal injuries. The thief was charged with a misdemeanor, and ordered to serve 120 hours of community service and pay the aquarium $800- or aproximately $32 a pound.

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