Aurora’s snow-blowing T-Rex: ‘I just wanted to lighten the mood’

For about an hour Friday afternoon, an 8-foot-tall Tyrannosaurus Rex pushed a red Ariens snowblower around a neighborhood on Aurora’s West Side.

Though 10-year-old Aiden prefers the stegosaurus — “I really don’t like T-Rexes,” Aiden said — he still thought it was “awesome” when his dad dressed up as one to clear snow from the sidewalk outside their home near Hall Elementary School.

For Scott Mulvoy, who turns 36 next week, the snowstorm came at just the right time. Mulvoy said he’d been threatening to buy the T-Rex costume for about two years, until his wife got it for him this Christmas from Amazon.com. Then his neighborhood was in one of Chicagoland’s hardest hit areas, accumulating about 10 inches of snow by Friday afternoon.

Hundreds of people have shared videos Mulvoy put on social media, in a post captioned “Who says snow blowing can’t be fun,” and thousands have commented, reacted or shared them on other accounts. WGN featured the clip in an evening broadcast. Mulvoy’s 15-year-old daughter even shared it on Facebook. As the video spread, he started getting calls from friends who said it made their day when they saw it on Facebook or TV.

“I feel like I’m famous,” Aiden said.

Mulvoy said he’d long coveted the costume for just such a stunt.

“I wanted to just do something stupid, like snowblowing or pick the kids up from school,” Mulvoy said. “...I’ve been planning on doing it for a little while but never really had a good snowfall until this one.”

Friday, opportunity struck. While the city called in private snow plows, Mulvoy suited up.

About 2 p.m., he got the snowblower running.

When Mulvoy’s 7-year-old daughter, Payton, looked out the window, she wasn’t expecting to see a “dinosaur” pushing the snowblower. But she said she was hardly surprised.

“It was funny,” Payton said.

A general manager for a heating and air conditioning company, Mulvoy said he grew up in Aurora and has spent most of his life in the city, including about eight years in his current neighborhood.

During the hour he estimates he was out Friday, he cleared the sidewalks in front of the family’s house leading to the elementary school.

Despite the internet attention, Mulvoy described his time as a dinosaur as relatively solitary. Some neighbors across the street stopped and laughed, but others merely looked at him, he said. A couple cars drove by, and the drivers took their eyes off the road.

“They just stared at me the whole time,” Mulvoy said. “Good thing there wasn’t an accident.”

Though temperatures were in the teens and 20s all day, Mulvoy said the costume, which has a battery pack and fan that makes it inflate, kept him warm.

“It was actually incredibly hot inside,” he said. “My clothes were soaked in sweat by the time I was done.”

But he said his mission was accomplished.

“The whole reason I do it is to make people laugh,” Mulvoy said. “...I just wanted to lighten the mood, because everybody’s complaining about the snow.”

hleone@tribpub.com

Twitter @hannahmleone