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Arts & Entertainment

Mister Sandman, Bring Me a Dream

Meet Dick Huggins, the man behind those amazing sand sculptures that keep cropping up on the east end of Second Beach on Sundays.

It's been thirty years since Dick Huggins, of Barrington, his wife Val and their two sons took a long weekend mini-break at the Ocean House in Watch Hill.

"As fate would have it there wasn't much to do since there weren't a lot of waves that day," Huggins recalled. "Val, my wife was content to read her magazines. I dug a deep pit for my two boys to play in and sat there looking at the large pile of sand that came out of that hole."

Huggins continued, "I was feeling antsy and started thinking what I could make out of that pile of sand. I took a plastic shovel and made a simple two foot tall pyramid. It looked pretty good, it had clean lines and didn't even take me that long. So now I'm thinking, 'what details can I add to this?'"

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Huggins started to use some breakfast utensils in hopes of incorporating more detailed lines in his sandcastles.

The next morning with breakfast utensils in hand, he created a crude Aztek type of building, with some steps, square windows and assorted details. 

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The rest is history.

Back then, there was no internet so Huggins learned this craft all by himself. Huggins had a eureka moment one afternoon when he was stuck in traffic next to a construction site, driving home from Second Beach.

Huggins explained, "They happened to be pouring the concrete so I had this notion that I could use wooden forms for my sand castles and make taller castles. My first forms were woefully inadequate, but I soon was building 6-7 foot tall castles with ease. My boys also had grown and they were helping me so it was a family event. Somewhere along the line, I figured out that really wet sand was better to work with than dry sand." 

The "zen" of the sand is hard to explain, but over the years, as more and more people got exposed to sand sculpting, the rise of the internet helped, and cable TV started doing feature stories. 

In the late 1990s, one of Huggins' Newport castles actually made it on CNN as their picture of the day. He never actually saw it, but got calls from friends around the country telling him they had just seen Huggins and his boys on CNN. 

In 2002, Huggins teamed up with a gentleman from Tiverton and the two formed the sand sculpting team of Sandtasia. Steve Topazio is now doing the sand sculpting full-time and has competed at such events as Hampton Beach, Revere Beach, as well as several Florida events.

Sandtasia does corporate events, the Rhode Island flower show in the winter, the Woodstock, CT fair every Labor Day, and assorted other contracted events.  The formal Sandtasia team consists of Steve, his sister Jessie, Huggins and his son Rich. They have other master sculptors who join them depending on the event and scope of the given project.

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