Giants of the Highway: The Secret Story Behind Route 66’s Most Unusual Museum

Welcome to Unpacked, America 250, a mini series celebrating the music, art, food, and more that makes America, America—in honor of our nation’s upcoming 250th anniversary.

The mini series is part of Afar’s “⁠52 Places to Travel in the U.S. This Year⁠” story, and in this fourth episode, host Aislyn Greene takes us to Illinois to explore the towering fiberglass giants that once ruled America’s highways.

From Bob Prewitt’s rodeo horse trailers to Texaco’s massive “Big Friend” campaign, this episode reveals how a cowboy’s creativity sparked a nationwide phenomenon of supersized roadside advertising—and how one man’s obsession saved these giants from extinction.

Transcript

Aislyn Greene, host: So in the heyday of the late 1960s, if you drove down pretty much any American highway, you’d encounter something larger than life—enormous fiberglass figures. For example, a giant man wearing a Texaco suit standing sentinel at a gas station, or a 20-foot-tall boy waving you into a burger joint. These giant statues became known as a muffler man, though most never held a muffler; we’ll learn why in a minute.

They were America’s supersize salesmen, and their story begins with a rodeo cowboy in California who loved his horses.

I am Aislyn Greene, and this is Unpacked, America 250, where we celebrate the traditions that make America, America.

Bob Prewitt was that cowboy, and he loved horses so much that he started a company in Lawndale, California, building horse trailers for the rodeo circuit.

Joel Baker, founder of the American Giants museum: He wanted to model his trailer, and he started making a fiberglass horse to go in it. And then everyone wanted the horse. And then he started making all these animals.

Aislyn: That’s Joel Baker. He’s the founder of American Giants. It’s a free museum devoted to these muffler men, also known as giants, that’s located along Route 66 in Atlanta, Illinois. We’re going to get back to the museum later in the episode, but for now, back to Bob. Around 1962, a restaurant owner asked Bob to make an enormous fiberglass Paul Bunyan to attract customers—because why not?

It worked so well, in fact, that the 20-foot-tall Paul Bunyans started popping up all over California. Picture towering, bearded men in blue jeans, and of course the iconic ax, but scaled up. These giants eventually caught the eye of a bigger company, International Fiberglass, who bought the molds from Prewitt.

And from there, the giants went national.

Joel: International Fiberglass had an excellent marketing manager. Her name was Violet Winslow. She was very good at her job, and when she came on board at International Fiberglass, she started getting these giants in all these trade magazines and different shows and conventions and so on and so forth.

Aislyn: Violet’s strategy worked—business owners across the country began ordering these fiberglass giants, and International Fiberglass responded by creating variations: cowboys, spacemen, and generic figures that could be customized for any business. The giants spread in clusters across America. There were heavy concentrations in Southern California, where they originated.

Then there were some that popped up in New Jersey and New York—basically anywhere entrepreneurs saw potential customers driving by. It’s no surprise, then, that the oil companies took notice, and they saw an opportunity for nationwide branding campaigns.

Joel: They really tapped into the oil companies because there was a lot of money there. So you have Phillips 66 and Texaco doing these different programs with these giants. And that really helped push them all over the country.

Aislyn: Texaco’s Big Friend program in the mid-1960s represented the peak of this—shall we say—giant ambition. The company ordered 300 custom figures. They were 23-foot-tall servicemen designed specifically for gas stations, and they had an option to add 2,800 more.

Joel: They deployed them all across the United States—they were massive. And what basically happened is it was a real pain to move them around and set them up. The jobbers, the Texaco jobbers—the guys in charge of all the oil stuff and who got tasked with these big giants—hated it. You know, they were hard to set up.

The wind was blowing them over, they were cracking, and vandals were stealing the head or a hand or something.

Aislyn: So within months, Texaco pulled the plug.

Joel: Texaco’s like, “We’re done with this. Scrap the program.” And they didn’t want people to take the giants and repurpose them for their own business—much like Cecil B. DeMille destroyed his movie sets in Hollywood in the 1920s because he didn’t want anybody to come and make a movie off his sets. It was the same idea with Texaco, and so they ordered all these giants destroyed.

Aislyn: By the early 1970s, the era of mass-produced roadside giants had pretty much ended. They were sold off or simply discarded as businesses changed hands and tastes shifted. Now, back to Joel’s story. He had no intention of becoming America’s leading expert on fiberglass giants. In the early 2000s, he was working in mobile television production, traveling constantly to cover sports and events. During a job in Florida, he saw something that sparked his curiosity.

Joel: I was in Florida—we were doing an event near Dade City’s Zephyrhills area. And I think there was a dinosaur alongside the road. I was trying to figure out what the story was because it was headless and old, and I was like, “Oh, this is interesting,” and that led me to Roadside America. And they had a banner there for the Muffler Man.

Aislyn: That’s actually where Joel discovered the origin of the name Muffler Man.

Joel: The reason we call them that has nothing to do with the history of the ’60s. It has more to do with the 1980s, I believe, when the guys at a website called Roadside America—actually they didn’t have a website back then; it was a book they were making that later became a website—really highlighted all these roadside attractions, and they started noticing these guys. Because by chance the first few they saw held mufflers, they called them Muffler Men, which is funny because the vast majority of them do not hold mufflers.

Aislyn: While perusing the Roadside America website during the Florida trip, Joel discovered a map with giant locations across the country, and two were nearby.

Joel: So within a day, I had gone and seen my first two giants.

And I don’t know what it was about them. I just thought, “This is so cool” because they’re so old and they’re all over the country, and there’s all these variants that kind of look the same, but they’re all different, and they all have these different stories. And I think I’ve always enjoyed history.

Aislyn: Joel’s media background gave him tools other enthusiasts lacked: cameras, editing software, and a storytelling instinct, as you can hear. He began documenting not just the giants themselves, but the stories behind them, which are just as fascinating.

Joel: I would dig deeper than most—or anybody else that I knew—into these stories and start uncovering pictures and, “Oh, this one was actually over here, and then it moved here,” and I realized pretty quickly that people like this—they like the deep dive into it that they’re not getting just by looking at the giant.

Aislyn: Documentation led to collecting. Joel’s first purchase was something called a Snerd. It’s a country bumpkin figure. It has the same body as a Muffler Man, but a nerdier head.

Joel: I remember the first time I saw one and the guy was like, “Oh, yeah, well, it’s for sale.”

It was like a light bulb went off in my head—like, “Oh, I could actually own one of these.” And then, of course, once you buy one, you’ve got to bring it home. So that was an interesting conversation with my wife, and he lived in our garden for a number of years and just kind of hung out back there, and that was cool.

Aislyn: Joel and his colleagues from the TV production crew began finding and restoring giants in their spare time and documenting the process online.

Joel: My buddies who were on the road with me—they were watching me, and of course they thought I was crazy and made fun of me quite a bit in the beginning. But over time, these guys I worked with took an interest, and they taught themselves fiberglass work and restoration and painting. And so we started using our garage—one of my buddy’s garages—to restore these giants. And we were doing videos on our restoration, and that really got people excited because now you’re taking something that’s really old and falling apart and has no future life, and you’re giving it new life, and people love that.

Aislyn: The restoration videos attracted attention from other collectors and from people who owned giants but didn’t know what to do with them—because what do you do with a 20-foot-tall Burger Boy? So Joel’s collection grew, and it was stored at various friends’ properties.

Joel: Over time, you build up this collection of giants, and I didn’t like the fact that I had all these giants and nobody was getting to see them. That really bugged me.

Aislyn: In 2012, Joel took his first dedicated giant-hunting road trip along Route 66 in Illinois. In the small town of Atlanta, he stopped to photograph a Paul Bunyan holding a hot dog outside a restaurant, and that’s how he met Bill Thomas, the current curator of the museum.

Joel: That’s when Bill literally saw me from his office window out there and came out and talked to me, and that’s how that friendship started way back in 2012.

Aislyn: Bill Thomas is a member of the Atlanta Betterment Fund, a local organization focused on historic preservation and tourism. As Joel’s collection grew, the two men began discussing a radical idea.

Joel: I don’t know which one of us brought it up first, but it was like, “You know what? If I could get my collection out of storage and we could get it where people could actually see them and learn about them.” So that was the very beginning of the museum.

Aislyn: We will hear more about the museum after a few words from our sponsors.

The American Giants Museum opened in 2023, and the centerpiece is Joel’s restored Big Friend—one of only six known survivors from the original 300 from the old Texaco campaign.

Joel: I was able to find one that stood on the boulevard in Las Vegas, and it was a long journey for it, but eventually we got it restored, and it stands there.

That’s why the building looks the way it does—because we wanted to make that building kind of look like an old Texaco station, even though it’s not.

Aislyn: The museum looks like a big white garage with red gas pumps out front, and it combines the visual impact of the giants with extensive historical documentation.

Joel: We filled the inside of the museum with all the research—much of the research I’ve done about the giants—and I get comments early on, like, “Well, people aren’t going to read all that,” and not everybody does, but a lot do. They can geek out on that stuff and really learn that history.

Aislyn: Visitor reactions have been overwhelmingly positive.

Joel: The only negative feedback I get is when people get there and it’s closed and they want to see it. But yeah, I think it’s been really different. You know, there’s a lot of similar things you can see on Route 66, and I think this Giant Museum, this Muffler Man Museum, has been something totally different—like, but still extremely nostalgic and quirky and all the things people love about the route.

Aislyn: Joel has big plans for expanding the museum. He even has the concrete display slabs ready for his next giant additions.

Joel: My goal is to have two more giants on those slabs by next year—next May. And then, yeah, it’ll look full. And, of course, we’ll do other things inside and probably put some new rotating exhibits inside and merch and things like that.

Aislyn: Recent acquisitions include a Bob’s Big Boy figure.

Joel: So Big Boy is probably one of the most iconic figures—one of these roadside advertising figures. But Bob’s Big Boy was a hamburger joint, and that was their mascot—this little boy that had a bit of a belly and these suspenders and this checkered red and white pattern.

And it ended up getting franchised all over the country under different names like Shoney’s and Frisch’s and all these things. And so everybody knows about Bob’s Big Boy—or most people do—and it’s very connected to these road trips and nostalgia and neon signs and that whole 1960s world that we just love.

Aislyn: Joel continues to hunt for rare giants, though he acknowledges that his holy grail, the Texaco Big Friend, is unlikely to be found again.

Joel: Every few years, something—normally it’s like a hand or a head of one—will emerge.

Aislyn: That’s so creepy. It’s very rare when a whole body appears because what would happen is these Texaco guys would often be ordered to destroy the giant, but they would be like, “Well, that’s cool. I don’t want to destroy it, so I’m going to take the head home and put it in my garage.”

Aislyn: One guy even turned a head into a playground for his young children.

Joel: You know, he cut holes in the eyes so they could look out and all this stuff, built some stairs inside so they could go up into the head—all this wild stuff.

And then, all these years later, their children contact us, and the thing is still in the backyard. So it’s an incredible find.

Aislyn: The museum currently operates as a free attraction because Joel’s mission is part preservation and part nostalgia.

Joel: And it wasn’t all rosy back in the 1960s, but as far as visually driving down the road, it was a special time with neon and these giants were a part of that. For a lot of people, it’s special because it comes with childhood memories—maybe they took a road trip with their dad or something. And a lot of people even have vintage photographs of themselves as kids with these giants.

Aislyn: The giants continue to serve their original purpose decades after their commercial heyday.

Joel: Back in the ’60s, these giants brought—in most cases, unless you were a tiny kid and you screamed when you saw them—but they normally brought joy to a family. They were on a road trip, they could all get out of the car and see the giant—it was cool, the kids liked it, and I think those giants still fulfill that mission today.

Aislyn: And it’s pretty cool because the visitors who come to the museum are often children who’ve grown up with smartphones and digital entertainment, and they still find themselves captivated by these analog attractions.

Joel: I think people who visit the museum—it’s a good part of their day. They get to see something unique and exciting and learn something and just see something bigger than life.

Aislyn: For Unpacked, America 250, I’m Aislyn Greene. Thanks for traveling back in time with us to when giants ruled the highways. We appreciate you joining this episode of Unpacked America 250. Check the show notes for links to the American Giants Museum. Previous episodes feature Go-Go Music in DC, Minnesota’s sounds and culture, and the history of Florida’s beach architecture.

You’ll also find a link to our other America 250 coverage on afar.com. We’ll see you next time.