Once, the giants were everywhere.
They perched atop restaurant roofs and loomed along our main drags, hoping to stand out amid the increasingly crowded streetscapes.
As the golden days of American car culture transitioned to the digital age, the attention of motorists turned inward to map apps routing preordained destinations. The giants, their capacity for capturing impulsive visitors diminished, were disappearing into nostalgic legend.
Even the most popular of them, fixtures for decades along famous roads, have been threatened with extinction.
But people still love the old fiberglass figures, advertising icons that began appearing along suburban commercial strips as postwar prosperity put more people on the road in search of food, fun and furniture for their new ranch homes.
“They come out of nowhere. You’re driving down Route 66 and you’re like, what is this thing?” said Quinn Adamowski, an advocacy manager with Landmarks Illinois as well as the board president at the Joliet Area Historical Museum.
The Joliet museum was instrumental in saving one of the most famous of the advertising figures, the Gemini Giant that until recently stood outside of the former Launching Pad restaurant in Wilmington, an icon along Route 66, the famous road that will mark its centennial in 2026.
“It was one of the most photographed, stopped-at, iconic things across Route 66 in the entire country,” he said. “It’s important to Wilmington, important to the region, important to the state, really, it’s important to the country in terms of Route 66.”
The Gemini Giant is now in southern Illinois getting some work done, and once restored will return home to Wilmington, where a place is being prepared for it in South Island Park, Adamowski said.
It’s one of the lucky giants. Most weren’t. After their heyday in the 1960s and ‘70s, the fiberglass statues began disappearing from the landscape.
“Trends change,” said Bill Thomas, curator of the American Giants Museum situated along Route 66 in Atlanta, Illinois. “That may be an oversimplification. They were a very popular thing for a dozen or more years, but you know how people are. They move on from one thing to the next.”
But there are indications that people might be moving back in the other direction. One is the American Giants Museum itself, which has attracted some 3,500 visitors — over twice the town’s population — since it opened in April, “and that doesn’t count July,” Thomas said.
“Today I looked at the guest book and thought, here’s a new one. We had visitors from Nigeria,” he said. “Europeans, Australians, folks from South America are old hat. I don’t mean to denigrate them, but we get them all the time. But Nigeria, that was nice to see.”
Many visitors are likely drawn by the retro allure of Route 66, John Steinbeck’s “Mother Road,” but the nostalgic advertising statues fit right into that milieu.
As he spoke Friday morning, Thomas was preparing to head to a restaurant along Interstate 55 to help welcome to town a new American Giant — a 19-foot statue of a “waitress holding a pie.”
“The restaurant owner approached me and said ‘I see all the people who are coming to the Giants Museum and I want a giant and I want her to hold a pie,’ because this restaurant is famous for its homemade pie,” Thomas said. “I said, I know the people who can build it for you. So he had one built and it’s coming today.”
The newest giant in Atlanta is based on “the one and only female giant” the advertising statue pioneers at International Fiberglass made, originally for Uniroyal Tires stores, Thomas said. Because the company’s original molds still exist, a new one could be “made and customized.”
Another effort closer to home could end with the recreation of an iconic fiberglass giant that once greeted visitors traveling along U.S. 20 toward northwest Indiana’s Duneland beaches.
Kevin McCarthy, a Thornton native who now lives in Momence, was intrigued by the uncertainty surrounding Wilmington’s Gemini Giant when its owner put it up for sale last year. He joined social media pages devoted to the statues and was especially interested in efforts to find out what happened to those that had been lost.
“It’s basically grown men doing a treasure hunt, so it’s kind of exciting,” he said.
When McCarthy read about the mystery surrounding Frank-n-Stein, a statue that once towered over a hot dog stand in Gary’s Miller section, he decided to get involved.
Modeled on screen depictions of the monster from Mary Shelley’s horror novel, Frank-n-Stein was more than 20-feet tall and stood on a 6-foot pedestal. In one hand it held a hot dog, the other a barrel mug of root beer.
“This thing could peek over a two-story building — that’s insane!” McCarthy said.
It made a far-ranging impression.
Frank-n-Stein was lauded by Chicago Tribune architecture critic Paul Gapp as “probably one of the most gorgeous works of kitsch in the nation” in an Oct. 10, 1977, story.
By the end of the 1980s, the Frank-n-Stein restaurant was closed and demolished. The statue out front had disappeared years before that. On sites devoted to the statues, “thousands of people had asked about it,” McCarthy said.
“They said they remembered it but didn’t know where it was,” he said. “It was kind of this long lost statue.”
McCarthy decided to join the search party, following up on clues and knocking on doors — boots on the ground for Indianapolis-based researcher and enthusiast Dave Distler.
Their detective work indicated the statue had been knocked down and damaged in a severe storm in 1982, and rather than have it fixed or replaced, the restaurant owner hired a demolition firm to haul it away.
Worker Tom Harrison instead hauled Frank-n-Stein to a friend’s house in Lake of the Four Seasons and “had it propped up in front of his house for a gag gift on his 40th birthday,” McCarthy said.
“This guy woke up to this huge Frankenstein monster propped up on his front yard,” he said. “Tom was kind of a prankster and felt that was kind of funny.”
The gift was humorous, but unwelcome. Harrison brought the statue to his home on the north side of Hebron for his son, Larry, to play with.
McCarthy tracked down Larry Harrison, who filled in the missing details about Frank-n-Stein’s fate.
“Larry remembered being a 10-year-old and this statue laying out there in the yard,” McCarthy said. “He and his friends would climb on it like a jungle gym, this old beat up statue. But it was so cool to have this big statue there.
“His dad got tired of it being an eyesore, so he cut it up and burned it there on the property.”
The giant monster that had welcomed so many beachgoers and hot dog eaters for more than a decade was reduced to a heap of slag.
But all was not lost.
Gary’s Frank-n-Stein had been created by Richard Kishel, an art teacher based in Muncie, Indiana, whose fiberglass advertisements also included a giant KFC bucket and a 50-foot Ronald McDonald once located in Gary, according to a June 6, 1977 Indianapolis Star profile. He also created a life-sized giraffe for the Indianapolis Zoo and nursery rhyme characters for an amusement park in Santa Claus, Indiana.
Kishel, whose work in Gary was done at a facility called East Gary Electric Company, has since died, but his son Tom said molds for Frank-n-Stein’s head and mug “still exist and are laying around in a barn somewhere,” McCarthy said.
The rest of Frank-n-Stein’s body is similar to more common Uncle Sam statues that have readily available molds, offering hope for enthusiasts that Gary’s hot dog monster might live again.
“It’s just a matter of finding funding, and a place to put him,” McCarthy said.
Placement ideas include along U.S. 20, where Frank-n-Stein once stood vigil, or perhaps along Lincoln Highway in northwest Indiana, “where it would get a ton of views,” he said.
“There’s even been talk about taking him across the border to Illinois to the Joliet area, to Route 66 because the Muffler Men have become such a destination along the road there,” McCarthy said. “This could be a nice new destination for people if we get it to the right place.”
For Adamowski, of the Joliet Area History Museum, the appeal of huge advertising statues is “the idea that these weird and quirky-but-cool things were ubiquitous across the country in the 1960s, and then they largely disappeared.”
But like in Atlanta, and perhaps with Frank-n-Stein, the fortunes of these giants might be on the upswing.
Further down Route 66, Thomas has seen the impact the statues can have in Atlanta, where he also works as Logan County’s economic development director.
“I see the benefit to our local economic base from having these things, and the way they attract tourists,” he said.
“There is a bit of a Renaissance for these kinds of figures and I’m really glad to see it.”
Landmarks is a column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at peisenberg@tribpub.com.