Go big and stay home! Why Illinois loves its roadside monsters

Megafauna.

No, wait: MEGAFAUNA. Better. A perfect word, and fun to say.

In fact, “megafauna” is not even a scientific term. It just sounds like one. It’s something we say to refer to, in a quasi-professional way, the largest beasts in the world, the biggest of the big. Your blue whales. Your African bush elephants. But since it’s not formal, why not broaden the definition: “Megafauna” could also refer to your fiberglass Bob’s Big Boys and your gargantuan Muffler Men — anything awe-inspiringly outsized that traditionally exists outside, in the wild. Like the Trojan Horse-size Radio Flyer wagon on the front lawn of the toy company’s Elmwood Park headquarters.

Summer is when the megafauna is at its ripest — especially this summer.

A new “Jurassic Park” movie has arrived. The long-running G-Fest — Rosemont’s annual Godzilla convention — will be celebrating its 30th gathering July 11-13. Splitting the difference between ginormous lifeforms and roadside kitsch are the five “Vivid Creatures” recently installed by the Morton Arboretum in Lisle — particularly that 16-foot-long snail slinking alongside I-88, often surrounded by admirers, resembling an ongoing study of scale. Of course, we’ve embraced largeness as a national trait at least since emerging from World War II as the biggest organism in the room. On the other hand, Washington just held a military parade — the sort of celebration of enormity once associated with insecure Soviets eager to prove their missiles were larger than ours.

America can always go bigger.

Particularly in Illinois, where it is not enough to have a big mirror named “Cloud Gate” — we have to reimagine it as the biggest “Bean” in the Midwest. The state motto is not “Why Do It When You Can Overdo It,” though just that’s a ballot-initiative away: What better way to explain a place that doesn’t eat deep dish pizza nearly as much as it promotes deep dish, or still retains a boastful fondness for the Sears/Willis Tower (despite it now being the 23rd tallest building in the world)? Or — this is truly pathological — feverishly hates ketchup yet harbors the WORLD’S LARGEST KETCHUP BOTTLE? You can find that in Collinsville, about 20 minutes from St. Louis. It’s 70 feet tall, atop a 100-foot tower; as if trolling us, the Feds put it on the National Register of Historic Places.

“Illinois is like a wonderland of large things,” said Rolando Pujol, whose dizzying new book, “The Great American Retro Road Trip: A Celebration of Roadside Americana,” is an obsessive taxonomy of the vintage fiberglass megafauna (and more) amongst us. “My Illinois to-see list numbers in the hundreds. But incongruous, anomalous, larger-than-life objects are American DNA, part of our collective self-identity. We develop attachment to large things. They become signposts in our lives.”

California may have more big fiberglass doughnuts than any other state, New York may have the largest buildings these days, but Illinois, especially Chicago, has arguably the most enormous fixation on superlatives. Thomas Dyja, author of the 2013 history “The Third Coast,” the sharpest explainer on Chicago ever, told me the other day that when he was a child the city felt obsessed with scale: “The Sears Tower being the tallest, the Merchandise Mart being the biggest, Marshall Field’s the most elegant, the water filtration plant being the wateriest, the Daly Machine being the most efficient and corrupt — even the Cubs sucking the most.” It was “all part of the swagger.”

Before you protest, consider: A couple of hours south, in tiny Atlanta, Illinois, there’s the thoughtful new American Giants Museum, dedicated to the appreciation of huge roadside advertising giants. About two hours south of there, in Coles County, Victor Mannina, owner of Bella Vita Private Resort, recently landed a grant from the state to restore the 74-foot-tall Abe Lincoln that’s been on the property since 1977. “People just sit and stare at him,” Mannina said, “like for a long time.”

Recently, I attended All Monsters Attack in Rosemont, a small convention devoted to all things large, fanged and mean. I spoke to graphic designer Matt Reedy, who was selling illustrations of giant monsters. I asked him: Why do you think we love giant things? And do you think Illinois, in particular, seems particularly obsessed with scale?

He said no, probably no more so than anywhere else. I asked where he was from.

“Alton, Illinois! Home of the world’s tallest man!”

He’s right: Robert Wadlow, “The Alton Giant,” stood 8 feet, 11 inches tall.

He still holds the Guinness World Record for the tallest person. He died in 1940, though had he lived another 80 years, he would have probably felt comfortable in Casey, Illinois, two hours north of Alton. If Illinois is the Midwest hub of megafauna, Casey is Jurassic Park.

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Robert Wadlow, 17, of Alton, Illinois, holds open the door of a taxicab for his father, Harold, at Union Station after their arrival in Chicago on Jan. 5, 1936. At the time, the younger Wadlow stood 8 feet, 4 inches tall and weighed 400 pounds. The two were in town to attend the National Shoe Fair at the Palmer House Hotel. (Chicago Tribune historical photo)

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Casey, exactly 2.26 square miles across, population 2,350, is itself a study in scale. Walking around this place feels like being the ball in a game of miniature golf. Tim Oakley, a tour operator, told me Casey has 47 oversized things, of which it owns the record for 12 of the world’s biggest, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. “Folks get mesmerized by scale,” he shrugged.

Casey, especially.

We spoke in an olive oil store, where Terry Yates, the owner of both the shop and a daily trolly tour of Casey’s titanic totems, said he considered building the world’s largest olive oil bottle, but since Guinness wants big objects to show functionality, that would mean filling the bottle with olive oil.

“Believe me,” Yates said, “I’ve looked into this.”

When you drive into Casey from the west, you pass the usual rural Illinois markers. Grain silos, grain elevators, green and yellow John Deere equipment, lumberyards. But also, the world’s largest mailbox, which is 5,700 cubic feet, at the end of a post 32 feet above the street. A large tour group can stand inside. There’s even a mail slot and whenever mail is dropped inside, a red flag (itself the size of a pickup) raises on the side of the mailbox. It’s an actual U.S. mailbox; anything collected there gets stamped with a note saying it was mailed from the home of the world’s largest mailbox — a designation Casey wrangled away from China a decade ago, its only serious competition to the title.

The visionary behind this fixation on oversized objects — begun 14 years ago, officially named “Big Things, Small Town” — is local businessman Jim Bolin. Because he manufactures oil pipelines, he already had material for his first object, a working 49-foot-tall wind chime. Casey was drying up then. “We were a town with no stores in its storefronts,” he said. “We needed a purpose. Once people began stopping to look at our Big Things, we invested more time in creating them.” There were doubters, residents concerned about increased traffic. But then tourists came. Businesses approached Bolin for more Big Things, many of which he inscribed with Bible verses. He says a town like Casey requires more than big mailboxes to generate lasting change, but it’s a start.

It’s also surreal.

A big bird cage there, a huge pencil there.

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Local businessman Jim Bolin stands in front of the world’s largest rocking chair on Aug. 26, 2019, in Casey. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)

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Written on top of the big mousetrap in front of Casey’s welcome center is a self-deprecating plea: “Help me! I’m trapped in Casey, Illinois!” The World’s Largest Rocking Chair — at 56 feet tall — towers above the roof of the tallest buildings in Casey, rivaled only by grain silos in the distance. There are so many big objects here, I mistook a handful for infrastructure. I almost overlooked the World’s Largest Car Key (28 feet tall), and then I noticed the enormous taco right beside it.

A common thing you hear from tourists in Chicago for the first time is that they didn’t realize Lake Michigan looked so large. From shore, it no more reminds you of a finite body of water than standing beside Godzilla would remind you of an iguana. That, I guess, is one way of describing the sublime, the feeling of wonder and awe at something so large that it’s hard to picture. It’s also not the worst way to explain why we gravitate to big things. We are not the center of the universe. Some large things are so hard to grasp (nuclear bombs), we invent larger things (Godzilla) as metaphors.

We need reminders.

Ed Godziszewski, a lifelong Chicagoan and one of the world’s leading experts on Godzilla, co-authored an elegant (and physically enormous) new history, “Godzilla: The First 70 Years,” full of behind-the-scenes images of average-sized movie crew standing on scale miniatures of Japan, beside other crew dressed as creatures too large to be real. “I have been on those sets during production on these films and I couldn’t tell you if the (special effects) artists think what they’re making looks inherently fake, but what they commit to is a kind of reality — one all about scale.”

He said, ever since seeing “King Kong Vs. Godzilla” at the Portage Theater in 1963, he’s thought a lot about the art of making something small appear enormous, and vice versa. “I realized what appealed was how it created an alternate reality — one you probably didn’t think looked real, and yet it was tactile. It was still a reality.” That’s not a bad way of explaining why we like megafauna.

The largest beasts in the kingdom can still seem like subtle suggestions of why larger mythological monsters once sounded almost true. No wonder we have come to regard live megafauna as a kind of roadside attraction — think of the whale watches off New England, or the buffalo that wander up to cars at Yellowstone National Park. No wonder the creatures that generate the most interest from everyday citizens — the ones biologists classify as “charismatic species,” the ones that attract the most preservation dollars — are often physically larger than most species.

“We have practical reasons, alongside emotional reasons, for this,” said Lawrence Heaney, a longtime curator of mammals at the Field Museum. “Early humans learned to be less concerned about the smaller weasels and such in the wild than about the carnivores, who were larger and dangerous. Larger things were the concern. But also, overwhelmingly, mammals are small. Roughly, there are about 6,500 species of mammals, though most are little — bats, shrews. Humans are very large mammals themselves. Few species are as large as humans. So why people would be impressed by bigger things makes sense. Naturally, I suppose, little things have not mattered.”

A statue of Paul Bunyon, seen in Atlanta, Illinois, began its life at a restaurant with the same name spelling in Cicero. (Chris Walker/Chicago Tribune)

In downtown Atlanta, Illinois, Paul Bunyon, fiberglass and 19 feet tall, cradling a hot dog like it was a newborn, stands among shrubs as if hiding from authorities. In a way, he is. He loomed for years over Bunyon’s hot dog stand in Cicero — his name misspelled to avoid copyright issues — from 1966 until 2002, when Cicero decided it had a zoning issue with 19-foot-tall lumberjacks. Atlanta installed him here, as a nod to its place along Route 66 and the history of roadside attractions.

Anyway, as I was admiring Paul Bunyon, Bill Thomas approached, hand outstretched.

Behind him, across the street, was the American Giants Museum, which opened last summer to tell the story of fiberglass leviathans that once stood sentinel beside gas stations and diners. It’s as exuberant and colorful as Thomas, its curator — white hair, white mustache, says that he’s from Cuba, then waits a beat and adds “Ohio.” I asked if the museum was once a Texaco station.

“Thank you for asking,” he said.

But no, everything — spotless white facade, red stars, green trim, gas pumps, garage doors — was made specifically for the museum. Beside it, though, stands a 24-foot-tall Texaco man, in a jumpsuit and hat, waving to passersby. That’s the real deal. Thomas launches into some history: Only 300 Texaco men were made, but gas station owners hated them and had trouble installing them; one owner even got a complaint from an elderly neighbor that his giant was staring in her window.

Most were destroyed, but not this guy. Same for the Phillips 66 cowboy standing nearby. And the nerdy Mortimer Snerd, who once stood in an East Coast amusement park — he was named for Edgar Bergen’s puppet, but is a dead ringer for Alfred E. Neuman. They stand surrounded by empty pedestals, awaiting three more giant fiberglass friends set to be installed, including the Viking Carpet Giant, recovered in Virginia and restored.

The museum was created by Joel Baker, a normal-sized Colorado man, who restores vintage fiberglass advertisements. He met Thomas, the Logan County economic development director, while admiring Paul Bunyon. Inside their museum is a tiger from an Esso gas station, and a pair of A&W mascots that could be Flintstones relatives, and a Shoney’s Big Boy, who, in his new home, is ironically one of the smallest of the giants. There are also a couple of large body parts from Miss Uniroyal statues, the only female giant. Most everything in the museum was made by International Fiberglass of Venice, California, which folded in the 1970s and destroyed the molds of its giants.

American Giants Museum in Atlanta, Illinois on June 21, 2025. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune)

What’s left is a small, well-designed museum with smartly told history and no plans to grow larger. Thomas said, “We will absolutely not get bigger. We never wanted that. The point of it was to stand inside a small place, connecting to giant things. That’s the point.”

But, ahem, is it art?

Of course it is. I ask because, in the 1960s, during the age of fiberglass giants, Chicago artist Claes Oldenburg made plans to install a giant spoon with a cherry at Navy Pier, its handle jutting over the lake. That would have been called art, no question. Oldenburg came out of the pop movement that gave us Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, and became known for “colossal monuments,” satirical public sculptures of everyday objects. A decade later, he installed “Batcolumn,” a 101-foot-tall baseball bat, still in front of the Harold Washington Social Security Center.

Though about that spoon: “When we had a mandate to create a new fountain, Oldenburg got the commission,” said Siri Engberg, curator of visual arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. “So he brought back the spoon idea, but now with water coming out of the stem of the cherry.”

It was installed in the late 1980s and if you’ve ever been to the Twin Cities, you’ve likely seen it, hilariously big and colorful, just outside the museum, so whimsical and sunny, “it’s now about far more than the Walker,” Engberg said. “It’s a beloved icon of the city.”

It’s also, she added, a reminder of how Oldenburg embraced novelty and “the colossal objects he admired across the American landscape.” The kind of colossal objects that, on exhibit in Atlanta, were once merely disposable. Indeed, Oldenburg was a toy collector, and his giant spoon was inspired by a gag gift he owned of a spoon in a pool of chocolate. He used scale to give the overlooked everyday a set of fresh eyes and a new outsized relevance. He delighted in what Heather BeGaetz, who made Morton Arboretum’s Vivid Creatures with husband Fez, calls “an Alice-in-Wonderland Effect.”

Context, though, matters. It’s one thing to install a giant lipstick (Yale University) or giant shuttlecock (Kansas City) in an artful setting, and something else to stumble upon, or ride by, an enormous roll of toilet paper (Missouri), massive cows (Wisconsin), a six-story elephant (New Jersey), big pierogi (Alberta, Canada) or the giant so-called “Eye-Care Indian” at the corner of 63rd Street and Pulaski Road. As charmed as Engberg still sounds by the Oldenburg’s spoon, she sounds no less excited to mention that, a few hours north of Minneapolis, there’s a 65-foot-long muskie!

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The city of Wilmington was able to purchase the Gemini Giant, a 30-feet-tall fiberglass statue that stood outside the Launching Pad Drive-In in Wilmington since 1965, in a recent auction. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune)

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Go big and stay home! Why Illinois loves its roadside monsters

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