Big John of Metropolis

Big John is a fiberglass grocer about 28 feet tall in a checked shirt and white apron, holding paper grocery bags, outside the Big John supermarket on US Highway 45 at the east edge of Metropolis, Illinois. He is one of the last of his kind. Bob Martin and Frank Bayley of Carmi, Illinois named their supermarket chain after Jimmy Dean's 1961 hit Big Bad John, and around 1967 they commissioned a mascot from the General Sign Company of Cape Girardeau, Missouri. A local musician and artist, Jimmy Boyd, drew the design, the moulds were carved that summer, and a run of figures, somewhere between a dozen and thirty depending on who is counting, went out to Big John stores across southern Illinois and beyond. Martin and Bayley left the grocery trade in the late 1980s and the chain broke up. The Metropolis store opened in 1986 under Mike Pool, who had worked for the founders, and kept the name; when its giant arrived is recorded nowhere. In 2014 the statue's right arm fell off under the weight of the bags and the years. It was taken apart at the waist, hauled to a powder coating shop at Joppa, and came back the following spring in khaki trousers, with one armload of groceries gone and the freed right arm raised in a wave. A sister figure still stands at the Big John store in Eldorado, Illinois. Others scattered as the chain closed: one went to Cape Coral, Florida in 1969 and was wrecked by a hurricane in 2022, and another was bought at auction by a folk art yard in West Virginia. A mile to the northwest, on the courthouse square, Metropolis keeps its better known giant, the Superman statue.