The Jolly Green Giant

The Jolly Green Giant of Blue Earth, Minnesota is 55 and a half feet tall, weighs four tons, wears a size 78 shoe and smiles 48 inches wide. He was the idea of Paul Hedberg, founder of the local radio station KBEW, who watched Interstate 90 bypass the town in the 1970s and wanted a reason for traffic to pull off. Green Giant, whose cannery had packed the town's peas and corn for decades, gave permission but no money, so ten local businesses put up 5,000 dollars each. Creative Displays of Sparta, Wisconsin built the fiberglass figure in the summer of 1978, shipping the arms separately because the hands on hips pose was too wide for a flatbed truck. The giant made his debut hanging from a crane on 23 September 1978 at the ceremony that completed Interstate 90 across Minnesota. Crews building east and west had met at Blue Earth, and a gold tinted slab of concrete was poured across the roadway as the highway's golden spike, with about 2,500 people watching and an Air National Guard flyover overhead. The statue went onto its permanent base, with a staircase between the legs for photographs, on 6 July 1979. A Giant Museum built around the collection of Lowell Steen, who spent thirty years as a mechanic on a Green Giant harvesting crew, opened in the old fire station in 2009 and moved into a welcome center beside the statue in 2019. The cannery still runs, under Seneca Foods, and the Blue Earth fire department washes the giant once a year.