A new museum pays tribute to America’s Muffler Men.
There are giants among us. They don’t live, breathe, or stomp around, but they do inspire awe, whether they’re standing proud alongside service stations and roadside diners or lying fallow, chopped into pieces in someone’s backyard.
We’re talking, of course, about the “Muffler Men,” giant fiberglass advertising statues first made in the 1960s, when car culture was king and businesses were looking for a gimmick. Originally made by International Fiberglass in Southern California, these giants were found all over the states in all different configurations—waitresses, Paul Bunyans, Gemini Giants, and Snerds, to name a few—but many have since fallen into disrepair or even disappeared, lost to the annals of time.
A relatively new Route 66 museum seeks to stave off that decline, though. The American Giants Museum in Atlanta, Illinois, opened in 2023 and pays tribute to International Fiberglass’ roadside creations, some of which dot the area nearby. Filled with artifacts provided by giant-lover and amateur historian Joel Baker, the museum has attracted almost 5,000 visitors this year alone, many of whom have made it a featured stop on their trip down America’s mother road.
The idea for the museum came about a decade ago when Atlanta local Bill Thomas looked out his office window and saw Baker, then a Southern Illinois resident, standing in front of the town’s then-only giant, a Paul Bunyan figure holding a giant hot dog. Baker was filming content for his social media channels, and Thomas says he instantly wanted to know what his story was.
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“This is a very small town,” Thomas says. “There are only 1,649 people here, and so we know when someone new is in town.” He went out and introduced himself, and the two struck up a friendship.
Somehow, along the way, Baker started telling Thomas about his collection of Muffler Men and related ephemera, from body parts to paperwork to advertising pieces. After Baker mused that he just needed a museum to house it all, Thomas—who’d worked in tourism before—saw the potential, telling Baker that one day, they’d open one in Atlanta. And they did.
Set in and around a building that, while newly built, was designed to resemble a Texaco service station, the American Giants Museum houses a fairly robust collection. There are artifacts from International Fiberglass, plus disembodied Muffler Man parts hanging from the walls and ceiling. Outside the museum is where the action really is, though, with six 10-by-10 concrete pads meant specifically to house Baker’s collection of giants, as well as giants on loan from other collectors or that may come the museum’s way in the future. (The goal, Baker says, is to have them all filled by Route 66’s 2026 centennial).
Right now, the museum’s marquee attraction is a 24-foot-tall giant known as the Texaco Big Friend, who waves to passersby from his perch at the corner of the lot. “Everyone loves big stuff,” says Thomas. “And for those of us who are 50 or older, we remember the giants from when we were kids. We grew up with them, and so it’s a very nostalgic experience to see them again. If you’re younger, it’s cool too, because they’re big, they’re fun, and they’re unusual.”
For his part, Baker says he never expected to become what’s probably the world’s foremost expert on Muffler Men and other American Giants, but that it’s become his passion over time. After seeing a couple of Muffler Men in Florida some years back, something clicked. “I thought, ‘this is really cool and there’s still so much we don’t know,’” he says. As a traveling media production professional, he was on the road a lot, too, so he started making it his mission to seek out and catalog the giants, gathering what info he could along the way.
He got into restoring the giants in 2015, working with interested parties and fiberglass professionals to produce molds based on the original creations, and so when the museum idea came along, it just seemed like a natural fit. He lives in Colorado now but checks in on the museum remotely, visiting when he can and checking in on his other collection pieces, many of which are stored in Southern Illinois.
Over the years, Baker says, he’s restored about seven different Muffler Men. “Every year or two,” he says, “I find a new one.” Much of what he’s discovered over the years is still unrestored or in storage, but hopefully, with museum funding and public interest, he’ll be able to put some of those Giants back out into the wild, ready to wow the world once again.
“A lot of people collect unique things,” Baker says, “but normally what happens is that those collections end up becoming private. You share them with a few people who are into what you’re into, but most of the time, stuff [like the Giants] goes into a storage unit, and hardly anyone gets to see it. Because of that, to have my collection displayed on Route 66 is really, really satisfying for me, and I’m very thankful for Bill and for his ability to help make it a reality since I certainly didn’t have the means or the finances to ever make something like this happen by myself.”
Though it’s only been open for a short time, the museum has already drawn visitors from far and wide, including people with personal or familial relationships to International Fiberglass, which unfortunately closed in the early ‘70s. It has also inspired businesses in the Atlanta area to seek out their own giants, with a brand new waitress bearing a big, delicious-looking pie already installed up the street at one of the town’s few restaurants.
“I just want visitors to the museum to know that there’s this really cool story out there about our roadside history,” Baker says. “Not only were there neon lights, but there were these cool, 20-foot, larger-than-life statues that were mass-made in California in the ‘60s. They still stand all across our country, too, so if people want, they can get out on the road and start visiting them. And they can start telling others about them, too.”
