Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [27]
Driving through the outskirts of town, I passed an ice-cream parlour with a couple of Blues Brothers figures on its roof. Gimmicks like those two figures have been features of Route 66 ever since its heyday, when restaurants and motels would go to extraordinary lengths to attract the attention of passing drivers.
There’s not much more to say about Joliet. It’s a pretty wee town with a river flowing through the middle, but, based on my experience, no people in it – except for one guy running along a pavement. I hope he hadn’t escaped from prison.
It Starts in Illinois, Let Me Tell You Boy
A few more miles through the tall-grass prairies of Illinois, I arrived in Wilmington, turned a corner and came face to face with a wonderful sight – a twenty-eight-foot-high green spaceman in a silver helmet who advertised a drive-in restaurant called the Launching Pad.
Big guys like him are still common sights on Route 66. Some travellers make a thing out of trying to spot as many of them as possible. Originally, these giants were designed to catch the eye of potential customers who were driving past so that people would say, ‘Gee look, a giant. Let’s go and eat there.’ Later, when the interstates bypassed a lot of the communities on Route 66, even bigger giants were built, to catch the attention and wallets of people cruising past.
The owner of the Launching Pad bought his spaceman at a restaurateurs’ convention in 1965 for three thousand dollars. Which begs the question: what kind of person lugs a twenty-eight-foot spaceman to a convention? I always thought conventions were held in hotel suites, and I can’t imagine anyone dragging a twenty-eight-foot astronaut into the Glasgow Hilton, no matter how much I stretch my imagination. But this fella had bought his giant spaceman for three thousand bucks and good on him, the entrepreneur that he was. I just wonder what he said to his wife when he brought it home. ‘Darling, I’ve got you a present … ’
When that fella bought the big guy, it was just a big semi-naked model. Someone used to make a standard roadside giant – they all had the same trousers and always held their hands out in front of them. So the owner of the Launching Pad held a competition to give his giant a name and decide how he should be dressed. A ten-year-old girl won the contest with her suggestion of Gemini – after the Gemini space programme, which was all the rage at the time. They made a big space helmet and a rocket, which they put in his hands. The helmet made him look a bit like a giant welder, but maybe that’s just me. Strangely, two rockets have been nicked from his hands so far, although I can’t imagine what the dirty swines do when they steal a six-foot polystyrene rocket. It’s rather tragic. Did they take them home and play with them?
As far as luring people off the interstate, the Gemini Giant would certainly work for me. I can just imagine my kids when they were younger – ‘Dad, take us there. I wanna go to where the rocket man is. Take us there, Dad. Come on, Dad, come on.’ I’d cave in. And anyway, I’ve always loved that kind of thing myself – that part of America that’s always viewed as big and vulgar, but which really appeals to me. Things like the biggest chair in the world, the biggest frying pan and the tallest thermometer. I love