# The Town That Built the Giant Tourists Were Already Looking For
In Blue Earth, Minnesota, travelers kept pulling off the highway to meet a giant who didn’t exist. They had cameras ready, questions ready, and then—nothing but a very polite letdown.
Paul Hedberg was the man hearing it all. He owned KBEW radio in Blue Earth and hosted a summer feature called *Welcome Travelers*, where he interviewed motorists who had left Interstate 90 and found their way into town. Paul wanted to greet people well, to make Blue Earth feel like more than a dot on a map.
The trouble was, visitors arrived with a perfectly reasonable expectation.
Blue Earth had a Green Giant canning plant. Travelers saw the connection and asked the obvious question, the one Paul must have heard again and again in one form or another: where could they take a picture with the Jolly Green Giant?
And Paul had to tell them there was no statue.
That’s a funny kind of disappointment. Not heartbreaking. Not dramatic. Just the small sag in a family vacation when someone has promised themselves a silly roadside photo and discovers the famous green fellow is absent without leave.
But Paul listened. He didn’t brush the questions aside. He heard what was tucked inside them: people wanted a reason to stop, smile, point upward, and say, “Well, would you look at that.”
So the missing Giant became Paul Hedberg’s project.
With permission from Green Giant, and with money raised locally, Blue Earth set out to give travelers what they had already been looking for. Not a brochure. Not a sign saying, “Sorry you missed him.” A real landmark. A huge one.
In 1978, the town put up a 55.5-foot fiberglass Jolly Green Giant. Accounts of the project put the cost at about $43,000, a serious sum for a very cheerful idea. But there is something wonderfully practical, and wonderfully Minnesota, about the whole thing: people kept asking for a giant, so the town built them a giant.
You can almost picture the first travelers who finally got the answer they wanted. They’d pull in, climb out, crane their necks, and there he’d be—green, enormous, and ready for photographs. No one had to explain the joke. The size did that all by itself.
The payoff was simple and sweet. The disappointed tourists finally had someone to visit. Blue Earth had turned a repeated “sorry” into a welcome.
The Giant now waits in Green Giant Park near U.S. 169 and Interstate 90, giving travelers a reason to stop before the road pulls them onward. It all began because one radio man paid attention to the smile people hoped they’d find.
Sometimes a town’s best idea is the one visitors keep asking for.