20-foot Muffler Man statue once stood tall in Macon. What happened to him?

If you lived in Macon between the late 1960s and 1980s, you may have noticed a 20-foot-tall fiberglass cowboy towering over local businesses, blotting out the sun and greeting customers.

After a 13-year-long search for the statue, Muffler Man hunter Joel Baker says he found Mr. Finance Giant lying in Jones County woods, less than an hour away from its original location.

Baker’s passion for tracking down the roadside giants began in 2011. That same year, he began looking for Mr. Finance Giant after seeing a photo of him on the Roadside America website taken by Georgia artist Laura Floyd in the mid ‘90s.

“It kind of became a treasure hunt and I got really into that,” he said. “I really like learning about the history of these giants and telling their individual stories, and [Mr. Finance Giant’s] story is very Macon.”

Macon giant making history

During the ‘60s and ‘70s, Muffler Men grew to be the pinnacle of outdoor advertising for automotive and retail businesses.

International Fiberglass, a fiberglass molding company in California, delivered the cowboy statue to Macon in the late ‘60s. One of its first iconic roles was at the Phillips 66 Gas Station on Hartley Bridge Road, Baker said.

Mr. Finance Giant relocated from south Macon to downtown Macon before expanding to Warner Robins, Baker said.

In the early 80s, Dennis Lockaby, Macon native and owner of C&L Motor Co. on Eisenhower Parkway, purchased the the western giant and refurbished it into a captain figurine after his own nickname, “Captain.”

Dennis wanted the giant to attract attention to his sales lot, but the statue became a problem for the Macon-Bibb County Planning and Zoning Commission, Baker said.

“He got in the newspapers quite a bit because they were always fighting about zoning laws. Back in the ‘70s, a lot of people thought of these big giants as eyesores,” he said.

The commission said the giant was over the limit on the number of square feet a business could have in signs, per local zoning regulations at the time, he added.

“Every time I moved the man, I had the Planning and Zoning Commission jumping on me,” Lockaby told Telegraph reporters in November 1984.

Dave Distler, a former genealogist and valuable asset of the giant’s recovery, said the Highway Beautification Project of 1965, which was led by First Ladby Bird Johnson during Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency, played a role in the regulation of outdoor advertising, including removal of certain signs like the Muffler Men on Route 66.

“Unfortunately for the Muffler Men, the closest thing they could be described as was a sign to advertise the businesses,” Distler said.

Finding that giant

Distler agreed to help Baker track the giant down in late February. He immediately began researching and communicating with Middle Georgia residents on Facebook.

Within a week, he struck gold and connected with Walt Reynolds, a Milledgeville native who said the towering giant had been sitting on his late grandfather’s property for over 20 years.

“It was kind of shocking to me actually because to some extent it was like a needle in a haystack,” Distler said. “A lot of things had to line up exactly for this to happen in only five days. I still can’t believe it.”

Reynolds recalled his grandfather collecting a large number of antiques and keeping them at the family farm in Jones County.

“Anyone else would have thought of it as a junkyard, but to us it was where we spent our weekends running through the woods and exploring his old cars,” Reynolds said. “The giant just sat back there in the back with the rest of the junk.”

It’s far from junk to Baker, who said his second passion is restoring the vintage giants and adding them to his collection at The American Giant Museum, a tourist attraction of Muffler Men on Route 66 in Illinois.

Mr. Finance Giant ranks as Baker’s seventh recovered item. He said the cowboy has been the second-worst fiberglass giant he had to restore.

“He was in rough shape,” he said. “A few more years out there, and he would’ve been pretty much gone.”

Reynolds agreed to sell the statue to Baker, who said that it is rare to find and obtain the historic landmarks because families typically want to keep them.

“I’m glad to see that this hunk of fiberglass is going to be restored and going to be enjoyed. Hopefully, it lasts for another 60 or 70 years for people to understand more about the history of these great mid-century monuments,” Reynolds said.

Learn more about the giant’s recovery and history here.