Georgia Landmark Clucks Its Way To 60
“We may own the building, but the Big Chicken belongs to Marietta.”
Courtesy KBP Brands
One of Georgia’s most famous roadside attractions is 60!
Marietta’s “Big Chicken,” a 56-foot tall steel sided structure of, you guessed it - a chicken - has adorned the northwest Atlanta suburb skyline since 1963.
Hubert Puckett was just 30-years old and a student at Georgia Tech when he came up with the design for a rooster to sit atop the original restaurant, Johnny Reb’s Chick, Chuck and Shake.
His design included a beak that opened and eyes that rolled.
“Only when they turned it on in 1963, [the moving beak and eyes] broke all of the windows in the building,” Anthony Gianino, Senior Vice President of Marketing for KBP Brands said.
Kentucky Fried Chicken eventually bought the restaurant in 1974 but the Big Chicken stayed, becoming a landmark in Marietta and a point of reference to anyone traveling through town.
“My mom used to tell people to turn left by the Big Chicken to get to our house,” a native Mariettan said.
In 1993, when the Big Chicken was 30, a huge storm blew through town and while KFC contemplated tearing it down, they instead renovated it and made it possible for the beak and eyes to move again, Gianino shared with SouthernLiving.com.
When KBP Brands acquired 50 restaurants in the Atlanta area in 2011 - including a Marietta KFC franchise, they were surprised to find out that their portfolio included an enormous steel rooster.
“We’d come to town and operators would insist we needed to go and check out the ‘Big Chicken’,” Gianino remembers with a laugh. “It became a buzz, everyone had to come get their picture in front of it.”
KBP Brands oversaw another renovation of the Big Chicken in 2017, updating it “without hurting anything that made it great.”
“It’s a part of being from Marietta,” Gianino said.
The love for the Big Chicken expands far beyond the restaurant - there is Big Chicken merchandise, an acapella group The Big Chicken chorus and even a short film Big Chicken, Small Movie.
It came as no surprise to Gianino when patrons of the restaurant, including Puckett (who also turned 90 this year) and Marietta Mayor Steve Tumlin packed inside the Big Chicken to celebrate 60 years of the iconic landmark.
“We may own the building, but the Big Chicken belongs to Marietta.”
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Read the original article on Southern Living.
