Route 66 Red Rocker
Fanning, Missouri
The former World's Largest Rocking Chair was the brainstorm of Danny Sanazaro, who wanted to entice customers to his archery and feed store. Danny remembered a big rocking chair he'd seen as a kid on a family road trip, and he'd heard of a 34-foot-tall rocker in Franklin, Indiana -- Big John -- that he knew he had to beat.
Erected on April Fool's Day 2008, Danny's mighty chair dwarfed the competition: 42-feet-4-inches high on rockers each 31.5 feet long that weighed a ton apiece. It was designed by John R. Bland, a friend of Danny's with no formal engineering training, and built by Joe Medwick, the owner of a local welding company. Assembled out of steel pipe, the chair weighed 27,500 pounds.
A highlight of the chair's early years was its annual "Picture on Rocker Day," the first Saturday in August, when Danny would hire a hoist truck to lift lucky tourists to the chair's 20-foot-wide seat for once-in-a-lifetime photo ops.
To be certified by Guinness as the World's Largest Rocking Chair, the chair had to rock, which it did when first built. But the massive, multi-ton chair was so terrifying in motion, and Danny was so worried that tourists might flip it over and kill themselves, that he had the chair permanently welded to its base.
Records exist to be broken, and Danny's rocker was knocked out of the No. 1 spot on August 25, 2015 by a 56.5-foot-high behemoth in Illinois. Denied its bragging rights, the rocking chair was dutifully stripped of its World's Largest signage and repainted red as, "The Route 66 Red Rocker." But its new identity didn't rock the public's imagination, and after less than a year Danny went out of business.
The rocking chair, however, remained, and in August 2017 the store reopened under new ownership, with an emphasis on snacks and souvenirs. The big chair -- still the second largest rocker in the world -- is now promoted as the "World's Largest Rocking Chair on Route 66."