1963 a 33 rpm EP, "When Pea-Pickers Get Together", featuring Tennessee Ernie Ford and the Green Valley Singers was released. Side one was a medley of popular folk songs, while side two told the story of how Ford and the Jolly Green Giant collaborated on writing his signature TV song ("How The Green Giant Found His Song (And Almost Lost His Ho! Ho! Ho!)"). The jacket for the record gives the official "biography" of the Jolly Green Giant. In 1964 The Kingsmen scored a hit at #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 with "The Jolly Green Giant", a novelty tune about the Giant's love life. In 1999 the marketing industry's leading publication, Advertising Age, posted a list of the twentieth century's top ten advertising icons, and placed the Green Giant third (behind the Marlboro Man and Ronald McDonald, and ahead of Betty Crocker, the Energizer Bunny, the Pillsbury Doughboy, Aunt Jemima, the Michelin Man, Tony the Tiger, and Elsie [the Borden cow]). In 2005, the Jolly Green Giant was shown in MasterCard's "Icons" commercial during Super Bowl XXXIX, which depicts advertising mascots having dinner together. The Valley "The Valley of the Jolly Green Giant" refers to the Minnesota River valley around Le Sueur. Today, just before dropping down into the valley heading south on U.S. Route 169 an enormous wooden sign of the Jolly Green Giant, along with the Little Green Sprout, is visible with the caption "Welcome to the Valley." further south on US 169, in the city of Blue Earth, Minnesota, stands a fiberglass statue of the Jolly Green Giant. The statue was first unveiled in 1978 and was set on its permanent base on July 6, 1979, at . The statue attracts over 10,000 visitors a year. The statue was the idea of Paul Hedberg, the founding owner of local radio station KBEW. During weekdays in the summertime Hedberg would interview people passing through Blue Earth on U.S. Highway 169 for his popular radio program Welcome Travellers. At the end of each interview, Hedberg presented guests with a sample of the peas and corn which had been produced by the town's Green Giant canning plant, along with a sample of what passed for the blue riverbed clay that gave the town its name. A common theme arising in these interviews was a desire to "see the Green Giant." In the late 1970s the nation's first transcontinental freeway,