Figured out the problem. Actually two issues.
First thing is that I didn't add the right annotation to one of the entities. I had the @OneToMany, but the @ManyToOne I didn't do right.. or vice versa.
The main issue tho, which on other entities I have that also had the blob column issue, was that I had @Basic(optional=false) above several properties. I don't know why/how this converts a bigint(20) into a blob column, but it does. At least with GlassFish v3 and MySql 5. Soon as I removed that annotation from a few different entities that were all exhibiting this issue, they all now show bigint(20) and all looks normal now.
Thank you for the replies. Wish my book and/or other searches would have revealed this.
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