PHOTO ESSAY
For the Love of Signs
A Self-Confessing Retro Sign Addict
Glitter among fantasy friends. Ride ’em cowboy! You’re king of the road. Within the signs developed, crafted, and erected all over the world, is the story of who we were and where we went, inventions that affect human behavior.
From directional symbols and whimsical characters to geometrical objects I’m a self-confessing retro sign addict.
Retro Sign Addict Symptoms
A person who walks with you, yet only pays sporadic attention to a conversation because he is on the lookout or unique signs (or similar objects) born in the middle of the last century.
- Asks family and friends to assess retro sign photographs from the past two decades.
- Spends an inordinate number of hours a day to categorize retro signs by era, color, design, character, purpose, and text style.
- Vivid dreams of horses rearing upward driven by neon letters or light bulbs.
- Insists on staying at roadside motor motels with glamorous (or not) huge neon signs usually owned and run by creative East Indian people.
- Resents Lady Bird Johnson’s calls to disassemble and trash neon signage, recalling her snarling words to the fantastic objects rising toward the sky.
As a retro sign addict, some criticism of the President Lyndon Johnson’s first lady “Lady Bird” is warranted. She advocated laws against signage causing the 1965 Highway Beautification Act to be the law of the land.
Addressing a White House Conference On Natural Beauty, she spoke proudly, saying, “Pleasing vistas and attractive roadside scenes need to replace endless corridors walled in neon, junk and ruined landscape.”
In my dreams, I categorize retro signs as follows:
Character
Text on Parade
Arrows
Deco Divas
If you are up to it (or not) check out Retro Sign Blog for some of the signage classics of the twentieth century.