Museum pieces are sure to be well read
CINCINNATI -- An old brick building just north of downtown Cincinnati gives little hint outside of the treasury of nostalgic icons within its walls.
Some unlighted motel and restaurant signs line the nearby street, and a 20-foot fiberglass genie that advertised the Aladdin Carpeteria carpet cleaning company in 1960s Los Angeles looms near the door. But that doesn't prepare visitors for the burst of color, motion and memories greeting them inside the American Sign Museum.
A tour of the more than 200 signs and other items that include sign makers' tools is a journey through decades of America's evolving cultural taste, technology and commercial design -- at times evoking fond remembrances of family road trips.
Vivid pinks, greens and other hues light up the foyer that museum founder and President Tod Swormstedt calls his "Sign Garden" -- the appetizer for a sign smorgasbord spanning the late 1800s to the 1970s.
Visitors entering the garden are drawn to a spinning Sputnik replica that welcomed customers in the 1960s to the Satellite Shopland shopping center in Anaheim. The 6-foot-diameter plastic globe -- its metal spikes studded with colored light bulbs -- spins near a Dutch Boys Donuts windmill with rotating blue neon blades from 1950s Denver.
Nearby is the multicolored 1950s SkyVu Motel sign that stood along state Route 40 just outside Kansas City, Mo., beckoning travelers with light bulbs flashing on and off in sequence as though traveling around the sign. There's also a 1930s United Pentecostal Church sign from Shreveport, La., with its streamlined design and a 1960s Howard Johnson sign from New York's Times Square.
Nostalgia is a key attraction -- especially for baby boomers who grew up in the post-World War II years when Americans began taking to the roads for family vacations.
Neon signs from the 1920s through the 1960s are particularly eye-catching, along with elegant hand-painted gold leaf on glass from the late 1800s and 1900s and the first electric signs of the early 1900s -- porcelain-enamel illuminated with light bulbs. Plastic signs that emerged after World War II, hand-lettered show cards advertising Las Vegas casino entertainment and sign salesmen's samples also are featured.
John Jakle, co-author of several books on American roadside history and a professor emeritus of geography and landscape architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is a fan.
