A sign of the times
Brian Price lays the letters on chicken wire netting while Park Patterson hands letters to Anthony Sibert to tie to the wire. New neon letters will be made for the sign.
Brian Price, top, and Park Patterson, bottom, take off the letters on the Observer-Reporter sign outside the newspaper’s building on South Main Street in Washington on Monday. H&R Signs will be refurbishing the sign.
H&R Signs employees take down the neon letters from the Observer-Reporter sign outside the building on South Main Street in Washington. The sign will be refurbished with new neon letters.
South Main Street should soon be a bit brighter at night once the Observer-Reporter’s sign is refurbished with white neon tubing.
The vertical letters spelling out Observer and Reporter went dark several decades ago, although the illuminated square clock has been keeping time fairly steadily as people toil inside the building to bring you news and advertising.
“I used to maintain that sign personally in the 1980s,” said Zack Masisak, owner of H&R Signs, Washington, who initiated the repair process Monday by removing the letters, transformers, wiring “and several buckets of birds’ nests.”
Masisak delivered the collection of letters Tuesday morning to Michele Johnston, owner of The Neon Connection in Verona, along the Allegheny River.
“There’s only a handful of people that do that anymore,” Masisak said.
Johnston will first trace a template of each letter, then apply 1,100 degrees of flame to shape glass tubing.
“I try to get all my work done in the morning because it gets very, very hot,” Johnston said Tuesday of her typical 7 a.m. start.
“Believe me, there aren’t many signs around that look like this,” she continued. “This is an old sign. I would definitely call it Art Deco. It’s not machine work. Somebody obviously put some blood, sweat and tears in this. They just don’t build signs like that any more.”
The Artcyclopedia website describes Art Deco as “an elegant style of decorative art, design and architecture … characterized by the use of angular, symmetrical geometric forms.”
The Observer-Reporter broke ground for its present building in 1922, and a June 1923 front-page photo shows the building without any neon adornment.
But, according to a photo caption about the clock’s first need for repair in 1988, the timepiece with wing-like stripes was installed in 1949.
The newspaper and O-R website are planning to document the entire project, which also includes new wiring and a dusk-to-dawn lighting feature.
“That’s neat; that’s wonderful,” retired co-publisher John L.S. Northrop of Washington said Tuesday in discussing the repairs.