O-R art deco sign gets new life
An alphabet soup of letters on a wire pallet on the back of a truck await installation recently on the neon sign outside the Observer Publishing Co. building on South Main Street in Washington. The glass tubing of the “R” and “S” in the word “Observer” later cracked. “Technical difficulties,” said sign technician Anthony Sibert, left. “Once it's installed, it's solid” and impervious to weather, said Brian Price, right. Sibert said the old glass tubing removed from the 1940s sign was so thick that he “could throw it across the street and it wouldn't break.”
Anthony Sibert, an employee with H&R Signs, puts the finishing touches on the neon letters before they are installed on the Observer Publishing Co. building in Washington on Aug. 28.
Anthony Sibert, an employee with H&R Signs, puts the finishing touches on the neon letters before they are installed on the Observer Publishing Co. building in Washington on Thursday, August 28, 2015
Michele Johnston, Mike Dulaney and Rich Boniker operate the Neon Connection in Verona. These three replicated the Observer-Reporter letters from an old sign as part of a restoration project.
Michele Johnston, the Neon Connection shop manager and glass bender, works on the letter “V” for the Observer-Reporter sign. Johnston heats the glass so she can bend it into the correct shape.
Gas is pumped through the letter V at the Neon Connection store in Verona.
Michele Johnston of Neon Connection in Verona shapes a glass tube. Johnston follows the pattern drawn by graphic designer Rich Boniker to perfect the shape.
Brian Price prepares to attach letters to the sign in August.
The refurbished Observer-Reporter sign lights up Main Street in Washington as Observer Publishing Co. employees take photos and admire the neon sign. The sign was originally purchased in 1949 and hasn’t worked for more than 30 years.
The sign in front of the Observer-Reporter building was lit again after a refurbishment project that brought the sign back to life after more than thirty years of not working. Observer Publishing Company employees gathered on Wednesday, October 10 to witness the lighting of the neon sign.
The sign in front of the Observer-Reporter building was lit again after a refurbishment project that brought the sign back to life after more than thirty years of not working. Observer Publishing Company employees gathered on Wednesday, October 10 to witness the lighting of the neon sign.
H&R Sign Co.’s Anthony Sibert, Brian Price, Neon Connection’s Michele Johnston, H&R’s owner Zack Masisak and Observer Publishing Co. Publisher Tom Northrop stand in front of the newly lit sign. Northrop headed the refurbishment of the sign, Johnston created the new neon letters, and H&R employees repaired, cleaned and affixed the new letters to the sign.
The sign in front of the Observer-Reporter building was lit again after a refurbishment project that brought the sign back to life after more than 30 years of not working. Observer Publishing Co. employees gathered on Wednesday to witness the lighting of the neon sign.
Newspapers often have names like sun, star or beacon because they hope to enlighten readers.
The Observer-Reporter has a more workmanlike name describing what journalists do. But some significant illuminating on South Main Street in Washington took place, literally, after a countdown and with the flick of a switch at 8 p.m. Wednesday when the brightness of white neon became part of a revived routine.
For the past 25 to 30 years – no one is really sure – the art deco Observer-Reporter sign has been dark, although the employee entrance and lamp posts have kept the square clock readable after sundown. H&R Neon Co. last performed service on the sign in 1985.
“Certainly, when I was younger, I remember we would drive down the hill and it was all lit up,” said Tom Northrop, publisher. “There have been a lot of people in town who have tried to restore their buildings. If we didn’t do anything to the sign, at some point, we’d probably have to remove it.”
He estimated that disassembling the sign might cost $5,000, so Northrop asked how much more it would take to bring it back into working condition.
The answer, from H&R Sign Co. of Washington, formerly H&R Neon, was $10,500.
In 1949, when the original sign was installed, The Observer and The Reporter were two separate publications, and each letter of the morning Observer was capitalized in a modern Baskerville font, according to retired Executive Editor Park Burroughs, while The Reporter’s banner was similar to the Old English style of what one has seen on the front page each day since the newspapers merged in 1967.
The sign captures the two names and their fonts in vertical columns capped with a capitalized “the.” A deco-style square clock topped with wing-like stripes serves as the base.
H&R workers removed the original letters and electrodes and sent them to The Neon Connection in Verona, where Michele Johnston made a template of each letter to guide her bending of glass tubing in a 1,100-degree flame. Some of the more intricate letters contain six to eight feet of tubing. Johnston calls the color “a 6500 White. It’s the brightness of it.”
“To fabricate it now would be thousands of dollars,” Johnston said of the entire metal sign, which, according to sign technician Brian Price is made of stainless steel with a baked-porcelain finish.
“I’m excited about it,” Northrop said before a light-up night gathering. “(Brian Price) put the letters in exactly as the sign was designed,” pointing out a few quirks that only a sign technician might notice.
Work continued on the sign’s controls and in late August, H&R’s crew reinstalled the letters. Three broke, but all were up and running for a few tests before Labor Day weekend. The clock, which ran continuously from 1949 to 1988 with nary a repair, is now back-lit, and a timer controls the hours of illumination.
“It never occurred to me do something other than neon,” Northrop said. “There’s just something about the glow of neon. It’ll be really, really bright and it will stay that way for maybe a year or two before it mellows out.”
He’ll get no argument from Johnston, one of the few practitioners of what is quickly becoming almost a lost art.
In the humid, late-summer evening Wednesday, a gathering of about 70 employees, family members, owners and invitees were on hand to witness the restoration. As the sign gleamed, the group applauded and cheered.
“Nothing can replace neon,” Johnston said.