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Originally posted by Steve Vigeant:
Somehow John Hodgins found me off this board and asked people to tell there snapper stories for a book he was compiling. I got carried away and wrote 10 pages. It got me on on a roll of writing about my sign experiences to this day. Here is an excerpt from the beginning of my tale.
In 1974, I started painting signs for my Dad's realty company. I was 14 years old. He figured that since I could copy comics well, that I must be able to paint signs. Throughout my high school years I painted 4’x4’ lot signs on provided plywood for $12 per sign. I copied out each identical sign in pencil from a small model, without realizing what a ponce pattern was!
After a few years, with a dozen of these signs under my belt, I was given the honor of repainting an old "Welcome" sign on Bloomfield Avenue in Caldwell NJ. I was home from college over the summer of 1980 and I was volunteered by my Dad who was a Rotary member. The sign had side wings with lots of lettering, including the imposing words "Birthplace of Grover Cleveland Alexander." I was not really a sign painter at this point, I only knew how to repaint an existing sign if I could still see the letters through the new coat. While I was working on this tough but high profile sign, a man named Frank with greasy hair and a moustache pulled over to me with his old sedan. He assured me that if I could paint signs. “He'd get me so much work that my arm would fall off.” My ship seemed to have arrived.
He was impressive. He told me that he once met a woman in a dentist office waiting room that was so taken by him, that he had to plead with her not to jump him right there in the office. When I told him I was worried about the draft, he reassured me that there were several ways around that. He said that it was easy to avoid the service if you acted really crazy. What he did, for example, was let the hammer of a gun down on an officer's finger. And when he was called in about it, he would go on bizarre tangents that proved he should never have been in the service in the first place. He said to the investigating officer, "You know Sarge, most people don't care about little pieces of paper that they see flying around in the wind. But when I see them I feel so bad for those little pieces of paper. They look so lonely, I feel just feel terrible for them." I thought I could never be brave enough to pull that off.
He would bring me panels and even One Shot paint, which amazed me because I didn't know that there was paint especially for painting signs. On one occasion I went in with him to deliver one of "our" signs to a local candy store. The client didn't know that “the artist himself” was in the back pretending to look at post cards. First, I overheard the client complaining about the price, a figure that was actually $5 higher than "my dealer" said we were getting. It was obvious the client hated the sign. He said, "for 40 bucks my 8 year old daughter could do a better job than this" And he threw him out. (Ironically, the sign that his daughter did is still on the building after 21 years. It's looks like each letter is in a different font, a sort of orange and green ransom note that says, "LOTTO, Quick Picks."
Occasionally Frank would drive me to a location to work. I would find myself in out of the way places in ethnic Jersey that I had never seen before. I felt so grown up seeing the world through the rolled down window of his beat-up car. One day he took me to a butcher shop somewhere along old Routes 1 & 9. On the way there he made a big deal about how important this job was and how great a job I had to do. I nodded, but I still planned on drawing out the lettering with pencil when I we got there as usual, maybe a little neater?
I had no idea how to plan a job in advance. I didn’t snap guidelines nor had I ever heard the word “font” at that time. I would get out my pencil and start drawing out block lettering. My goal was to get all of the letters on the sign and centered. For this job I thought some style was called for so I deployed my latest trick, which was rounding off all of the letters at the terminators, in this way I rendered them as a sort of poor man’s Helvetica Round.. I was busily laying out the sign in this way, when I looked down and saw that frank was nervous. The sign didn't look right. In fact it was so bad that the client had already called me off the job. He told me that he didn’t blame me, but that Frank was a real loser. He made a point of paying me something, and told me not to give Frank anything. It slowly dawned on me that I was being used. It wasn't long before he disappeared leaving me with a few IOU's in the process. He probably left for Florida to do "sign work", the kernel of an idea that would change my life.

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Posts: 55 | From: Oakland, CA, USA | Registered: Nov 1998  |  IP: Logged |