A TAste of Neon

[Erik Sine]

A Taste of Neon

ED MURRIETA; ed.murrieta@thenewstribune.com

Published: March 12th, 2008 01:00 AM

Inside restaurants, cooks blend herbs and spices to entice diners’ palates. Outside, signmakers and repairmen combine gases – neon, argon, krypton, xenon or mercury vapor, elements that, when ignited with electricity, beam rainbows of eye-catching, even heartwarming colors to entice customers and fans of a classic form of Americana: neon diner and drive-in signs.

“It really shows a taste of the history of the restaurants,” said Janell Brown, a Federal Way designer who collects photos of neon signs on her waymarking.com Web site. “There’s a cool combination of art, science and craftsmanship that you don’t see in plastic signs today.”

While some bulbs burn brighter and much paint is chipped and faded, Tacoma-area restaurants are aglow in vintage signs’ icons and art from neon’s heyday, the 1940s and 1950s:

• The winged, kicking neon boots atop Flying Boots Cafe, circa the late 1940s.

• The incandescent arrow swooping toward Frisko Freeze, erected in 1950.

• The attentive pooch sporting a red neon bow at The Poodle Dog, circa the early 1950s.

• And, in a stack of sheet metal, glass tubes and copper-wound transformers, the 1949 gestalt of Pick-Quick Drive-In articulated in two neon adjectives and nouns – better burgers – with an arrow on top.

“It’s the whole thing right there,” said Joe Burgi, patriarch of the family that owns the Pacific Highway icon. “There isn’t a day goes by that somebody doesn’t stop and take a picture of that crazy thing.”

NOSTALGIC APPEAL

Last April, a photographer working for the national trucking company Roadway took a picture of Pick-Quick, which stars as Miss October in Roadway’s 2008 Roadside Drive-Ins calendar.

What’s the appeal of old signs?

“There is a lot of nostalgia,” said Penny Jensen, the owner of Frisko Freeze. “It reminds me of my father and growing up as a kid. It means a lot to me. Hopefully, it means a lot to Tacoma.”

Jensen, 55, inherited Frisko Freeze from her father, Perry Smith, who founded the North Tacoma drive-in in 1950. Jensen alternately reminisced about the sign and rattled off a fix-it list – burned bulbs, chipped paint, rust inside the candy-striped sign pole, the burger that no longer lights up.

“It’s old,” Jensen said. “It’s gonna need some major maintenance down the road. It just drives me crazy if the lights go out.”

ICONIC VALUE

Tim Tweeten owns The Poodle Dog, the septuagenarian Fife landmark whose 1950s red neon channel lettering sometimes reads “ood Food” rather than “Good Food.”

“Do I fix the doggone thing?” Tweeten asked. “Constantly.”

Tweeten couldn’t calculate the amount of money he’s spent on sign repairs in the eight years he’s owned The Poodle Dog, but he knows the sign’s iconic value.

“Priceless,” Tweeten said. “I’m not going to yank it down. I’ll keep fixing it. When it blows over, I’ll have one built exactly like it.”

Replacing a sign is one thing. Erecting one at a new location could be problematic. Such signs, said Pick-Quick’s Burgi, are “something you do not see much anymore and you can’t duplicate anymore because of the ordinances and codes will not allow it anymore.”

Tacoma neon sign artist Kevin Russell can attest to that. A couple of years ago, he designed a retro-looking sign – featuring a neon star, flashing arrow and incandescent bulbs – for Panamonica’s, a now-defunct music venue that occupied a historic building in downtown Tacoma.

“Historic preservationists wouldn’t allow it,” Russell said. “The sign looked old. It couldn’t have been more fitting for an old Tacoma neighborhood.”

GENERATIONAL TASTES

Retro is in the eye of the beholder.

“Your age plays a big role in whether you like neon,” said Thor Aanes, a 73-year-old retired maker of neon signs whose Lakewood company, American Neon, serviced many of the area’s vintage signs. “We had a period of time when neon was very unpopular. Neon got kind of a skid row image in the early 1970s.”

Even though Aanes calls neon “the best illumination you can get” (it’s not uncommon for neon tubes to last 20 or 30 years), he said neon can be gaudy and obnoxious.

“Sometimes neon can be quite garish,” said Russell, 40. “You can use it in ways that people don’t realize it’s neon and it’s still producing a nice effect. I look at neon signs as a form of art.”

While new technologies like light-emitting diodes duplicate neon’s look at a fraction of the cost, Russell said only the bright buzz of neon will do sometimes.

“When a business wants to provide an energy and excitement, neon is very good for that because the energy that you see flowing through the tubes is a really unique display medium,” said Russell, who works for Seattle sign company Tube Art, which is restoring the long-gone neon tubing on Frisko Freeze’s building.

To hear Russell tell it, making neon glow is like cooking – an alchemy of gases, rather than spices.

“If you pump blue gas with mercury, it comes out bright green,” he said. “If you pump a tube with argon and don’t put any mercury in it, it has a very dim color of green. It’s mercury that really gives neon life.”

RETRO RULES

To capture the flavor of Steffie’s Caribbean Restaurant in 2005, Russell incorporated purple plates, forks, spoons and knives among the sign’s yellow-and-green palm trees. In a sign for The Hub, a soon-to-open neighborhood bar and restaurant in Tacoma’s Stadium District, Russell is using neon to fix the restaurant’s feng shui: a large wrap-around arrow that resolves into the word ENTRANCE will glow on the side of the building, directing customers to the front door.

Other nonvintage, but evocative neon signs include Longhorn in Auburn, whose giant, rotating steer horns declare the barbecue joint’s business; Tatanka in Tacoma, whose main menu attraction – bison – is depicted in a red neon outline; Josephina’s, a Tacoma Mexican restaurant whose sign features floral flourishes you might see on a waitresses’ blouse; and the simplicity of the neon crown atop Tacoma’s Crown Bar.

“Anything that still has neon that’s not covered up in plastic and utilizes any kind of caricature, whether it be an arrow or a symbol, that’s a retro sign to me,” Russell said.

[imanut]

“If you pump blue gas with mercury, it comes out bright green,” he said. “If you pump a tube with argon and don’t put any mercury in it, it has a very dim color of green. It’s mercury that really gives neon life.”

????? Green?

gn

[Erik Sine]

It maybe because I'm color blind but, I've never seen blue gas, or green

[imanut]

It maybe because I'm color blind but, I've never seen blue gas, or green

Welll----you have to turn it on to see the color, dummy. Kinda like a newbie looking at a glass flask and saying "it's empty".

gn

[Travis]

Welll----you have to turn it on to see the color, dummy. Kinda like a newbie looking at a glass flask and saying "it's empty".

gn

Thats a good one there. Fortunately I did not (at least I dont recall) asking this. But I have been asked a couple times.