Restored sign to serve as beacon of transplanted diner

[Erik Sine]

Restored sign to serve as beacon of transplanted diner

Monday, March 16, 2009

By Justin Mason (Contact)

Gazette Reporter

Photographer: Marc Schultz

J.R. Cooke of Infamous Graphics in Albany works on the original neon Chuck Wagon Diner sign.

PRINCETOWN — For more than three decades, the giant neon Chuck Wagon Diner sign stayed on a shelf Gale Weatherby built in the garage of her mother’s Chicago residence.

The former photography student fell in love with the sign during her visits to the restaurant while attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. So when the diner closed down in April 1976, Weatherby decided she wanted the piece she most readily identified with the eatery: the 9-by-11 foot electrified cowboy head that once illuminated the city streets.

“The sign was like a landmark in Champaign,” she recalled during a phone interview from her California residence. “The whole diner was like a landmark.”

Weatherby paid $80 for the sign at auction, thinking she could one day hang it inside a studio apartment. She even asked workers to put it in the rear of her convertible so she could haul it away.

Of course, the 9-foot-by-11-foot aluminum and steel structure looked much smaller when it was mounted atop the Mountain View Diner Co. restaurant. And the movers she hired balked at the prospect of putting the one-ton sign on anything less than a flatbed truck.

“The next best thing was to dismantle it and pick it all apart,” she said.

The sign would remain garaged and all but forgotten for the next 31 years until Weatherby happened to post a photo of it on the Internet. To her amazement, someone recognized the small silver diner in the picture as one that had been hauled halfway across the country to be fully restored in Princetown.

The minute she contacted Tom Ketchum, the Chuck Wagon’s new owner, he jumped at the chance to purchase the sign. In May 2008, he drove to Chicago and hauled away the six sheets of porcelain-enameled aluminum, the 44 fluorescent rods and all the electrical inner workings. Weatherby painstakingly labeled all the parts in the hope that the cowboy would once again beckon restaurant customers.

“I had always hoped I might be able to find someone who was operating the diner,” she said.

Ketchum was searching for someone to help him with the sign when he was put in touch with J.R. Cooke, a large sign production specialist working at Signarama in Albany. The 14-year veteran trained under a journeyman who had spent most of his career working on signs much like the one that topped the Chuck Wagon.

“I’ve adapted [to] the modern signs, but I still like the old ones,” he said from the business’s basement workshop.

Two weeks ago, Cooke began designing the 14-inch-thick aluminum shell piece separating the two sides of the sign. He’s designed a steel pole skeleton that will create a framework so it can be mounted on a pole outside the diner, rather than on top of the aging structure

Cooke said just about everything is original in the sign, including the 1950s-era electronics. However, the old wiring must be painstakingly replaced because of changes in code.

“It’s a tedious process, because you have to un-solder, replace and re-solder every connection,” he said.

By the time it’s finished, the sign will shine four different colors powered by a combined 108,000 volts. Cooke said he’ll have the sign back together within two weeks and ready for installation at the diner whenever Ketchum is ready.

“It’s a project I wanted to do,” he said surveying the partially rebuilt sign. “This is like bringing back a piece of history,”

Meanwhile in Princetown, Ketchum has finished work on a kitchen addition to the 38-foot-long and 17-foot-wide diner, which was mounted on its concrete foundation in November. The previous year, Ketchum had the nearly 23-ton structure hauled 630 miles from a warehouse in Michigan to a site near his autobody repair shop off Route 20.

Now he’s tackling the interior. Pretty soon, he said, the building will have heat and he’ll start painting the dining room in anticipation of a late spring grand opening.

“There’s a lot of work left, but it’s coming real good,” he said.