The City Sign Shop 08/12/2011

 Somewhere after two years in the Army, during the stagflation recession of the early 1970s, I ended up working for the City Sign Shop. A definite deviation from my career path, but a paycheck nonetheless.

[Back then when you lost your job, you went out and found another one.  You probably would take a cut in pay, but working seemed to be the natural state people gravitated toward.]
Larry made all the green and white street signs for the city.  The letters were reflective white which were placed by hand on a green aluminum plate in a fixture.  Heat and suction fused the letters to the metal.  I talked Larry into making a Desolation Row sign for me, but it disappeared when we moved out of the city.

For the most part my job was to ride around our quarter district with Gino in a pickup truck wearing a hard hat looking for signs that were damaged.  Gino showed me the ropes:  Drive, stop for coffee; drive, stop for coffee; drive, fix broken sign, then get some coffee, then drive.

Signs get damaged by vandals, car accidents, and storms, among other things. The odds of seeing a damaged sign were pretty good, especially in the bad parts of town.  Most afternoons we ended up at Seventh Street Recreation playing pinball and drinking bad coffee for a couple of hours, then head back to the shop to unload the truck before quitting time.

Randy was the guy who drove the machine that painted the yellow and white stripes down the middle of the street.  I would sit in a little chair on the back, place and pick up the orange cones during the paint job.  Randy nearly killed me going down the dip on School Street near Schmeling Building Supply.  When he hit the dip the back end of the truck went flying up and so did I.  Luckily I landed back in the little chair.

We also used a template to paint the turn arrows.  I tried to talk Randy into painting a right turn arrow in a left turn lane, but unlike me, Randy had a family and needed his job.

Randy also made cash by fixing and maintaining cars.  His customers would bring them to the J.I. Case building where the City Sign Shop was located and Randy would work on them during the ever constant slow time.  The sign shop was over-staffed and under-managed like all the other city departments in all the other cities in all the other states all across the country.

Management didn’t care who worked and how much, and the workers didn’t care how much time was wasted, how much money was spent, or how much personal business was conducted during working hours.  Without the make work jobs, we each had about 15 - 20 hours of work to do each week.  The rest of time was spent playing pinball or working side jobs.

The boss only cared when he was giving an alderman a tour.  Tours were announced to the staff well in advance to either get us out on the road or find us something to do.

What activity there was in the City Sign Shop slowed down in the winter.  I’m not sure why, but it may have something to do with the city workers signing up for extra duty to get overtime pay ploughing snow.  Consequently, I was laid off in the fall.  The next week I was re-roofing barns in German Valley.