Really neat motel sign in the desert!
 

I had to go up to Tehachapi this weekend, and here on Hwy 14 in the middle of the Mojave Desert is this motel.... What a great sign! I had to stop and take this picture. The motel looks untouched in time, so I wonder if each room has a 50s TV? Well, probably not. But I have the feeling that this is one of only a very few motel signs left in the year 2006 that says "TELEVISION"... Not even color, cable, or FREE television!

Charles

That is...A REEEALLY COOOOL SIGN!!Don't see many like that anywhere,anymore.I bet someone could make one of those coffee table books with photos in it,you know what kind,with pictures of old signs,sort of a tribute to advertising gone by in time.This one should be on page.....2!!(page one always has the "intro/why I did the book/acknowledgement stuff on it.)Thanks for sharing the photo.By the way,there's some good train watchin' nearby where you took this shot! :yes: Rob

i'm pretty sure that book's been done, retro. check this out: http://www.roadsidepeek.com/googie/index.htm. the design style is called Googie, and is currently the rage with the hip/urban design folk. the term 'Googie' comes from the name of the hollywood burger joint said to have originated the style, Googie's.

Oh, dear God...I remember all this stuff going over to Gatlinburg & the Smokies when I was a kid...the more garish & tacky, the better..There was one on the "backdoor' to Gatlinburg-it was a beer hall, I don't remember the name, but they had this big fiberglass bear & a "blinky moon" sign...Place was notorious-they had a killin' about every month there for awhile..It burnt down when I was a tadpole, but the bear & the blinky moon sign stayed up for quite awhile..

Yep...remember plenty of those sign from my childhood. Usually on motels and restaurants. Many had bright blue neon pronouncing:
COLD AIR

Thanks for the link!Growing up in the San Fernando Valley,I remember so many of those signs,espescially the liquor store signs.My family were always night owls like I still am,and I would look forward to seeing that big Circus Liquor clown on the way to my grandparents house.I dont know how many times I begged my dad to stop at that liquor store,just so I could hang around underneath it.
I havent looked at the rest of the site,but I bet you a lot of those drive-in and hamburger joint signs from So-Cal would qualify too.
Thanks for that great trip down amnesia lane.
Jimmy

Try James Lileks' website at http://www.lileks.com/motels/index.html. All kinds of nostalgia stuff!

Along the same lines is a photo book by Troy Paiva called "Lost America"

http://lostamerica.com/

I found this book one evening when I was searching online for the Lenwood Drive in (outside Barstow on Rt 66).
That screen on the cover is the Lenwood Drive In circa 1997, it's completely gone now.
This is the Theater I went to as a child in the 60's, you could see the screen from our front door about a mile away!

I know Troy from another music forum- nice guy. Great book, too. Stan Ridgway used some of Troy's photos on his last couple of cd's and on his web-site.

"I've been from Tuscon to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonapah
Driven every kind of rig that's ever been made
Now I driven the back roads so I wouldn't get weighed
And if you give me: weed, whites, and wine
and you show me a sign
I'll be willin', to be movin'..."

Lowell George, 1970
http://www.univie.ac.at/Anglistik/ea...eatWilling.htm

Tonopah may not be the dead slap middle of nowhere, but it's right down the road from it.

I've collected some motel postcards that mention television, especially ones from the years when color TV was a noteworthy feature. I have one that says "Color TV in the common room" and one that says "color TV on request". Also, one for a large chicago downtown hotel (can't remember which right now) bragging "color TV in every room".

IIRC, I also have one that bragged how many stations they had (was it 3 or 4?).
Along the way, I have picked up a few unrelated postcards, like the large hotel in the early 20th century that bragged about having 1000 rooms and 800 baths, and a motel in New Jersey that bragged loudly "NO MOSQUITOES."

Hotels and hotel furniture companies are going through a revolution today as flat screens are becoming the latest thing. The entertainment armoire is being phased out in favor of low furniture that can sit below the plasma or LCD that is mounted to the wall.

They still have a lot of those kind of digns dotting the Northern areas of Niagara Falls Boulevard.......The Bel-Aire and the Bit-O-Paris stick out in my mind......

Thanks for posting that cool pic.
I like Route 66, old neon & other kitschy old stuff.
I got some pics years back of a Howard Johnson sign somewhere between Alton, IL and St Louis MO. It was the "Simple Simon and the pieman" sign.
I'm pretty sure it's gone now.

Thanks for all these notes of appreciation! Glad to share...

On this subject of signage, Does anyone have a photo of any TV repair shop signs that are noteworthy? Here in Los Angeles, most TV repair shops are gone. When I was a boy, there were 2 or 3 shops in every block (it seemed)... My favorite was the one which was founded by actor Victor Mature, "Vic Mature TV" on Pico Blvd just West of Westwood Blvd in LA. They had a really neat window display of vintage TVs that they had sold new, including a 3" Pilot, a Predicta, and others. The sign was HUGE, with plenty of neon tubing and featured "RCA VICTOR BIG COLOR TV available here". Also had a sign that said "Hoffman warranty center". That shop is gone, but was still there as late as the mid 80s. Then there was a shop on Westwood Blvd near UCLA that had a sign "WE NOW SERVICE COLOR TVs!"

Charles

Hotel signs boasting the number of channels they had were actually common in rural areas around here up until the early 90s. Back then there were 5 channels in capital cities (3 commercial, 2 goverment) and there was no cable TV. In many rural areas there was only 1 commercial channel (which typically showed a mix of programs from the 3 commercial channels with some local content and reruns the other networks didn't bother showing) and 1 of the goverment stations. The second goverment station came later, a local affiliates of all 3 commerical stations later still. Some hotels close enough to a capital city installed high gain antennas on tall towers with an inline amplifer to receive city channels with varying amounts of success. So hotel signs would often proudly announce 4 channels, 5 channels, or Melbourne TV.

I spent about a year in a crappy little town 400kms out of Melbourne just before the 3 commercial affiliates came online. In order to escape the awfulness of Southern Cross TV I had 6ft VHF yagi on the tallest tower I find with an inline amplifier that got me watchable, but snowy reception of Melbourne channels.

Of course now all channels are available everywhere via satellite if not via local affiliates and Pay TV offers even more channels via satellie, so Melbourne TV isn't anything to brag about anymore.

I don't live too far from US 25-E, which goes from Detroit to Florida. I-75 has long since made it obsolete, but there are still several motels along the way that were put up in The Golden Age- 1940-1960...most are ruins now, or have been turned into "efficiency apartments" (read-flophouses),or worse. I remember most of 'em were still going on when I was a kid-Usually some old guy & his wife ran 'em,& the old guy would stay busy mowing, painting, etc....Then the old people would die, & the place would start a long, downhill slide....Very sad to see...

Any of you who have an interest in Googie, take a look at this site:

http://www.spaceagecity.com/googie/

Lots of great pics.

How about this GE T-V trailer, still sitting in the weeds in the southern tier of Western NY?

Man, dat ting's been dere fer a LOOOOOOOOONG time...

Pretty wild, literally. When I was in New York City in the early 80s, there were still lots of those Bell Telephone signs as well as Fallout Shelter signs hanging around.

It was Gatlinburg in mid-July
I'd just hit town and my throat was dry...

I work for a city in Ventura County California called Fillmore. They have a pretty neat old sign that is for the city itself. They have lots of neon signed buildings there, I'll have to check out the local motels and see if there are any "color TV here" type signsl.

David

It's a miracle that this sign survived 1994... I went through there on the Friday after, and downtown was pretty much a pile of bricks and smashed glass covering crushed cars parked along Central. Here's a photo of the Hotel Fillmore taken shortly after... Luckily a lot of the historic buildings got rebuilt, and the city has made a great comeback in the Old Downtown district. And a great car show on the 4th of July!

Charles

Yeah, that sign has been there since the 50's. A lot of the city wasn't as lucky, but we've been back for a while now. Some pictures are attatched, including the sign during the day. What downtown looks like now. Our ever favorite gun store. And the Lost & Found shop which is of more interest for televsision collectors as I have actually seen some Setchell Carlson studio monitors here.

David

Dumont neon
 

Sixty-three years in the same family. Eatontown TV stands near the main entrance of Fort Monmouth in NJ. This Dumont sign was taller than the building. Estimated at 30-feet tall, it had seven tubes of green neon illuminating the main letters. The sign was so large and bright it served as a nighttime beacon for Monmouth and Red Bank airports. It was there till the building was expanded in 1974. Some of the steel from the sign is in the concrete floor of the '74 addition. Spoke to the owner this morning. He speculated that Dumont paid the entire cost of the sign. I've often wondered if the unusual size of the sign was somehow related to Dumont's association with the Eatontown area during his work at the Fort.

I love old motel signs and other highway relics. As others have mentioned, there are a number of coffee-table books out there featuring photo-essays of such things.

Also, when I go on road trips I try to stay at old family-run motels like that just for fun. Ah, it's just part of the adventure, you know? Anyway, while I've never seen a 50's TV in a guest room at those places, I've encountered several where the furniture and fixtures seem to have gotten stuck in time somewhere in the 1950's or 60's. The old TV's always got changed out, but one room I stayed at once several years ago had the strangest late-50's-looking window air-conditioner I've ever seen. It was an RCA-Whirlpool, and you could tell RCA must have been trying to exert their influence on the product styling. It was (if I remember correctly) blue-grey in color, and the cabinet was styled like a small late-50's table radio-- if each dimension was magnified like 4 or 5 times over. The controls were on the top of the unit and hidden under a hinged panel; the fan and thermostat knobs looked like TV tuner knobs (and the thermostat at least had numbers that appeared like those on a TV tuner, though calibrated 1-10 instead of 2-13) and the controls were arranged in a way that looked reminicent of a TV control panel. I think it had pushbuttons for some functions though. Strangest thing... anyone here seen anything like this? I took a picture of it at the time; I'll have to root around and see if I can dig it up at some point.

One night I will always remember: once when we were kids we all packed in the station wagon and set out to Six Flags Great Adventure in NJ. The adults had it all planned out-having driven all the way up, after leaving we would drive down to Cape May and take the ferry across to Delaware and home from there. The plan worked fine until they got to Cape May and realized the last ferry of the night was long gone. Nobody had checked the schedule. All the motels out on the highway were flashing no vacancy signs. Meanwhile, 4 adults and 4 kids are crammed in a 77 Buick Century Wagon, it is somewhere around 1 am and we are cruising the streets of Wildwood, NJ looking for someplace to stay. Dad & Mr. Tommy stop at this old place a few blocks from the beach and when they come back they are just laughing. They said, and I've never known for sure if they were serious or not, "the clerk said they didn't have enough girls for all of us!" Anyway, Dad also said that the TV set in the lobby looked like something I would have. I didn't even get to see it but I wanted that thing!

I should have had my camera with me Saturday. In the town I was in there is a small appliance store with a large GE sign advertising Major Appliances and Color TV.

I found this one on eBay a while back, I believe it was in L.A.

What a great photo! You mean somebody was selling the picture on eBay? I woulda bid!

If it's the same MEL'S TV. it's on Lincoln Blvd, on the west side of the street, near Ocean Park Bl. The phone number on the sign starts EXbrook, which would be correct for the Venice area. I remember that store, but by the 80s, the signage was different. Still said PACKARD-BELL though!

Charles