Really neat motel sign in the desert!

[dtuomi]

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

[kx250rider]

Originally Posted by dtuomi

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

[dtuomi]

Originally Posted by Kaye-Halbert TV

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

[Pete Deksnis]

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.

[Whirled One]

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.