Charles Phoenix has a huge collection of old photography slides, and he goes around the country giving narrated slide shows to large audiences. His next show is at the John Anson Ford Theater across from the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles on June 16. (For ticket information go to www.fordamphitheater.org)
He also has a "slide of the week" mailing list. Sign up here. Here's the latest:
A friend and I were to be driving by the Sears Service Center in San Gabriel and a sign company had just finished removing the big, beautiful 50s era neon Sears sign off the front of the building. It was one of the last remaining examples of the old Sears signs “handwritten” in that classic script. We stopped and asked the sign man if we could have it. He said that he couldn’t let us have the sign but we could have all of the neon. He hadn’t broken one tube while taking the sign down. So we carefully put all the neon in the car and kept begging for enormous porcelain letters. I thought no was his final answer… but there was hope! He said that he was going to take the sign to the dump in Santa Ana and we could be there when he took unloaded it and we could then take it – deal.
We arrive at the dump and sure enough there he is, unloading the sign. We pull up right next to him in our borrowed pick-up and start loading up the letters. The letters were huge. The “S” was a taller than me. Just as we got it loaded on the truck a dump worker yells “hey, you can’t take that. This place is only for dumping, not for taking and you can’t take that sign.” Well, I begged for at least forty-five minutes until I realized that my pleading just wasn’t going to get us that sign. So I had to do what I didn’t want to do, cry. The first tear did the trick and five minutes later we were leaving the Santa Ana Dump with the Sign.
