the great neon signs of las vegas
A Neon Come-Hither, Still Able to Flirt
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN for the nyt
Published: January 13, 2005
LAS VEGAS
THROUGHOUT Las Vegas's evanescent history many have been able lay claim to fabulousness. Elvis was fabulous. Liberace was fabulous. Frankie, Dino and Sammy Davis Jr. . . . of course fabulous.
But the birth mother of fabulous, the creator of the seminal shrine to fabulousness, is an unsung 81-year-old headliner named Betty Willis, whose 1959 "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas Nevada" sign — a luminous diamond stretched like Silly Putty, each letter of "Welcome" encircled by silver dollars — brought twinkling destiny to Las Vegas: love at first sight in neon.
"We thought the town was fabulous, so we added the word," Mrs. Willis recalled recently, sitting in a blue velveteen rocker in her living room, a Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas bull figurine on the fireplace mantel. "Everything you could flash or spin, we did it."
In a city that has honored its history by blowing it up (may the Dunes, the Sands and the Aladdin rest in peace) Mrs. Willis's beacon to motorists beside the old highway from Los Angeles has defied the odds. A Las Vegas native, she fell in love with neon on girlhood trips to California, peering out of the family Studebaker at the theater marquees of downtown Los Angeles. What is now the Las Vegas Strip was then an empty highway into nothingness crisscrossed by dirt roads.
Her career spanned the glory days of neon, the Vegas night a gigantic tumbler carbonated with light. One of the city's first commercial artists, she started in the 1940's, designing newspaper ads for Vegas shows, perfecting showgirls kicking across the page. In the early 1950's she began designing neon motel signs. One was for the Blue Angel, its flittering neon bluebirds peeling back a bedroom curtain, a revolving angel pointing her wand at the motel. "I got criticized for depicting a super-well-endowed angel," she recalled of her aptitude for the Vegas nude. "I said, `Well show me an angel, and I'll draw her.' "
This year the silhouette of her fabulous sign, erected in 1959 and sold to the county for $4,000 to lure tourists, is the logo for the city's centennial, a yearlong klieg-lighted blitzkrieg that will include the marriage of 100 couples simultaneously and the world's largest birthday cake, preregistered with Guinness World Records.
While the 15-foot-tall Silver Slipper and other choice pieces of vintage neon lie in "the boneyard" — a sort of cemetery run by the city's Neon Museum, opened in 1996 to save vanishing signs — Mrs. Willis's own piece of roadside Americana is assuming a life of its own. She never copyrighted the design because she felt the town needed free publicity, and in recent years the sign has lent its jaunty retro image to snow globes, boxer shorts, potato chips, shot glasses, pork cracklings, centennial chocolates, T-shirt giveaways by Southwest Airlines for "fabulous Rapid Reward Visa cards" and limited-edition commemorative Nevada license plates, surpassing fur dice in the iconographic pantheon.
In fact the quintessential Las Vegas landmark is Mrs. Willis's happy median: the somewhat foreboding chunk of concrete amid bruising traffic south of the Strip where jaywalkers risk life for a photo-op.
Politicians have jumped on the juggernaut: Las Vegas's mayor, Oscar B. Goodman, who has long spoken of his desire to annex unincorporated parts of surrounding Clark County, where the sign officially lies, had a replica made several years ago that spells out "Welcome to Fabulous Downtown Las Vegas."
"It's transference," he said psychoanalytically. "Visitors see the sign with the twinkle in it and know they've got a license to enjoy themselves."
The placement of Mrs. Willis's sign on the fringes has perhaps protected it from the boneyard. "It's a powerful combination of symbolism, kitsch and mythology," said Hal Rothman, a history professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas and the author of "Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the 21st Century" (Routledge, 2002). "It embodies the casual hipness of Las Vegas, nostalgia for the Rat Pack minus Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop."
The sign, at once innocent and sultry with its seven silver dollars and two-tone flickering eight-point star, inspires deep affection locally; plans to "beautify" the median in the 1970's and remove the sign inspired a populist uprising led by a local disc jockey. "It's a call to arms for our city because `fabulous' is what we do best," said Richard Hooker, the city's senior cultural specialist. "Classic neon artists like Betty are the design heroes of the city, giving the place an image in the public mind. Their signs are like music to the eyes."
Mrs. Willis, who imitates the motion of the classic Sassy Sally casino sign by flirtatiously jiggling her knee, grew up before neon, when the desert sky was lighted only by stars. Her parents moved to southern Nevada in 1905 in a horse and buggy, down two-rut roads. Her father, Stephen R. Whitehead, built the first two-story house in Las Vegas and was Clark County's first assessor, exhibiting a gene for figures that his daughter, one of eight children, inherited.
In 1942 she went to art school in Los Angeles, then got her start drawing ads for Fox West Coast Theaters. Returning home, she took a job at the courthouse dispensing appropriate attire to revealingly dressed divorcées-to-be. "At least four or five times in my life people said, `You better get a good job at the courthouse because Las Vegas is about to go bust,' " she said.
Even then Mrs. Willis, whose expletives are not of the "Gee, whillikers!" variety, found she liked working in the world of men. "I didn't like working with a bunch of girls," she said in an exasperated twang, her eyes resembling a rattlesnake eyeing a prairie dog. "They're inclined to talk."
She got a day job as a legal secretary and moonlighted as a commercial artist, drawing 3-by-12-inch newspaper ads with the stars and lines of dancing girls. At a coffee shop she ran into a former ad manager who was working for the Young Electric Sign Company, now Yesco, which hired sign artists from the movie industry to create much of the city's classic neon, including the Golden Nugget sign, a gold rush of flowing neon that wrapped around the corner of Second and Fremont Streets.
In 1952 she moved to Western Neon, a small local outfit, where a salesman, Ted Rogich, the father of Sig Rogich, the Republican fund-raiser and media consultant, got the idea to propose a welcome sign for the highway from Los Angeles.
"In those days," she said, "salesmen would stand out in the street with the cars and a camera, because you designed a sign around the hole under and over the other signs. Ted was a heck of a salesman. We knew the sign would be recognizable because of the odd shape. We wanted people to remember the town and come back. The circles were expensive. So we put in a lot of them."
Mr. Rogich, 81, said he sold the sign to the county, though the highway to Los Angeles technically belonged to the state. He said an influential county commissioner, Harley E. Harmon, who "had a lot of juice in those days," declared, "To hell with the state: put it up.' " (Today the sign is owned by Yesco and is leased to the county.)
Mrs. Willis spent much of her career at Ad Art, creator of the fabled Stardust sign, where she worked on cost estimates with engineers as well as on designs. Hotel signs, called "spectaculars," evolved from watercolor and pencil renderings, drawn with the tip of a pencil that she said was "sawed off and dipped in white ink, because the raised dots were the right size for bulbs."
Many, including Mrs. Willis, consider the original Stardust sign — its constellation of neon stars suspended in air, but now residing in the boneyard — the crown jewel in "the architecture of light," as the Strip has been called. "That sign was the result of an all-night bull session in which one of the first drawings was retrieved from the wastebasket," she said.
The moody intensity of neon generated its own heat, literally and figuratively. "You'd drive down the street, even on a cold night, and it was 80 degrees," said Charles Barnard, designer of classic signs for places like the Frontier and the Thunderbird. "You could hear the mechanical flashing devices clicking away, the lights going crazy."
Like many artists Mrs. Willis is a perfectionist. She remains dissatisfied, for example, with the hand-drawn lettering of the word "fabulous," which she considers amateurish. "I sweat blood when I take a good hard look at it," she said.
She retired at 77 and now works part time for a silk-screen business run by her daughter, Marjorie Holland. They live together, along with Mrs. Willis's grandchildren, Erin, 23, and Jimmy, 13, in a beige stucco ranch house practically engulfed by new subdivisions, the displaced scorpions guarding her artwork in an adjoining shed. Mrs. Willis has been divorced twice, and she raised her daughter, a former crime scene investigator who is now 52, solo.
Mrs. Willis enjoyed men as colleagues; husbands were a different matter entirely. "Jerks!" she exclaimed. "The first one drank too much. But he was cute."
She now lives on Social Security. "I made more money than the average girl," she said, though the men made more. "I never cared," she said. "I loved the sign business." Still she is frustrated and a bit miffed by the souvenir machine that the sign, whose image is in the public domain but is monitored for appropriate use by Yesco, has become. "I should make a buck out of it," she said. "Everybody else is."
Its mystique underscores not just the marketing of Las Vegas but also the growing appreciation of neon in a place that until recently worshiped at the temple of change. (The shelf life for signs is typically a dozen years.) The Neon Museum's flagship sign, the 40-foot-high Hacienda Horse and Rider, now stands restored in the middle of Las Vegas Boulevard, one of 11 classic fallen landmarks that the museum has resurrected so far. And the city has recently nominated a two-and-a-half-mile stretch of its downtown section, known as Glitter Gulch, to be a national scenic byway, joining the Strip, already a federal byway for its "nighttime scenic beauty." Last summer the city council unanimously voted for a "sign overlay" that, should Glitter Gulch be designated a byway, would require all new signs in the district to be 75 percent neon.
Beyond dancing fountains and their ilk the Strip today is subsumed by huge dueling JumboTron-style message boards flashing a cacophony of images: Rolls and Appetizers, Alanis Morrisette, Hand-Held Double Black Jack, The Ultimate Burger.
To spend a while in the median beside Mrs. Willis's sign, which draws hundreds of pilgrims dreaming of fabulousness every day, their hazard lights blinking, is to know that it will outlive them all.
"I think it proves the old adage of the power of repetitive advertising, like the Old Dutch Cleanser girl," she said. "When a logo is successful, people remember it. It's a pretty good job that sign has done."
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- bill 1-14-2005 12:53 am
A Neon Come-Hither, Still Able to Flirt
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN for the nyt
Published: January 13, 2005
LAS VEGAS
THROUGHOUT Las Vegas's evanescent history many have been able lay claim to fabulousness. Elvis was fabulous. Liberace was fabulous. Frankie, Dino and Sammy Davis Jr. . . . of course fabulous.
But the birth mother of fabulous, the creator of the seminal shrine to fabulousness, is an unsung 81-year-old headliner named Betty Willis, whose 1959 "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas Nevada" sign — a luminous diamond stretched like Silly Putty, each letter of "Welcome" encircled by silver dollars — brought twinkling destiny to Las Vegas: love at first sight in neon.
"We thought the town was fabulous, so we added the word," Mrs. Willis recalled recently, sitting in a blue velveteen rocker in her living room, a Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas bull figurine on the fireplace mantel. "Everything you could flash or spin, we did it."
In a city that has honored its history by blowing it up (may the Dunes, the Sands and the Aladdin rest in peace) Mrs. Willis's beacon to motorists beside the old highway from Los Angeles has defied the odds. A Las Vegas native, she fell in love with neon on girlhood trips to California, peering out of the family Studebaker at the theater marquees of downtown Los Angeles. What is now the Las Vegas Strip was then an empty highway into nothingness crisscrossed by dirt roads.
Her career spanned the glory days of neon, the Vegas night a gigantic tumbler carbonated with light. One of the city's first commercial artists, she started in the 1940's, designing newspaper ads for Vegas shows, perfecting showgirls kicking across the page. In the early 1950's she began designing neon motel signs. One was for the Blue Angel, its flittering neon bluebirds peeling back a bedroom curtain, a revolving angel pointing her wand at the motel. "I got criticized for depicting a super-well-endowed angel," she recalled of her aptitude for the Vegas nude. "I said, `Well show me an angel, and I'll draw her.' "
This year the silhouette of her fabulous sign, erected in 1959 and sold to the county for $4,000 to lure tourists, is the logo for the city's centennial, a yearlong klieg-lighted blitzkrieg that will include the marriage of 100 couples simultaneously and the world's largest birthday cake, preregistered with Guinness World Records.
While the 15-foot-tall Silver Slipper and other choice pieces of vintage neon lie in "the boneyard" — a sort of cemetery run by the city's Neon Museum, opened in 1996 to save vanishing signs — Mrs. Willis's own piece of roadside Americana is assuming a life of its own. She never copyrighted the design because she felt the town needed free publicity, and in recent years the sign has lent its jaunty retro image to snow globes, boxer shorts, potato chips, shot glasses, pork cracklings, centennial chocolates, T-shirt giveaways by Southwest Airlines for "fabulous Rapid Reward Visa cards" and limited-edition commemorative Nevada license plates, surpassing fur dice in the iconographic pantheon.
In fact the quintessential Las Vegas landmark is Mrs. Willis's happy median: the somewhat foreboding chunk of concrete amid bruising traffic south of the Strip where jaywalkers risk life for a photo-op.
Politicians have jumped on the juggernaut: Las Vegas's mayor, Oscar B. Goodman, who has long spoken of his desire to annex unincorporated parts of surrounding Clark County, where the sign officially lies, had a replica made several years ago that spells out "Welcome to Fabulous Downtown Las Vegas."
"It's transference," he said psychoanalytically. "Visitors see the sign with the twinkle in it and know they've got a license to enjoy themselves."
The placement of Mrs. Willis's sign on the fringes has perhaps protected it from the boneyard. "It's a powerful combination of symbolism, kitsch and mythology," said Hal Rothman, a history professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas and the author of "Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the 21st Century" (Routledge, 2002). "It embodies the casual hipness of Las Vegas, nostalgia for the Rat Pack minus Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop."
The sign, at once innocent and sultry with its seven silver dollars and two-tone flickering eight-point star, inspires deep affection locally; plans to "beautify" the median in the 1970's and remove the sign inspired a populist uprising led by a local disc jockey. "It's a call to arms for our city because `fabulous' is what we do best," said Richard Hooker, the city's senior cultural specialist. "Classic neon artists like Betty are the design heroes of the city, giving the place an image in the public mind. Their signs are like music to the eyes."
Mrs. Willis, who imitates the motion of the classic Sassy Sally casino sign by flirtatiously jiggling her knee, grew up before neon, when the desert sky was lighted only by stars. Her parents moved to southern Nevada in 1905 in a horse and buggy, down two-rut roads. Her father, Stephen R. Whitehead, built the first two-story house in Las Vegas and was Clark County's first assessor, exhibiting a gene for figures that his daughter, one of eight children, inherited.
In 1942 she went to art school in Los Angeles, then got her start drawing ads for Fox West Coast Theaters. Returning home, she took a job at the courthouse dispensing appropriate attire to revealingly dressed divorcées-to-be. "At least four or five times in my life people said, `You better get a good job at the courthouse because Las Vegas is about to go bust,' " she said.
Even then Mrs. Willis, whose expletives are not of the "Gee, whillikers!" variety, found she liked working in the world of men. "I didn't like working with a bunch of girls," she said in an exasperated twang, her eyes resembling a rattlesnake eyeing a prairie dog. "They're inclined to talk."
She got a day job as a legal secretary and moonlighted as a commercial artist, drawing 3-by-12-inch newspaper ads with the stars and lines of dancing girls. At a coffee shop she ran into a former ad manager who was working for the Young Electric Sign Company, now Yesco, which hired sign artists from the movie industry to create much of the city's classic neon, including the Golden Nugget sign, a gold rush of flowing neon that wrapped around the corner of Second and Fremont Streets.
In 1952 she moved to Western Neon, a small local outfit, where a salesman, Ted Rogich, the father of Sig Rogich, the Republican fund-raiser and media consultant, got the idea to propose a welcome sign for the highway from Los Angeles.
"In those days," she said, "salesmen would stand out in the street with the cars and a camera, because you designed a sign around the hole under and over the other signs. Ted was a heck of a salesman. We knew the sign would be recognizable because of the odd shape. We wanted people to remember the town and come back. The circles were expensive. So we put in a lot of them."
Mr. Rogich, 81, said he sold the sign to the county, though the highway to Los Angeles technically belonged to the state. He said an influential county commissioner, Harley E. Harmon, who "had a lot of juice in those days," declared, "To hell with the state: put it up.' " (Today the sign is owned by Yesco and is leased to the county.)
Mrs. Willis spent much of her career at Ad Art, creator of the fabled Stardust sign, where she worked on cost estimates with engineers as well as on designs. Hotel signs, called "spectaculars," evolved from watercolor and pencil renderings, drawn with the tip of a pencil that she said was "sawed off and dipped in white ink, because the raised dots were the right size for bulbs."
Many, including Mrs. Willis, consider the original Stardust sign — its constellation of neon stars suspended in air, but now residing in the boneyard — the crown jewel in "the architecture of light," as the Strip has been called. "That sign was the result of an all-night bull session in which one of the first drawings was retrieved from the wastebasket," she said.
The moody intensity of neon generated its own heat, literally and figuratively. "You'd drive down the street, even on a cold night, and it was 80 degrees," said Charles Barnard, designer of classic signs for places like the Frontier and the Thunderbird. "You could hear the mechanical flashing devices clicking away, the lights going crazy."
Like many artists Mrs. Willis is a perfectionist. She remains dissatisfied, for example, with the hand-drawn lettering of the word "fabulous," which she considers amateurish. "I sweat blood when I take a good hard look at it," she said.
She retired at 77 and now works part time for a silk-screen business run by her daughter, Marjorie Holland. They live together, along with Mrs. Willis's grandchildren, Erin, 23, and Jimmy, 13, in a beige stucco ranch house practically engulfed by new subdivisions, the displaced scorpions guarding her artwork in an adjoining shed. Mrs. Willis has been divorced twice, and she raised her daughter, a former crime scene investigator who is now 52, solo.
Mrs. Willis enjoyed men as colleagues; husbands were a different matter entirely. "Jerks!" she exclaimed. "The first one drank too much. But he was cute."
She now lives on Social Security. "I made more money than the average girl," she said, though the men made more. "I never cared," she said. "I loved the sign business." Still she is frustrated and a bit miffed by the souvenir machine that the sign, whose image is in the public domain but is monitored for appropriate use by Yesco, has become. "I should make a buck out of it," she said. "Everybody else is."
Its mystique underscores not just the marketing of Las Vegas but also the growing appreciation of neon in a place that until recently worshiped at the temple of change. (The shelf life for signs is typically a dozen years.) The Neon Museum's flagship sign, the 40-foot-high Hacienda Horse and Rider, now stands restored in the middle of Las Vegas Boulevard, one of 11 classic fallen landmarks that the museum has resurrected so far. And the city has recently nominated a two-and-a-half-mile stretch of its downtown section, known as Glitter Gulch, to be a national scenic byway, joining the Strip, already a federal byway for its "nighttime scenic beauty." Last summer the city council unanimously voted for a "sign overlay" that, should Glitter Gulch be designated a byway, would require all new signs in the district to be 75 percent neon.
Beyond dancing fountains and their ilk the Strip today is subsumed by huge dueling JumboTron-style message boards flashing a cacophony of images: Rolls and Appetizers, Alanis Morrisette, Hand-Held Double Black Jack, The Ultimate Burger.
To spend a while in the median beside Mrs. Willis's sign, which draws hundreds of pilgrims dreaming of fabulousness every day, their hazard lights blinking, is to know that it will outlive them all.
"I think it proves the old adage of the power of repetitive advertising, like the Old Dutch Cleanser girl," she said. "When a logo is successful, people remember it. It's a pretty good job that sign has done."
- bill 1-14-2005 12:57 am [add a comment]