Mark Westphal

Neon is something everyone sees everyday in just about every place but doesn't really notice, much less consider. The earliest neon i remember seeing was the Markle Steel Company sign in Houston Texas in the early 1960s. I was about six years old. It was two stories tall and showed a construction worker sitting on a steel beam giving a thumbs up to hoist. Multicolored, large, and animated so that his thumbs-up arm moved up and down in a constant, progressive affirmative. i looked forward to seeing it from the freeway every week when we drove across town to my grandmother's house.

When i was nineteen i had no idea whatsoever what i wanted to do for the rest of my life. Nothing interested me to the point of passion, and work seemed like something to be done but dreaded daily. One afternoon early that summer i sat on a curb looking at the art deco River Oaks Theater, which was being restored. I moped in a teenage way about how directionless my life is, was, and forever would be. This went on in a darkly pleasant way for some time, as the sun sank decidedly in the west. Just as I was about to get up and walk moodily home the light sensor on the theater tripped and the entire building started dancing with neon lights of all colors. That was it. Saul on the road to Damascus. The sound of one hand clapping. The shouted answer to the riddle of the Sphinx: Neon.

Long story short, I spent the next six years moving all over the United States trying to find some old fart (like i am now) to teach me how to bend neon. Houston. Boston. New Orleans. Kansas City. I waited tables at night and haunted sign shops on my days off, trying to get people to show me how to do something, anything to do with neon. Let's just say they didn't feel the golden inspiration of my dream. After a year in each place, instead of a vacation, I would pack whatever car I happened to have full of stuff and move to a different city, and finally i moved to Atlanta.

I had been in Atlanta about a year, and it was about time to start looking for a new city. but now i was twenty four, and starting to feel that it just wasn't going to happen no matter where i moved. Same old farts, same impatient rejections. At this moment a girl from upstairs knocked on my door so that she could whine about the latest guy she was seeing. Numbly i sat there while she went on and on about the pros and cons of this guy that she was thinking of breaking up with. Somewhere in the middle of all that she dropped that he had a small neon sign shop. Instantly she was electrifyingly fascinating, her conversation and her dating dilema completely absorbing. I made her the deal that if she could get me into the shop for a job interview, and I could get the job, I could scope the guy out and help her with the breakup when it occurred. She disappears from my memory after that day. Bless you marlene wherever you are.

I did get the job. The shop was a hole in the wall that flooded every time it sprinkled. It had a phone, but no listing anywhere. It sat rustily behind a pizza parlour which took neon in trade for the rent. I worked for free during the day, waited those now hateful tables at night, and i was in heaven's highest circle. I guess because i wanted it so bad, and had gone to such distances for it, I caught on to bending very quickly and within six months was the tubebender for the shop. I quit being a really lousy waiter at long long last, and have tipped generously ever since.

Since this has already taken up so much of the reader's time, I will spare you the tedious course of my career and take you from that small blessed soggy shop where I learned my craft to twenty years later where i was the head of the glass department at Maltese Signs, then the largest sign company in the southeast. I learned about big time signage. I learned about thrift and how to make the most out of materials, and mostly i learned to ask alot of sometimes irritating questions about details so that something was done right the very first time, on time, and installed when promised. I was blessed by getting to meet and hire two other tubebenders who were at least as good as myself and probably better to work with for those last six years there. I got to work with and get to know other craftsmen, guys who did wonderful amazing things with metals, and plastics, and had skills that I never considered before but now saw daily creating seemingly impossible things. I was part of something very close, and very skilled, and disciplined. Then the Canadians came and bought it. One shudders when recalling what deliberate ignorance and poor management does to something once healthy and growing.

So my good friend Scott Pressman and I opened S&M Signs and Neon in December of 2006. I get to take all the experience and knowledge I have managed to glean from all these years, not to mention the contacts in everything from woodworking, to skyscraper sign installation, and put them out for the benefit of my customers. In my spare time i get to make my own personal neon things, and i consider myself a very very lucky and blessed man for the entire journey. Polite applause, slow curtain...

The End.