"You Have a Cluttered Mess"

What would everyone do if there were no bright lights?

Would our nation be grand if signs weren't there to show the proper way to everyone in this land?

Well, that's a rather specialized view, but it's very clear in the reflective eyes of the $500 million-a-year electric-sign industry. Meeting last week in Miami, 2,000 members of the National Electric Sign Association listened almost misty-eyed as a blonde, busty "Miss Electric Sign of 1966" glowed out the lyrics of the song composed for the occasion.

NESA's people are a sentimental lot anyway: they are fond of saying that the most magnificent electric sign in the U.S.A. stands in New York harbor, holds a torch of 19 lamps that create 13,000 watts of illumination. They had no hand in the Statue of Liberty, but they have done pretty well themselves. One member firm created the giant 474-ft. baseball Scoreboard in Houston's Astrodome, whose animated display when the Houston Astros hit one of their rare homers includes steers with the U.S. and Texas flags waving from their horns. In New York an 80-ft. illuminated bottle will soon pour neon gin high above Times Square.

In Miami last week, some NESA members sounded slightly apologetic about such signs blinding America. "The clutter of our cities is real, and signs have something to do with that," said Jackson Brooks of Fort Collins, Colo., NESA's outgoing president. The organization put itself in principle behind the road-beauty bill signed last October by President Johnson and dubbed, because of Mrs. Johnson's neonolithic support of it, "the Lady Bird bill." So business is good. NESA members have already conducted campaigns in Ohio and Washington in which dilapidated old signs were torn down, clearing the way for new, more elaborate and more expensive signs.

Much of the garishness, NESA members insisted last week, is the fault of their customers. Said former President Thomas R. Watson of Evansville, Ind.: "Let one of America's best industrial designers design a gas station. It blends perfectly with the architecture of the community. It is landscaped, it has an electric sign identifying it and everybody is happy. What happens? Opening day, the station operator strings up a couple hundred paper pennants, soaps up his windows, puts up one sign that says, 'stamps,' others that say 'mechanic on duty,' 'rest rooms,' 'free advice,' 'road service,' 'flats fixed,' and you have a cluttered mess. Who gets blamed? The sign people and the designer."

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