winds, so I went back to Prescott and
returned the next week to finish it.”
One favorite stop on the Mother Road
was Seligman, where the company still
services signs at the Route 66 Motel, the
Supai Motel, Black Cat Bar, and Copper
Images courtesy of A & B Sign Co. and Author
Bottom left: Hassayampa Inn, Prescott.
Bottom right: A & B Signs reinstalling the sign.
Top right: Hotel St. Michael sign.
to remove it, there was enough of a
community outcry that it was later
reinstalled by others as a Prescott
landmark.
The company’s service area includes
the Verde Valley, Sedona, and Route 66
from Holbrook to Kingman. In
Cottonwood, the company maintains The
View Motel sign, which is owned by the
niece of the late comedian Lucille Ball. The
company has created beautiful signs in
Sedona for the Matterhorn Motel and
Oaxaca Restaurant. Working there is a
challenge, however, because of the city’s
stringent sign restrictions.
In Flagstaff, they still do work at the
Motel Dubois and Monte Vista Hotel. “I
would go up with a 100-foot crane and
work alone on these signs,” Perry says. “I
also worked east of the city on the Two
Guns Shell sign that was illuminated with
12-volt car headlights, 15 lamps to the
circuit, and the red neon at Twin Arrows
before it became a casino.”
Route 66 was also the setting for one
of Perry’s wildest sign installations, at a
service station in Winslow. Heavy winds
forced him to wait until sunset to start. “I
went up on the crane and began using a
welding rod to attach the letters,” Perry
recalls. “But the winds picked up again, so
I used vice grips to help secure the sign and
went to bed around midnight. The next
morning, there were 70 mile-per-hour
Image courtesy of Arizona Contractor & Community
Apache Lodge. “That was the end of an era
of the big sign days, all done in the 1950s
and 1960s,” Perry recalls. “Neon was the
sign illumination of choice then.”
Many signs built or serviced by A & B
Signs, however, didn’t have such a bright
future. “Some really beautiful signs were
destroyed; no one understood their
significance or value,” Perry laments. “At
the Navajo Lodge, we maintained for
umpteen years the sign featuring a headdress of a Navajo Chief. Every stick of that
was neon in a different color. Now, onehalf of the sign is in an antique mall on
Cortez Street. Kuhles Salvage took it down
and cut it in half.”
Another impressive neon display was
at the Owl Buffet, a former bar in the 200
block of West Gurley. “I kept a beer sign
from it and sold it for two thousand
dollars,” Perry says. “The bar’s sign itself
was worth way more than that, as it was a
double-faced image of an owl in full color
neon. It was heartbreaking to rip it down
and throw it away.”
One partial preservation success was
the sign for the Senator Drive-In, an
outdoor movie theater that opened in
1950 along Senator Highway south of
Prescott. Although A & B Signs was hired
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