Earlier this Spring I got a call from a longtime friend Steve Hartong from Paulina Iowa . Steve runs a very nice antique store in Paulina that has a nice selection of brewerania if you ’ re ever in the area . He proceeded to tell me about a fellow who contacted him concerning a 30 foot Hamm ’ s Beer neon that originally hung behind the bar at his father ’ s bar in Alta Iowa . He went on to explain that the sign read “ From the Land of Sky Blue Waters ” in light blue neon . He then explained that the words “ From ” and “ The ” were broken but the rest of the words were fine and the sign was complete with the wiring harness and transformer . He asked what I thought it would cost to repair those two words and thinking of a sign 30-foot-long , each word had to be 3 to 4-foot-long and subsequently cost about 150.00 to 200.00 to repair . He didn ’ t realize it was that expensive to repair neon but did say he was going to look at the next day never mentioning he was buying it for himself or for resale and if I would be interested in it . Kind of forgot about until a couple weeks later when a guy from Alta Iowa called and started asking me about the neon . I had repaired a Hamm ’ s sign for his friend in Cherokee Iowa recently and he had mentioned to him that I had a Hamm ’ s Beer collection . It didn ’ t take long for me to figure out we were talking about the same neon Steve and I had discussed earlier in the month . Asking if it was for sale and how much he ’ d like for it , he replied you tell me . I said I would certainly like to at least see it and made arrangements that following Saturday to go look at it . No sooner than I hung up the phone , I called Steve Hartong and made sure that he wasn ’ t trying to buy the same neon . He replied that he didn ’ t even go look at it after thinking he had nowhere to display it or any way to repair it . I also asked him if he had been given any indication of what the owner wanted for the neon . Steve had told him around the 200.00 mark would
be fair which I thought was a very good price . He told me to go for it . Again shortly after to hanging up the phone it rang again this time with the neon ’ s owner calling back to inform me that he had gone and measured the sign and not wanting to mislead me called to tell me it was only 15 feet long . Now that was a little more manageable because frankly even I was questioning my sanity going to look at a 30-foot neon . Then the phone rings again and my buddy Big Bird calls to see what we ’ re up to that coming weekend and after hearing the story he was all in to go with . Saturday morning dawned colder than hell with snow and wind to boot but we decided to go anyway against the better judgement of the women folk . It was a little tough and spots with the required whimpering from the back seat that we would surely die when we got stranded in Iowa . In an executive decision we decided to forge on and finally arrived in Alta a little behind schedule . After getting the color back into the girls faces , we proceeded into the neon owner ’ s basement where the neon lay in what Missy described as a pile of broken letters . I ’ ll admit it looked pretty rough and there was so much nicotine from the bar on the letters that it appeared the neon had been painted yellow . The transformer looked like something from a bad horror movie . The owner also had quite a selection of other beer and baseball items that he wanted to sell as a unit and his initial price was way too high for my liking . He wouldn ’ t just sell the neon separately and after some intense negotiations and threatening to walk back up the stairs without anything being purchased , we finally agreed on a price we both could live with . The trip home wasn ’ t quite as bad and with a van full of beer signs our confidence was restored . After cleaning the nicotine off the tubing , it came time to try and decide how to mount the neon . It had originally been mounted by itself on the back bar . I ’ m still trying to find a picture of the back bar . The owner says he should have one but so far no results . We discussed a chunk of old barn wood but wasn ’ t able to find a suitable piece large enough . After checking with Hiniker Saw Mill in Mankato we went with a slab of red cedar polished on one side with the rough cut bark left intact . The finished product turned out way better than envisioned and after the initial idea of mounting the neon in the basement behind my tap knobs my lovely wife suggested that it would look pretty cool in our four season porch . After carefully bringing it back up from the basement , Mr . Clean and I mounted the neon in the porch and to me the results are stunning . Stop in the next time you ’ re in the area and see for yourself . Steve aka THbear
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