Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

LEIF ENGER: Tony Brown was always attracted to neon, always wanted to make a living at it, but it was tough to get training. He couldn't afford the program nearest his home in Milwaukee. So for a while, he went from sign shop to sign shop looking for someone who would teach him to bend glass.

TONY BROWN: They were reluctant to let me experiment on their fires or try out a little bending. I bought some regular glass rods from a hobby shop and tried bending them over a stove.

LEIF ENGER: Didn't work so good?

TONY BROWN: No, it didn't work out too well.

LEIF ENGER: Today, Brown is one of 20 students in Sharon Thomas's neon class, an intense nine-month course at Northwest Technical College in Detroit Lakes. He's probably the only one here who is desperate enough to try bending glass in his kitchen, but the others understand his struggle for instruction. Most neon programs are both short and expensive, say two months for $4,000. They are also packed. Sharon Thomas says the neon revival that began in the late '70s is still at full gallop.

SHARON THOMAS: There are new shops cropping up everywhere all the time, and old shops that have been there for a while are getting busier and busier and adding to their departments. So the sky's the limit with the neon right now.

LEIF ENGER: For the past nine years, Northwest Tech has offered the most comprehensive neon course in the country, and the only one taught at a public institution. At times, the waiting list is two or three years' long. Thomas says prospective students are so patient for two reasons. First, the course is about half the price of many private programs. And second, it's several times as long. The skills you need in this field, Thomas says, can't be absorbed by cramming.

SHARON THOMAS: All of these individuals come to us, either right-handed or left-handed. We ask them to become ambidextrous and to build their hand and eye coordination to a point that you're not going to experience in hardly any other job. Basically, it's like retraining yourself how to think and use your hands and eyes together.

LEIF ENGER: Cindy Buck graduated from the program last year but comes back daily to bend glass and build her portfolio. There's a lot of Cindy's work hanging around the shop-- a luminous half moon; a smooth, red convertible; the word Corvair in rounded script. She says she has found her life's work-- a simple cylinder of glass, a blue flame, and her own drive for the perfect bend.

CINDY BUCK: You want even heating. If you don't get even heating, you're not going to have a good bend, and your glass will start to get real soft on you and roll around.

LEIF ENGER: Yeah, it's acting like rubber now.

CINDY BUCK: Yep, and let's see how it's shrinking.

LEIF ENGER: As the glass goes soft, Buck puckers her lips around a plastic hose, which leads to the open and still cool end of the tube.

CINDY BUCK: Bend and blow.

LEIF ENGER: So when you blow air into it, you're keeping it from collapsing on itself?

CINDY BUCK: Right, it just blowing it right back out to the diameter that you want it to be.

LEIF ENGER: You're the resident overachiever?

CINDY BUCK: Yeah, they call me the neon goddess, which I am hardly the neon goddess around here. But I enjoy doing it, so I don't mind spending the time I spend here, of course. I want to be good.

LEIF ENGER: The neon course at Northwest Technical has attracted such perfectionists from all over the US and Canada. And in recent years, it's made professionals of many of them. But will all these hot new benders still have jobs in a decade? Ever since that first sign appeared in Los Angeles, an ad for Packard automobiles, neon has gone through the ups and downs of any commercial art. It's popular now, but neon almost disappeared for a while in the 1950s when plastic signs hit the market.

John [? Tomovski ?] is associate publisher of Signs of the Times magazine, A 90-year-old trade journal that's covered the neon industry almost since there was a neon industry. He says, despite challenges to the field like fiber optic signs, which are already in limited use, neon remains efficient, durable, and appealingly nostalgic.

JOHN: Unlike most things, not too many viable current technologies haven't changed at all since the 1920s. The ability to spell out a product name in a flowing script and have it light and last for 20 years is pretty amazing. I don't think you'll ever replace neon.

LEIF ENGER: [? Tomovski ?] says neon is also more than most aspects of the sign industry a craft, even an art, and is, therefore, dependent on well-trained practitioners. The glass is not bent by machines but by human hands, obeying orders from the eye and mind and a certain tactile instinct. Northwest student Diane Erickson, who plans to open her own sign shop after graduation, believes neon will endure simply because it's the perfect medium for what it does.

DIANE ERICKSON: When I would drive down the street and I would see a business sign, I thought, well, OK, that looks nice, the color is nice, and so forth. But when you drive by and you see a neon sign, it's like, wow. It's like, hello, I'm here, come check me out.

LEIF ENGER: This year's neon class will graduate from Northwest Tech in May. A few spots, says instructor Sharon Thomas, are still open for next fall's class. Leif Enger, Mainstreet Radio.