Here’s your sign February 16, 2010

Posted by Ron Warnick in Art, Businesses, History, Music, People, Signs.
11 comments

A few months ago, we tracked down who had painted hundreds, perhaps thousands of distinctive signs along the Route 66 corridor from the western Texas Panhandle to eastern New Mexico. It was Rudolph Gonzales, who has crafted his work along the Mother Road since the mid-1950s and is one of the last to do so by hand in the computer age.

Last weekend, Emily and I met Gonzales for the first time. Part of the reason for our visit was to see what he and his one-man shop, Signs by Rudy in Tucumcari, N.M., were like. But we also were there on business.

Gonzales’ business sits in the northeast edge of Tucumcari, on an old dead-end alignment of U.S. 54. A sign on one side of his building bears his lettering style.

Inside, after being greeted by the affable Gonzales, you seen a number of mock-ups and drawings for his clients.

One of those clients is the classic Palomino Motel in town, which is getting a new advertising sign.

Also scattered about Gonzales’ shop are a few of his paintings. He says he’s “too much of a perfectionist” to think they are worthy of sale. One of paintings he displayed he’s been dabbling with since 2003, trying to get the sunset colors just right.

Gonzales also mentioned that he makes violins on the side. Here, he shows a violin that’s all but finished except for the varnish.

I asked him whether he played the instrument. He replied, “A little,” and proceeded to do this …

If you don’t know the melody, it’s “Faded Love” by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. It is the official country-and-western song of Oklahoma, and has pretty much become an American standard.

A young Bob Wills met Gonzales’ father many years ago at his barbershop in Roy, N.M. Wills heard that the elder Gonzales was a good fiddler, and encouraged him to join a band. Gonzales said his father nearly kicked the persistent Wills out of the shop because “he didn’t think a gringo could play” — that is, until Wills started sawing with that bow. Wills spent the early days of his music career playing around New Mexico, and learned how to play in front of varying audiences.

Gonzales also showed a few photographs of what he considered his best work, including this Dairy Queen billboard.

There also were old photos of sign-painting colleagues and of himself, including this image from the 1970s.

Gonzales sat down at his bench and showed his lettering technique, using a mahl stick to steady and guide his hand.

He said being left-handed gives him a distinctive style and helps him make letters quickly, especially italics.

Gonzales said it took him less than a year to master lettering when he started in the sign business at age 20. But he said it took him many more years to become adept at composition, with the spacing between the letters and words. He said that’s where many sign companies, despite their high-tech computers, fail their clients because they’ve never mastered composition.

Back to business. Emily commissioned this decorative sign from Signs by Rudy for Route 66 News:

Despite being one of the last of the hand-lettered signmakers, Gonzales acknowledged he’ll probably learn to use a computer soon. That’s because he wants to write a book about the history of the sign business as he experienced it, and he admits such a book will have to be laid out on a computer.

And Gonzales inferred that he might as well learn something new with a computer. “I figure I’ll be around 10 to 20 more years to cause trouble,” he grinned.