{"id":9581,"date":"2014-03-26T15:59:59","date_gmt":"2014-03-26T19:59:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/?p=9581"},"modified":"2014-03-28T13:48:31","modified_gmt":"2014-03-28T17:48:31","slug":"sign-of-the-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/sign-of-the-times\/","title":{"rendered":"Sign Of The Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

April 2014 | view this story as a .pdf<\/a><\/p>\n

We may not know who put the salt in the ocean. But we\u2019ve found<\/em> the guy who put up the first Time & Temperature sign.<\/h3>\n

By Colin W. Sargent<\/p>\n

\"Sign-of-the-Times\"<\/a>“I was on the crew that put the first Time & Temperature sign\u201d on the roof of the Forest City skyline, says John Roberts, owner of Jayar Neon Signs of South Portland, who\u2019s lit up commercial Portland \u201csince 1955. The Time & Temperature was 1965 or 1966. It was incandescent, though I\u2019ve spent 57 years of my life working in neon. Before final assembly, it was 15 pieces, each five-by-seven feet. Each weighed 500 pounds.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anticipation across the city was high. \u201cThe steel workers were up on the roof of 477 Congress Street because they were adding two floors. We had to wait for them to finish, so the sign pieces sat in the yard down at Coyne Sign Co. all summer long.\u201d It seemed like forever. \u201cEveryone asked, when are we going to put it up?<\/p>\n

\u201cWe started taking it up on the roof on Armistice Day, November 11. I watched the Veteran\u2019s Day Parade from up on the roof. We worked on the giant sign all through the winter, until May, putting it up. The wind was always blowing from Mount Washington all across Back Bay. Sometimes it was icy cold, whipping into our faces, almost unbearable. There were three of us on the crew, sometimes four. We mounted a crane on the roof and left it there so we could put fresh light bulbs in when we needed to. We\u2019d go up in a bosun\u2019s chair and be pulled up to change them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Imagine the vertigo. Changing bulbs while swaying dizzily over the shimmering downtown, \u201cWe used to hang over the street,\u201d with Porteous and the traffic swirling below. \u201cFifteen stories over the street in a bosun\u2019s chair.\u201d<\/p>\n

Roberts is still creating a buzz: \u201cI did the Great Lost Bear sign. Bull Moose. Gilbert\u2019s Chowder House. Bayside Bowl.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

April 2014
\nWe may not know who put the salt in the ocean. But we\u2019ve found<\/em> the guy who put up the first Time & Temperature sign.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9585,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[81],"class_list":["post-9581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","tag-april-2014"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9581"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9584,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9581\/revisions\/9584"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}