The morning Art Dempsey didn’t open the order book was a Tuesday in October of 1961. He had opened it every morning for 35 years, first thing before the linseed oil was uncapped, before the brushes were laid out in their row from thin to wide. The book sat on the left corner of the workbench, and the habit of opening it had gone so deep it wasn’t really a habit anymore.
It was just the shape of the morning. That Tuesday he walked past it. He stood in the middle of the workshop and looked at the brushes instead. The smell in there was tarpentine and old wood and something underneath both. A mineral sweetness that came from decades of paint soaking into the floorboards. You stopped noticing it after a while.
Art had stopped noticing it a long time ago. He went to the window that faced the main street. Across the road on the front of Harmon’s Hardware, there was a new sign. It had gone up the previous Friday. white background, clean black lettering, a thin red border, straight and even and exactly the same from any angle.
The kind of sign that looks like every other sign that company has made. Because it is. Hal Harmon had been Art’s customer since 1948. He’d replaced his sign twice in those 13 years. Both times Art painted it. Last month, Hal had called. He was sorry. He said the vinyl company was half the price in two days to deliver. Art said he understood.
He did understand. That was almost the worst part. By October, 11 of the 14 businesses on Kingman’s Main Street had switched to vinyl. Art still had the pharmacy, the feed store, and a rancher outside of town who needed gate markers every spring. That was the list now. He turned from the window and looked at the back wall.
The sign had been there since before the workbench before the shelving he’d put up in 1938. A piece of pine board roughly 2 feet wide painted cream and lettered in dark green. The paint had cracked along the top edge and the S in sun had a slight tremor in its tail that no one would have called a mistake. It just looked like a young man’s hand moving with something it wasn’t entirely sure about yet.
Dempsey and son established 1926. His father had wanted it above the door. Art painted it the summer he was 23. The summer his wife was seven months along with what turned out to be Frank. He’d written son before Frank was born. He’d painted it like a bet he wasn’t certain he was making. The sun was still there.
Frank was in Phoenix doing something in commercial construction and hadn’t been back to Kingman in 4 years. Art didn’t look at the sign for long. He never did anymore, but he hadn’t taken it down either. Some things you keep not because they comfort you, but because they’re true, and putting them away feels like a different kind of loss.
He uncapped the linseed oil and got to work. 3 mi outside Kingman, on a stretch of flat ground a production company had been using for 6 weeks. The morning started with an argument about signs. Not a loud argument, the kind where one person is explaining something reasonable with a clipboard and the other is listening with his hands in his pockets in the way that means he stopped listening a while back.
The man with the clipboard was the prop coordinator, a young fellow from Burbank named Ellis, who was good at logistics and had a habit of using the word camera ready in places where it wasn’t quite the right word. The man with his hands in his pockets was John Wayne. Ellis had propped 11 vinyl signs against the side of the equipment trailer.
They were freshlymade, period dressed in the way the industry had learned to do it. Careful fonts, aged looking backgrounds, fictional business names for a fictional street. From 10 ft away, they looked exactly like what they were supposed to look like. Wayne picked one up. He turned it over. He ran his thumb along the edge where the vinyl had a slight give that wood doesn’t have a softness no amount of distressing paint was going to fix.
He held it flat and looked down its surface at an angle. The way you check something when you want to see its texture rather than its face. He set it back against the trailer. These letters have never seen sun, he said. Ellis glanced at the signs. They’re camera ready. We tested them on film stock last week. They read perfectly.
I know they read. The audience isn’t going to I know what the audience notices. Wayne looked at him. I’m talking about something else. He put his hat on and walked to the truck. At the gas station on Third Street, he asked the attendant while the tank was filling whether there was anyone in Kingman who still painted signs by hand.
Art Dempsey, two blocks down, left on Mosquite. Though I don’t know how much work he’s getting these days. Wayne nodded and didn’t ask anything else. Before we go on, if you’re watching this and you haven’t subscribed yet, we’re still a small channel and just getting started. 5 seconds from your phone is all it takes, and it’s the only way to make sure the next story finds you.
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The door to Art’s workshop was open. The smell came out onto the sidewalk before Wayne reached it. He stopped in the doorway. Art was at the bench with his back turned, working a brush along a small board. When he looked up, he saw a large man in a plain work shirt and a battered hat standing in the doorframe, looking at the room.
Help you with something? Mind if I look around first? Art shrugged. That was the same as Yes. Wayne moved along the walls without hurrying. The finished pieces on the upper shelf, the works in progress below, the color samples going back decades, layers of paint over paint like a record of everything the room had been through. The brushes, the oldest ones with handles wrapped in cloth tape, the bristles worn to a specific shape by one man’s hand over 40 years.
Then he stopped at the back wall. He stood in front of the sign for a while. Long enough that Art noticed. What’s that one? Wayne said. First one I painted in this shop. When? 1926. Wayne looked at the lettering. He looked at the S in sun, the tremor in the tail of it. Whose shop was it then? My father’s. He died in 31.
I kept the name. And the son. Art was quiet for a moment. My boy Frank. He’s in Phoenix. Wayne moved to the workbench and looked at the board Art had been working on. Feed store lettering, clean and straightforward. He watched Art’s hand move. How long for a sign like that? Half a day for something simple. Detailed work? Two? 3 days.
and the vinyl company 500 a week, right? Wayne pulled the empty stool from the corner and sat on it. Art watched him do this and didn’t say anything, which was the thing Wayne had been checking for. A man who lets you sit without being asked is usually willing to talk. I’ve got 11 signs I need made.
For a picture, we’re shooting outside of town. Period work, 1880s storefronts. I’ve got a list. He took a folded paper from his shirt pocket and set it on the bench. Art looked at it then at Wayne. The prop department already ordered vinyl. They did. So you’d be going around them. I would.
Art unfolded the paper and read through it. He named a price for each sign the way a man names prices when he’s not performing anything. Steady, specific. The adjustments for complexity already calculated. Wayne listened to all of it. That’s fair. He said, “It’s more than the vinyl. I know what the vinyl costs.” Art set the paper down.
The prop department won’t like it. Wayne took out a small notepad, wrote something, tore the page out, and set it next to Art’s list. It said, “Put it on my fee. That’s for them.” Wayne said, “You make the signs.” What happened at the equipment trailer that afternoon was short.
Ellis went through it professionally. budget, timeline. The vinyl had already been signed off. Wayne let him finish. Those letters have never had sun on them. He said, “You can see it on camera. You can feel it wearing the costume. The audience might not know what they’re looking at, but they feel it. That feeling is the whole job.
” Ellis said, “John, from a practical standpoint, put it on my feet.” Wayne picked up one of the vinyl signs and set it aside. Art Dempsey on Mosquet Street. He has the list. That was the end of it. The 11 signs arrived at the set in three batches over two weeks. Pine boards lettered in ochre and cream and dark green.
Each one a little different from the next. The spacing on the E, a hair wider than the M beside it, the way it is when a hand makes a letter rather than a machine. The prop crew hung them on the false storefronts without much comment. The set photographer that week took an extra set of stills the day they went up.
She said later she’d done it because the street looked different with those signs. More like somewhere real than something built to look like somewhere real. She couldn’t put it better than that. After the production left Kingman, two other prop departments called Arts Workshop, one for a picture in New Mexico, one for a television series out of Tucson.
Both paid the standard rate. Art hired a part-time assistant in the spring of 1962, a young woman who wanted to learn the older methods. He taught her the way his father had taught him, standing beside her, letting her watch the hand move, not explaining everything at once. The feed store called in 1965, then the pharmacy.
Art didn’t chase the work that had left. He kept his prices where they were and did what came. The call from Frank came in the spring of 1968. Art was at the bench when the phone rang. He set the brush down. I saw your work, Frank said. On television, that western. I recognized the lettering. Art didn’t say anything for a moment.
How do you know it was mine? The way you make a capital D. The serif on the bottom. You’ve always done it the same way. Art looked at the sign on the back wall. The D in Dempsey. They talked for over an hour. It was the longest call they’d had since Frank’s mother died. Frank came to Kingman that Christmas.
He was in his early 50s and Art was 74 and neither of them was good at saying things directly. But they sat in the workshop for two full days. And Art showed him everything. The brush prep, the grid layout, the stroke order for a capital letter that needs to read from distance. Frank wasn’t learning a trade.
He was learning the language his father thought in. On the last morning, Frank stood in front of the sign on the wall. He put one finger against the tail of the S in sun where the paint had cracked the worst. You painted this before I was born, he said. I did. Were you sure I was going to be a son? Art thought about it.
No, he said, but I painted it that way. Frank came back the following summer and the one after that. Art Dempsey died in March of 1979. He was 86. Frank came down from Phoenix and didn’t leave. He kept the brushes. He kept the order book. He kept the color samples on the wall. He kept the sign. A few months later, he painted a new one for the door. Same dark green on cream.
Same letter forms his hand had washed for years. Dempsey and son established 1926. And below it, smaller in 1979. The workshop is still on Mosquet Street. Frank’s son runs it now. The sign above the door has been repainted twice. Same colors, same letters, the same small variation in spacing that comes from a hand rather than a machine.
The original is still on the back wall. The S and sun, the tremor, the cracked paint along the top edge. No one has touched it. The morning light comes through the east window and falls across it for about 20 minutes. The paint catches it the way old paint does. Not bright, not reflective, just present.
the color of something that has been looked at for a long time by people who understood what they were looking at. Then the light moves on. The workshop opens at 7. There is usually someone waiting. If you enjoyed spending this time here, leave a comment about something made by hand that you still remember.
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