By Karlyn Eckman
The year was 1946, and Don Eckman had returned home after World War II. He had served in New Guinea on PT boat 133, surviving battles at sea, malaria and tropical ulcers. He had married his high school sweetheart, Kate Bjornsson. A few years later they would have a newborn (me) with another (Marilyn) on the way. He enrolled at Dunwoody Technical Institute in Minneapolis under the GI bill, where he took sign-painting courses part-time for five years (1946-1951). He became an apprentice at Telke Signs in Minneapolis (owned by Dick Telke) in the winter of 1946-1947, where he worked for a few years before opening his own sign shop in 1951. At first he was Dick Telke's only employee, but later was joined by Bob Peck and Jim Weisen. In 1951 Don and Kate would buy a two-bedroom bungalow in northeast Minneapolis, where he opened a modest sign shop in the garage.
Most signpainters knew each other in those days. Signpainting was a blue-collar trade and unionization was mandatory, but also required years of practice to gain expertise. Theirs was the fragrant world of lard oil, turpentine, Lucky Strike cigarettes, Signpainters' One-Shot, sword-striper and Russian sable hair brushes, spangles, squeegees and India ink.
Signpainters were magicians: they could take a tiny image, scale it up immensely and reproduce it on the side of a huge building. Can you imagine a hand-lettered sign four stories in height? Consider the C & E Building at 2402 University Avenue West, where in the 1960s the 60-foot image "POW" (Piano and Organ Warehouse) was hand-lettered on the west side of the building. The POW sign was later replaced with Nelson's Office Supply, the defunct company whose towering hand-lettered sign still exists. Just imagine working on 60-foot wooden extension ladders (sometimes two signpainters working on the same ladder) in the wind and rain or snow, where they laid out twenty-foot high words with chalk and tape measures.
Those old-time signpainters did gold-leaf lettering, silk-screen printing, highly detailed calligraphy, NASA charts and graphs, painted theatre back-drops, cartooning, and even book illumination. They worked with a wide variety of methods, materials and chemicals, some hazardous and volatile. Most signpainters were also resourceful, creative and artistic. Many later became accomplished artists, as did my dad and Jim Weisen. Today signpainters have been largely replaced by computerized graphics, printing and advertising companies, and few "old school" signpainters still practice their craft. Signpainting and hand-lettering are indeed dying arts.
On with my story. So the years rolled by, and a third daughter arrived (Mary Jo). Don moved his small business, Eckman Signwriters, to a bigger shop at 18 ½ Avenue NE in Minneapolis, and hired other signpainters (Jim Stafford, Duane Deal and Byron Westberg) to help expand his business. His daughters were frequently recruited to help in the shop, especially during elections when he produced thousands of election signs, hand-pulled on silk screen frames. He taught us as children to precisely hand-letter with sable brushes and Speedball pens, produce paper signs for shop windows, set up silk screen runs, and lay gold leaf signs on window glass from incredibly thin and fragile sheets of 14K hammered gold. He was not only a signpainter, but a graphic designer and an accomplished artist who produced beautiful paintings and pastel drawings. Don Eckman died in 1975 at the age of 54. Dick Telke died in 1996.
Fast-forward to the fall of 2008. The Parkview Cafe has closed, and Hampden Park Coop is negotiating to expand and purchase the Oddfellows Hall. When the cafe closed the Parkview signs were removed, exposing old hand-lettered signs hidden for decades. The neighborhood discovered that the cafe was once Harms Drugstore, "Prescriptions Our Specialty." Such a quaint relic of the past! But somehow the lettering seemed oddly familiar, reminiscent of Dad's style. Could the signs have been lettered by my father? Not likely, I thought. The Harms signs looked much too old, maybe dating from the 1920s or 1930s, and after all, Dad's lettering was much more polished. For six months I wondered about it, but always dismissed the possibility.
On a beautiful spring day in mid-March 2009 I walked to the co-op to shop for dinner. The sun's angle was different this late winter day, very bright and golden, and shining directly on the Harms Pharmacy sign. Suddenly it was possible to see, on the bottom lower right, faint red lettering that said "Telke Signs." AHHA! So these signs had to be more recent if they were Telke's, and would have had to been done after World War II.
Could Dad have painted these signs? Could there still be any Telke family members around? I made contact with Dick Telke's youngest daughter Kathy, who was born after Dad left Telke Signs and couldn't confirm who painted the Harms signs. I then contacted Dad's old friend Jim Weisen, who had some important clues. Jim is in his mid-80s but remains a prolific artist in Spokane, teaching watercolor classes twice weekly. He recalled that for a time he and Dad worked together for Dick Telke during their student and apprentice days. Dick and Jim painted signs in the south metro; my dad covered the north metro and Midway area of Saint Paul. On Thursdays they would all "splash windows" together, meaning that they worked as a team, painting directly and rapidly on customer's storefront windows, usually advertising weekly specials. Jim said that he definitely didn't paint the Harms signs.
The not-so-polished hand lettering suggests that the three signs on the Oddfellows building were done by an inexperienced apprentice, not an older journeymen like Dick Telke or Bob Peck. Jim Weisen confirms that he did not paint them. The anecdotal evidence, and by process of elimination, suggest that my father painted them as an apprentice, still recovering from tropical ulcers and malaria, with a young family on the way. It would have been sometime between 1947 and 1951, before he opened his own shop. Most likely it would have been in 1947 during his Dunwoody apprenticeship.
So who cares about an old faded sign on a storefront? So what if my dad painted it? There must be a million post-war stories like this. Well, yes, it is pretty cool for his progeny that a fragment of our family history is uncovered, coincidentally three doors away from his daughter's house. This revelation unexpectedly weaves my own family history into the fabric of my adopted neighborhood. I've been a member and volunteer at the coop since 1987, and my dad's handiwork has suddenly re-appeared on the coop building after half a century. It is important because it recalls an old blue-collar artisanal trade that is already obsolete. It is important because it illustrates the resilience and optimism of young World War II veterans who survived depression-era childhoods and a foreign war, rolling up their sleeves and starting life anew. It is important because we all have a new glimpse into the history of our neighborhood.
Signs appear everywhere on our landscape, and our neighborhood has often rallied against big invasive billboards. Personally, I dislike them and consider them eyesores. Yet billboards were the bread and butter of those old signpainters like my dad, who hand-lettered much smaller versions of today's billboards. Those billboard jobs were important to Dad and helped him to support his young family. But times have changed. The sign industry is no longer a family business but rather the domain of huge advertising companies. It has evolved tremendously in the sixty years since my father lettered the Harms Pharmacy signs. Young men and women still go off to war, come home, and start families. Our neighborhood continues to exist, evolve and progress. The coop is expanding. Personally, it is delightful to discover a long-forgotten fragment of my dad's world on our corner, just above the mailbox, after more than half a century.
