On the side: Signing off

 Sign. 

Sign. 

Everywhere a sign.

Well, not quite.

The Red Oak Express sign’s days are numbered.

No, we aren’t a Taurus.

I’m talking about the vertical sign in our front yard. You know – it’s the one with the E-X-P-R-E-S-S letters going top to bottom and the little “Red Oak” capping it. Apparently it once was lighted at night, but that practice ceased when the Express ran out of employees who weren’t afraid of heights.

Anyway, the city of Red Oak determined about five years ago that the flora, fauna, buildings and sights of the community shouldn’t be destroyed by ruinous, oversized, gaudy, patchwork displays of commercialism, and that signs along Broadway, Commerce or Senate should be no more than 8 feet in height. 

Finally, we short people won’t hurt our necks looking up.

Well, the clock began ticking and by May 24, the old give-me-an-E, give-me-an-X sign is to become an ex-sign. Exiled to oblivion, it is to be replaced by something more modest – something that conforms to the mores established by the city fathers, and I would imagine city mothers, too. 

This duty falls to me.

Our neighbor to the south, Dollar General, dealt with this matter when it put up its new store. There it sits in the yard, a simple, elegant sign featuring the company’s unmistakable logo and yellow glow. Up and down Broadway, I see businesses that already addressed the matter with ground-level signs that heel-click with code of ordinances. Elsewhere along 48, I see signs likely to be 86’d, their owners in the same state of soon-to-be non-compliance as the Express. 

I hate sign ordinances.

When you can dig up a sign in a hoity-toity suburb of Any City USA and transplant it in one of our smaller Iowa towns, the message is we need to be like them. I have an Expression I’d like to use in response to that, but I’ll exhale heavily instead.

Small town Iowa can have nice things. We can have a nice town. And we can have a nice town with big blinking signs, small rotating signs, flashing neon signs and the like, all pointing to our businesses with a flair that passersby can’t miss. It’s the job of a sign to be a tree, not part of the forest. 

“It’s a Wonderful Life” is a Christmas eve tradition in my home. I’ve seen it so many times I look for wings when someone comes through our front door. Back to the point, I much prefer the signage in Pottersville to Bedford Falls. I mean, Pottersville looked like it had somethin’ goin’ on. I believe Bedford Falls was renamed Stepford in the 1970s.

So, here at the Express, we are going to put on our thinking caps and try to develop a plan that meets the rules and regulations, so we can submit our money to get our permit approved, so we can hire a sign guy, so we can have a sign, and so we become assimilated, compliant business citizens. We’ll try hard to keep it dignified. We’ll try to ensure it’s creative and tasteful.  And, we’ll try to make it so it reflects the Expressiveness of our publications, business and community.

Yeah, it will probably be like everyone else’s. Maybe there’s one for sale in a suburb somewhere.

Brad Hicks is the Editor/Publisher of the Red Oak Express. He can be contacted at publisher@redoakexpress.com.