FILLMORE : City Wants a Shining Future for Old Sign

By day, it’s a fading blue-and-white sign on a pole easily overlooked among the businesses that line California 126 in Fillmore. By night, it’s an eye-catching green neon beacon pointing north. It’s the “Fillmore” sign. And no one seems to know how or when it arrived on the northeast corner of Central Avenue and the state highway.

In recent months, only half of the sign’s letters have lit up at night.

The sign predates a now-defunct gas station that was built on that corner after World War II and was run for 30 years by Gerald (Sadie) Davis. Davis’ brother Burtis, a 73-year-old Fillmore native, would hazard no guesses about the sign’s origins. “Only Jesus Christ knows how it got there,” he said.

The sign also predates former mayor Delores Day’s arrival in Fillmore in 1943. Day said that during her 20 years on the City Council, she gathered no clues. “The Fillmore sign is one of those things that’s just always been there as long as I can remember,” she said.

Fire Chief Pat Askren’s theory is that local business people erected the sign in the late 1930s or early 1940s, when California 126 was moved from its old path through Fillmore, on Santa Clara Street and Old Telegraph Road, to its present location one block south.

“At the time, there was nothing out there but orange groves,” Askren said. “As far as we can tell, the merchants put the sign up so people would know they were passing Fillmore’s business district,” Askren said.

Fillmore native Roger Campbell, a city councilman, said that about 20 years ago, there was talk of taking the sign down. “Some people thought it was too old-fashioned,” he said. “Of course, that’s exactly why I like it.”

The rest of the City Council apparently agrees.

Fixing the half-lit Fillmore sign is at the top of the council’s list of goals for 1991, although Askren’s search of records uncovered no evidence that the city was responsible for erecting it.

The city made another effort not long ago to keep Fillmore’s neon shining. City Finance Manager Mark Ryan said that in 1989, Fillmore spent $460 to patch the sign. Askren said the sign “has been in stages of disrepair for a long time.”

Peter Charters, operations manager for Vital Signs of Ventura, which repaired the sign two years ago, said, “It’s a really nice sign, a beautiful classic.”

“It’s a landmark for Fillmore,” City Manager Roy Payne said. “When I’ve been away somewhere and come back after dark, I look forward to seeing it, all lit up--it means I’m home.”