A toast to the best, brightest

Don’t let the hundreds of neon beer signs on EBay fool you. In the world of flashing, humming tributes to alcohol, a decent collector’s item is getting harder and harder to find. So hard, in fact, that assembling the new beer-sign history exhibition at downtown’s Museum of Neon Art took almost a year.

The result: a small, albeit informative, group of 20 buzzing, glowing ambassadors of midcentury bar culture. The collection, which includes signs created over five decades, appears through April 3.

The exhibition is filled with beer signs familiar (Coors, Molson, Bud), beer signs exotic (Tsingtao) and beer signs extinct (Grand Prize). The tubes sizzle with a vaguely unsettling, Frankenstein’s-castle quality -- curator Kim Koga deliberately omitted rugs from the gallery to amplify the effect -- but, unlike their cousins out on the streets, none of them sputters or sports broken letters. “Rainier for Lie” or “Pas Blue Ribbon” might give the show more street cred. But most of these very commercial works come from collectors who have restored the electrodes, the fixtures and the blackout paint, that medium that turns long tubes of gas into letters and absorbs extra light.

“It was a matter of finding the right collectors to find the old signs,” Koga says. “That ‘Miller High Life’ sign that’s in everyone’s memory? That’s actually hard to find.

“It’s gotten suddenly very popular in Germany,” says Koga, who also creates her own neon artworks. “So all these young kids in Germany have become collectors, and the signs have become hard to find in America.”

For the show, Koga wanted signs that reflected the technologies of their day, particularly the styles that breweries stopped making after the 1950s and ‘60s. She also wanted at least a few signs in various states of decay, as a way to educate visitors about sign makers’ limitations. One ‘60s-era sign, advertising “Busch Bavarian Beer on Tap,” has blackout paint so faded it looks almost white. Nearby, an ad for rival brew Hamm’s boasts a perfect, glossy black coat, even though it was crafted 10 years earlier. A collector had recently restored the latter sign.

“We thought, ‘Let’s just show these signs the way that collectors collect them,’ ” Koga says.

As the show materials describe it, American beer-sign culture first emerged after Prohibition ended, in 1933. Before then, neon signage hadn’t been used much in the United States since its arrival a decade earlier.

“The patent for the neon-sign electrodes -- the ends of the glass tubes -- expired in 1932,” Koga says, “so the boom really didn’t happen until after that.”

Each glass sign required a craftsman who could hand-bend the tubes in elaborate fonts, so the signs didn’t come cheap. But as beer companies flourished, they needed ways to hawk their brands in darkened watering holes, and the medium took off.

By the 1940s, breweries had developed a Henry Ford-style assembly line system for producing their flashing ads. The signs also shrank to a more portable size; beer makers could ship one out right alongside their product.

“There were some shops where one person would do the P, the A and B, and they would hand it to another person who would do the S and T,” Koga says. “That’s how a lot of tube-benders came into the trade.”

The earliest signs in the exhibition come from the 1940s, when more than 2,000 neon shops operated in the United States. (Today it’s closer to a few hundred.) Finding the glass and gas was no problem, but metal was deemed off-limits in wartime. So companies such as Gulf Brewing Co. -- once owned by Howard Hughes -- fiddled with alternative materials. Bars started hanging neon hawkers enhanced by cardboard; the synthetic resin Bakelite; or painted, backlighted glass. And they started hanging them by the dozens.

“Starting in the 1940s, beer companies just went whole-hog into advertising,” Koga says. “The mass production of the beer sign contributed to the growth of the whole neon sign industry.”

Signs using both Bakelite and glass backing are on display, along with more common metal-backed ads. But the Big Mamou of the exhibition has to be the animated, oversized, 53-year-old mascot for Oakland’s late Hofbrau restaurant -- a jolly beer meister joyously pulling a pint. Until earlier this year, the rotund fellow held a post at the corner of Broadway and Grand Avenue in Oakland, but when a new business moved into the space, Koga and some colleagues rescued the sign from possible destruction and restored the piece to working condition.

The sign’s construction is so complicated that visitors need to stand about 15 yards down the hall to see what the barkeep is up to. Squinting a bit helps too.

“You have to stand, like, literally, a block away” to get the best effect, Koga says. “But I want people to find an appreciation for these signs -- to realize that, my God, they’re all handmade.

“We sort of trip over these signs and don’t appreciate them. They’re even an eyesore sometimes. But to isolate them, take them off the street, put them in a gallery -- they become like gems.”

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Neon on Tap

Historical Retrospective of the Great American Beer Sign

Where: Museum of Neon Art, 501 W. Olympic Blvd., Suite 101

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays; noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. Closed Jan. 1.

Price: $5 for adults; $3.50 for seniors and students; free for children younger than 12 and members. Free from 5 to 8 p.m. on the second Thursday of every month

Contact: (213) 489-9918 or www.neonmona.org