Summer Signs

The forecast it for the temperatures to be at or above 100 degrees today so if I was to do anything outside at all it had to be in the early morning. After dropping The Emmer off at work I called Guitar, who is also a "morning" person.

We decided to take a ride and see if we could discover some more old neon signs to add to our collection. Early morning is a great time to do this sort of thing as many of the great old signs are in not so great old areas of town and the fewer people on the street, the better. By 7:30 am we were driving down one of the old commercial "drags" of the Denver Metro area. We did indeed bag a few new signs.

When you're out seeking weird or kitsch, you never know what you'll find...and a lot of the time it just finds you. So it was this morning. Both of us spotted the sign for the "Hanger Bar" which wasn't that great but the flag next to it made a pretty good picture so I quickly pulled into the parking lot and when I looked into the lot, lo and behold..."Guitar!, Look at that car???"

Guitar was as intrigued as I was and as we got up close to it we found it to be a Crosley. Now, I knew Crosley as a maker of radios, air conditioners and all kinds of electronic equipment but cars...? As we walked around it marveling, the owner came out of the back of the bar. He'd been cleaning up from last night.

He said it was a 1950 Crosley that he's owned since he was 15 years old. To be charitable that had to be at LEAST 45-50 years ago. Anyway he told us all about the car. Six gallon gas tank...but that would take you 300 miles. He said it would do 70 mph but it was a scary thing!

Guitar and I were patting ourselves on the back for discovering a cool thing when this guy says, "If you think that's neat, you ought to see the the B-17 inside the bar." "B-17??" we say almost together...."Yeah, there's one made of beer cans inside the bar." he says.

The Weird Gods are smiling on us today!!!

Sure enough, inside the bar was a very large model of a WWII B-17 done in beer cans. Some of the cans in the "sculpture" looked to be collector items on their own. Seems like when Stapleton was the airport in Denver a lot of the airport folks made this bar a regular stop. A lot of the airport folks were WWII veterans so there was a lot of Air Force memorabilia in the bar.

Stapleton closed down as the Denver airport over ten years ago...and it looked like the glory days of this bar were over long before that. But kitsch knows no age. In fact it's tough to be new and have any kind of real kitsch....kinda like wine.

By this time Guitar and I had used up the morning. It was getting hot and we both decided it was a good day to find a cool room in the house and chill so we ended our adventure for this day.

Thanks for visiting.