His handlebar mustache flashes, presumably day and night, as Greenwood revels in the wonders of the gas that made Las Vegas famous.
Then he plugs in the pet project of the “neon team” at his studio on Missoula's Northside and - oh, yeah Š
“S-M-I-T-H H-O-T-E-L,” the sign says, and “HOTEL” lights up in a striking green.
Suddenly it's a soft evening on Railroad Street in the late 1920s. A train rumbles into the Northern Pacific station across the way. Lumberjacks and gandy dancers stroll by on a street of brick.
Patrick Smith is no relation to Clarence Smith, the first owner of the hotel at the corner of Woody and West Railroad. But he had his eye on the sign before the century-old hotel was demolished in 1991. Floyd Weston, in his mid-80s at the time, was the lone tenant of the building, which had been in his family for years.
Smith was sipping beer at Charlie B's on North Higgins one summer day when Weston came in the bar. Smith entreated his friend Charlie, the owner of the bar, to ask Weston about the sign.
“I paid him 25 bucks and a bottle of beer. He said, ‘Then go get it right now,' ” recalled Smith, who quickly recruited a three-man crew. They backed up his pickup to the sign laden with coal dust and “an incredibly heavy transformer.”
For most of the succeeding two decades, Smith kept the “Smith Hotel” sign mounted on his barn in the upper Rattlesnake.
“Not everyone can have a piece of neon sign hanging in the yard. Not everyone would want to either. But it's very much part of Missoula history,” he said.
Along came 2007, and what Smith calls “a little segue in his life” when he decided it was time to bring the sign back to life.
“I just like neon, I like color and design. I like craftsmanship,” he explained. “Redoing this sign is kind of a little bit of a gift to myself.”
A retired electrician and longtime Missoulian, Smith had friends in the right places. He had long admired Kelly Greenwood's meticulous work with glasswork and neon. Steve McGuinness, a longtime Missoula architect and artist, gladly jumped on board.
“There are not very many people left who do custom hand-painting like Steve's doing,” Greenwood said. “And you need to find somebody who can work with old paints for this job.”
Said Smith: “We're kind of the pros from the St. Charles,” referring to the gang's affectionate name for Charlie B's.
Greenwood's son, Ian, is steeped in the sign business as well, and volunteers his after-work hours to the restoration process.
“He's doing all the knuckle-busting and all the hard work,” Kelly said. That includes welding, wiring and framing.
Smith researches the materials needed to make the restoration authentic and buys them. The Greenwoods and McGuinness work for free.
The fifth member of the team, and the key player in the men's eyes, is across town at Epcon Sign Co.
Ian Greenwood prepares to light newly fashioned letters for the backside of the Smith Hotel sign at his father's shop. Part of the process includes leaving the tubes illuminated while the gases spread out and equalize, illuminating any flickering or color irregularities.
Linda Lennox has been with the company for 48 years, since it was called Walford's and was doing the vast majority of sign work in Missoula and other western Montana towns. Lennox and Walford's gave Kelly Greenwood his professional start in glasswork after he moved from Great Falls to go to college in the late 1970s.
Lennox, before anyone else, recognized the historic value of the patterns and drawings of Walford's signs. What she called the “working man's sketches” were saved to assist in repair and replacement projects. By archiving them, she has built up a veritable “What's What” of past local signs.
“It's kind of a history of Missoula through the '40s and the '50s, and some into the '60s and '70s, through signs,” she said. “I have the Missoula Mercantile from the '40s, Missoula Brewing Co. or Highlander Beer, and later on the Fox Theater.”
She has designs for signs from Stoick Drug and Kramis Hardware, and from Hudson, Nash and (yes) Edsel automobile dealerships. There's the Bud Lake Husky truck stop on West Broadway and the big “air-conditioned” sign on top of the old Florence Hotel.
Lennox figures she's got 100 or so such patterns.
After a recent move, she hasn't dug up the Smith Hotel sign specs yet. Since no color photos of the sign were available, determining the neon's color became an issue.
But Lennox went to a reliable source - Lennox. She remembered it to be green, and told Smith as much. He replied that there was green pin-striping around the letters, which reaffirmed Lennox's memory.
“Back in the '40s, that was kind of the way they did neon signs,” she said. “They almost always made the neon the color of the letter, or they would dress the letter up with a border color that would be the neon color.”
Neon on the backside of the Smith Hotel sign was just “HOT” one day last week. Greenwood fashioned the “EL” in a process that, other than a 20-minute cooling period, took less than 10 minutes.
Starting with a standard 4-foot piece of clear tubing, he scored, heated, bent and snipped a portion of it into shape.
Two flasks of gas were secured to one side of his plant, a long “bombardment” table that is “vintage Sixties,” Greenwood said.
He short-circuited the tube with high-voltage current - 500 degrees worth - then evacuated it of all gases and other unwanted impediments. Next was the backfill of a neon/argon mixture.
“Neon has almost no properties. It bonds to nothing, so it's noncorrosive,” Ian Greenwood explained. “However, when you add electricity it exchanges electrons.”
Thus light, but very little heat - a 9-to-1 ratio.
“It's really, really efficient,” Kelly said. “Neon uses about a quarter of an amp of electricity. With an equivalent fluorescent lamp, you're talking two to three amps with that same amount of footage. There's not a more economically lit sign ever produced.”
Neon, in its natural form, produces red light. Argon looks blue when electrified. The proper combination, along with a phosphorous coating on the tubes, provided the desired green.
Then it was a matter of waiting until the gases evened out inside to a consistent green color. That sometimes takes up to 24 hours, Greenwood said.
It's a tried and true process that has essentially gone unchanged since 1910, when Frenchman Georges Claude displayed the first neon lamp in Paris. Claude and his company introduced neon gas signs to America when he sold a pair to the Packard car company in Los Angeles. They literally stopped traffic, Smith said.
He appreciates the complexity of neon and once yearned to go to school in Portland to study it.
“Neon's a very hard thing to learn, because you have a big breakage factor when you're learning,” he said.
He remains attracted to the proces, he said, because “I just like neon, I like color, I like design. I like craftsmanship.”
The Smith Hotel sign will probably wind up back at his home in the Rattlesnake, though the Missoula Art Museum has indicated some interest in displaying it first.
Last month, Smith struck gold again. He explained the neon restoration project to another friend and artisan, Neil “Mort” Olson, and scored Olson's sign that once hung in front of the old Eddie's Club, the predecessor of Charlie B's.
The Eddie's Club sign lies on the ground outside Greenwood's studio now. It's 13 feet high and 6 feet wide, and Smith can't wait to get started. To help pay for it, he's devising a fundraising plan based on photos and memorabilia from Eddie's Club and its esoteric clientele in the 1960s and '70s.
After that: Smith's “Holy Grail.”
It's the 70-foot sign from the Fox Theater, torn down from what today is called the Riverfront Triangle at Orange and Front streets mere months before the Smith Hotel was demolished. When in operation, the neon lights of the Fox Theater sign flashed day and night.
It currently lies rusting alongside Highway 93 at the base of Evaro Hill. Smith last week was trying to track down the owners to see if they're interested in restoration, which he figures would take public works or public arts money to do.
Then, if wishes come true and sign ordinances can be waived, he'll one day see it back in its original spot at the corner of Orange and Front streets, heralding for the world to see whatever becomes of that riverfront property.
“The whole thing is about just an appreciation of neon,” said Smith. “The other issue is the city not allowing old signs to come down and be refurbished. They have to be plastic when they go back up.
“That's kind of disgusting. We're talking about rebuilding downtown and making it attractive. There's nothing more attractive than neon.”
The original label on the old Smith Hotel neon sign attributes it to Missoula's Walford Sign Co. Greenwood began working with neon signs at the local sign company and worked there for 16 years.
Reporter Kim Briggeman can be reached at 523-5266 or at kbriggeman@missoulian.com.
Photographer Linda Thompson can be reached at 523-5270 or at lthompson@missoulian.com.
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