mullentown » Blog Archive » If You Were the Architect
Yay! It’s coming back, and it’s nothing to do with politics: it’s the Walker Bank sign in Salt Lake City. As seen in the comments at mullentown, it sounds like the old Salk Lake weather icon may be making a comeback.
In one of those weird Internets Tubes coincidences, my Uncle Charlie is mentioned on that Early Television site, as he was a long time radio enthusiast and tinkerer with new technologies in Salt Lake. In the 40’s and 50’s, he was involved with a lot of this stuff. I guess he was employed or connected with KDYL-TV in the early days, a fact that I vaguely remembered from family stories. KDYL-TV isn’t on the air anymore, but became KCPX /
Anyway, the Walker Bank sign was illuminated with 2 different sets of neon tubes: green for good weather, and red for stormy. I can’t remember if it flashed to show a difference between “rain” and “snow.” Mom and I used to spend a fair amount of time looking at the view of Salt Lake from my aunt and uncle’s house, and checking to see what the weather would be was part of this experience – green or red, fair or stormy. If you couldn’t see it at all, it was either foggy, or REALLY stormy (heh).
I’ve just emailed my cousin Bill to let him know about this Early Television site, he’ll get a kick out of it. I also found several other links online that lead to photo collections at the University of Utah to do with early television. I’d be willing to bet that Charlie took a lot of the KDYL photos – there’s something about the composition and the clarity of them that reminds me of Charlie’s photography. He owned a well-regarded Photo Lab in Salt Lake for many years, and Bill is also a very good photographer – he actually set up and took this photo of “damn sour pie” that we had for Mom’s memorial backyard bash.
Come to think of it, Charlie must have known this commerical artist I ran across, Pat Denner. Mr. Denner did ad and art work for Salt Lake businesses like Walker Bank, Dee’s, and Harman’s Cafe (a sit down restaurant that had a Colonel Saunders tie-in back in the days before the franchised take-out joints). I bet Charlie took the photos of the food for the menu, because he always had a sideline in photographing food for print or television ads. I know for a fact he used to joke about how hard it was to make a burger from Dee’s look appetizing for the ads he did for them.
That menu pictured on the Howdy Pardner! documentary blog is so tantalizingly familiar… the old Harman’s restaurant was down on 13th East and 21st South, at the corner of all the completely redeveloped part of the old Sugar House downtown area. I still remember how good the rolls were with butter and honey, and of course the chicken was so much better when it was made to order and brought to your table on heavy, restaurant grade china by a waitress in a starched pink uniform and white apron. I also remember it was the first place that I saw those new-fangled hot-air hand dryers in the women’s room. Now there’s just a takeout KFC kitty-corner to the old location – there’s no such thing as a sit-down Kentucky Fried Chicken place any more.
Whoa. Quite a stroll down memory lane. All because of a freakin’ neon bank sign.
