Really neat motel sign in the desert!

[Pete Deksnis]

Sixty-three years in the same family. Eatontown TV stands near the main entrance of Fort Monmouth in NJ. This Dumont sign was taller than the building. Estimated at 30-feet tall, it had seven tubes of green neon illuminating the main letters. The sign was so large and bright it served as a nighttime beacon for Monmouth and Red Bank airports. It was there till the building was expanded in 1974. Some of the steel from the sign is in the concrete floor of the '74 addition. Spoke to the owner this morning. He speculated that Dumont paid the entire cost of the sign. I've often wondered if the unusual size of the sign was somehow related to Dumont's association with the Eatontown area during his work at the Fort.

[Whirled One]

I love old motel signs and other highway relics. As others have mentioned, there are a number of coffee-table books out there featuring photo-essays of such things.

Also, when I go on road trips I try to stay at old family-run motels like that just for fun. Ah, it's just part of the adventure, you know? Anyway, while I've never seen a 50's TV in a guest room at those places, I've encountered several where the furniture and fixtures seem to have gotten stuck in time somewhere in the 1950's or 60's. The old TV's always got changed out, but one room I stayed at once several years ago had the strangest late-50's-looking window air-conditioner I've ever seen. It was an RCA-Whirlpool, and you could tell RCA must have been trying to exert their influence on the product styling. It was (if I remember correctly) blue-grey in color, and the cabinet was styled like a small late-50's table radio-- if each dimension was magnified like 4 or 5 times over. The controls were on the top of the unit and hidden under a hinged panel; the fan and thermostat knobs looked like TV tuner knobs (and the thermostat at least had numbers that appeared like those on a TV tuner, though calibrated 1-10 instead of 2-13) and the controls were arranged in a way that looked reminicent of a TV control panel. I think it had pushbuttons for some functions though. Strangest thing... anyone here seen anything like this? I took a picture of it at the time; I'll have to root around and see if I can dig it up at some point.