Highway 101: The History of El Camino Real

SIGNED, SEALED, AND DELIVERED

Two words: Captive audience.

That’s what drivers on U.S. 101 and other highway were—and still are. In a way, traveling the American highway is a lot like watching television: You have your big-budget specials (that gorgeous scenery), your regularly scheduled programming (gas stations and rest stops), and even test patterns in the form of traffic jams.

Then there are the commercials. In neon. In illuminated plastic. On billboards. On road signs, which are the public service announcements of the highway experience.

Even the kids who set up those neighborhood lemonade stands know the principle: More traffic equals more business. And where are you going to find more traffic than by the side of a road? Even better: a highway. No sooner had we taken to our newly built highways in that fantastic new contraption, the motorcar, than signs started popping up telling us where to go. Just try counting the number of arrows you see on a road trip; if you’re on the road a while, they can easily number in the hundreds.

The signs started out simple. In the early years of the 20^th century, before the government took over the funding of highway construction, boosters banded together in “trail associations” to promote and maintain various roads. These groups consisted mainly of businessmen seeking to make money by routing the highways past their front doors. Road maintenance wasn’t a matter of altruism: The better the roads, the more likely drivers were to use them—and the better business would be.

State Route 1 and U.S. 101 share the same roadway for miles along the California coastline. This sign is posted near one location where they diverge in San Luis Obispo. .

Signs telling you what road you were on or how far it was to the nearest town helped, too. In the early years, a maze of more than 250 trails appeared across the country, and they weren’t the expressways or freeways of today. They utilized country lanes and city streets, sometimes making it difficult to stay on course. A wrong turn from Broadway onto Main Street, and you might find yourself miles off track. To make matters more “interesting,” there were places where two of these early highways shared the same road. Two might merge or diverge without notice, and drivers wouldn’t know which way to go.

The Apache and Old Spanish Trails shared the same stretch of road with the Atlantic-Pacific, Evergreen, and Lee Highways in southwestern New Mexico—a phenomenon that would persist after the federal highway system was established. For instance, the route now known as Interstate 10 east of Los Angeles once carried signage for U.S. 60, 70, and 99. Even today, segments of U.S. 101 are co-signed as State Route 1.

As if the overlapping routes weren’t bad enough, trail associations competed with one another for traffic, sometimes adopting confusingly similar names. If you were traveling through Kansas, you could take the Old Santa Fe Trail, touted by an association formed in 1911 to promote the historic route. Or you could instead follow the New Santa Fe Trail, brainchild of a group formed a year earlier to boost a road that followed the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad.

The Arrowhead Trail from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles was an alternate to the Lincoln Highway meant to promote commerce in Utah by keeping motorists in that state longer.

Not all trails were created equal. Some were better maintained than others. Some were paved for one stretch before deteriorating into gravel, dirt or even mud. Still others dead-ended where the funds—or the merchants’ motivation—had run out.

Critics accused the highway associations of being more concerned with lining their pockets than maintaining their roads. Some even promoted their roads as federal government projects, even though the government at that point had nothing to do with them. This led the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads to warn that highway groups were guilty of spreading “propaganda” in an attempt to legitimize their projects, which were guided more by their quest for profits than any national interest.

That quest could even prompt an association to change a highway’s route if such a move seemed beneficial. The Reno Evening Gazette blasted the Pike’s Peak Ocean-to-Ocean Highway for changing its western end point from San Francisco to Los Angeles—and in so doing, bypassing northern Nevada. In a 1924 editorial, the newspaper charged that “transcontinental highway associations, with all their clamor, controversy, recriminations and meddlesome interference, build mighty few highways.”

Taxpayers in small towns had little say in how the roads were managed, but nonetheless were left to foot the bill for their construction and maintenance, the newspaper said. What did they have to show for it? Noise.

“In nine cases out of ten, these … associations are common nuisances and nothing else,” the paper concluded. “They are more mischievous than constructive. In many instances, they are organized by clever boomers who are not interested in building roads but in obtaining salaries at the expense of an easily beguiled public.”

With all the confusion over which road was which, early road signs supplied a solution—although not a perfect one. Each trail association came up with its own insignia, which it placed wherever it could find a good spot in the motorist’s line of sight: on fence posts, rocks, trees, telephone poles, etc. The Lincoln Highway, which ran from New York to San Francisco, used a large capital “L” on a white background sandwiched between narrow red and blue stripes. The William Penn Highway and the Keystone Highway both used the same keystone symbol that still appears on Pennsylvania road signs today. The Horseshoe Trail sign featured a horseshoe (naturally)—although it was depicted facing downward, which couldn’t have been reassuring to motorists hoping for a little good luck.

Names, not numbers, denoted the old trails, some of which paved the way for later highways and interstates, while others were neglected and eventually all but forgotten.

The most sophisticated private group that took on the task of posting road signs was AAA in California, where both the northern and southern state auto clubs dove in head first. The Automobile Club of Southern California started posting road signs in 1906, an activity it continued for the next half century. The club erected signs in the state’s 13 southernmost counties, but it didn’t stop there. It also put up porcelain signs in Arizona, southern Nevada, and Baja California, placing markers on the Old Spanish Trail from San Diego to Texas and the Midland Trail from Los Angeles to Ely, Nevada. In 1914, it undertook perhaps its most ambitious project, placing some 4,000 signs along the western portion of the National Old Trails Road between Los Angeles and Kansas City.

The California State Automobile Association, meanwhile, was doing similar work in the state’s 45 northern counties, putting up its first sign in 1908 at Parkside Boulevard and 19^th Avenue in San Francisco. It continued its work through 1969. Among the roads that benefited were U.S. highways 40, 48, 50, 99, 101, and 199 in California, as well as the Lincoln Highway east to Salt Lake City and the Victory Highway as far afield as Kansas City.

A variety of road signs could be seen outside St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Olive, Orange County, in 1967. Orange County Archives.

The earliest signs were made of wood, but the switch was made to porcelain because it was easier to repair in the field. The durable material, mounted on a redwood post or steel pole, became ubiquitous throughout the Golden State. Glass reflectors were added later to improve nighttime visibility.

Originally, the signs were diamond-shaped with blue lettering against a yellow background, but they eventually gave way to the black-on-white format that became the national standard for informational signs in 1927. Informational signs, featuring directional arrows and distances to towns up ahead, were rectangular and used black lettering on a white background. Signs indicating detours, speed limits, highway junctions, and city limits also fell into this category.

LIST OF TRAILS

Here are some of the 250-plus trails that crisscrossed the United States during the early years of the 20^th century. U.S. highways that follow some portion of the old trails are included where available.

TRANSCONTINENTAL TRAILS

Bankhead Highway—Washington, D.C., to San Diego (U.S. 1, 15, 70, 170, 29, 78, 70, 67, 80)

Dixie Overland Highway—Savannah, Georgia, to San Diego (U.S. 28, 80)

Lee Highway—Washington, D.C., to San Diego (U.S. 11, 64, 6)

Lincoln Highway—New York to San Francisco (U.S. 30)

Lone Star Trail—St. Augustine, Florida, to Los Angeles (U.S. 1, 90, 84, 67, 290, 80)

National Old Trails Road—Baltimore to Los Angeles (U.S. 50, 66)

New York National Roosevelt Midland Trail—Oyster Bay to Los Angeles (U.S. 60, 150, 50, 40, 6)

Old Spanish Trail—St. Augustine, Florida, to San Diego (U.S. 70, 80, 90)

Pikes Peak Ocean-to-Ocean Highway—New York to Los Angeles (U.S. 36)

Theodore Roosevelt International Highway—Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon (U.S. 2, 302)

Victory Highway—New York to San Francisco (U.S. 1, 40, 83)

Yellowstone Trail—Boston to Seattle (U.S. 20, 12, 10)

NORTH-SOUTH NATIONAL TRAILS

Atlantic Highway—Fort Kent, Maine, to Miami (U.S. 1)

Dixie Highway—Chicago to Miami (U.S. 136, 31, 150, 31W)

Evergreen Highway—Portland, Oregon, to El Paso, Texas (U.S. 99, 10, 97, 410, 30, 30N, 91, 66)

Jackson Highway—Chicago to New Orleans (U.S. 51, 45)

Jefferson Highway—Winnipeg, Manitoba, to New Orleans (U.S. 71)

Jefferson Davis Highway—Washington, D.C., to Mobile, Alabama (U.S. 29, 31)

King of Trails Highway—Winnipeg to Brownsville, Texas (U.S. 75, 73, 73E, 50, 73W, 77, 81, 196)

Meridian Highway—Winnipeg to Houston (U.S. 81)

North-South National Bee-Line Highway—Chicago to New Orleans (U.S. 31, 41)

Ocean Highway—New York to Miami (U.S. 13, 17)

Pacific Highway—Vancouver to San Diego (U.S. 99, 40, 101)

WESTERN REGIONAL TRAILS

Arrowhead Trail—Salt Lake City to Los Angeles (U.S. 91)

California-Banff Bee Line—Cranbrook, B.C., to Los Angeles (U.S. 97)

Colorado Gulf Highway—Denver to Galveston, Texas (U.S. 85, 385, 370, 81, 181)

National Park to Park Highway—Loop (U.S. 99, 40, 2, 66, 50, 85)

New Santa Fe Trail—Kansas City to Los Angeles (U.S. 50, 350, 85, 66)

Caution and warning signs, on the other hand, featured black lettering on a yellow background. Most were diamond-shaped, although railroad crossing signs were circular and stop signs were octagonal. Stop signs originally featured yellow backgrounds, too, sometimes with horizontal lines above and below the injunction to stop. Red was long the standard color for stop signs in California, and the rest of the nation followed suit in 1954, by which time durable red paint became more widely available. (That same year, yield signs in the shape of an inverted triangle were added to the mix, but they were originally yellow, too. It wasn’t until 1971 that the design changed to a white triangle inside a thick red border, with the word “yield” spelled out in red lettering at the center.)

The first signs on El Camino Real—where the two auto clubs took over maintenance of the iconic bells in 1921—were yellow-and-blue diamonds that featuring the auto club logo, but these were replaced by the familiar black-and-white shields in 1928. The diamonds disappeared as well, yielding to the standard rectangular shape.

State routes were signed with black lettering on white backgrounds, too, but the markers featured a grizzly bear silhouette and were shaped like a spade in honor of the state’s gold rush heritage. The shape endured, but the bear symbol was eliminated and the color scheme changed in 1964 to white lettering on a green background.

Not all signage along the nation’s highways is informational. Or cautionary.

The system of standardized signs and markers adopted by the American Association of Highway Officials in November 1925 in Detroit called for the following in its subsequent report, published in January 1927:

SHAPE

“An octagonal sign is used to indicate ‘Stop,’ where for any reason such action is necessary.

“The diamond shaped signs, commonly called ‘Slow’ signs, are used to indicate any condition inherent in the road itself requiring a slow speed and caution on the part of the driver.

“The circular sign is used as an advance warning at railroad grade crossings only.

“The square shaped signs, commonly called ‘Caution’ signs, are used to indicate any condition requiring caution that is not inherent in the road itself, but which is due to contiguous or adjacent conditions which often are also intermittent.

“Rectangular shaped signs of various dimensions are used to carry directions, information and restrictions of use or benefit to the driver.

“The arrow shaped direction sign may be substituted for the rectangular direction sign.

“Route markers, to carry the designations assigned to various routes, are of various distinctive designs. For United States Highways the standard outline of the official shield of the United States is used. On State roads that are not U.S. Highways the several States use other appropriate devices, such as the Covered Wagon in Nebraska, the conventional Sunflower in Kansas, the Indian Head in North Dakota, the North Star in Minnesota, the Triangle in Wisconsin, the Keystone in Pennsylvania, etc. Several States including Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and South Dakota, use the State outline as a distinctive marker.”

COLOR

“All signs of a precautionary character, including the circular railroad sign, the octagon stop sign, the diamond slow sign, and the square caution signs have black designs on a yellow background.

“All direction, information and restriction signs are black on a white background, except the Rest Station Sign is white on a green background.

“Route Markers have black copy on a white background (A few of the States are exceptions to this.)”

SYMBOLS

“The symbols used on the various signs are those for railroad grade crossings, both for single and multiple tracks, for left and right curves and turns; for reversed curves and turns; the arrow on the directional sign and the arrow which accompanies the route marker.”

Most of it is selling something, and you’ll see plenty of evidence along U.S. 101 even today. Retail advertising along highways takes a couple of different forms. There are, of course, billboards, which direct motorists to a destination farther down the road or promote something unrelated to the highway—a TV show, a law firm, a religious message. The list is as varied as the number of people who decide to buy that piece of roadside space. Then there are businesses located right along the highway that erect signs letting drivers know they’re there.

MEET DR. PIERCE

The first American billboards were on the highway rather than beside it. Traveling circuses would affix large posters to the side of horse-drawn vehicles that preceded them into each new town, announcing their arrival.

Just as early route markers were painted on trees and fence posts, some early advertisers used existing structures to convey their message. They had to be big to attract attention, so the most likely candidates were barns and silos. In 2016, a silo next to northbound 101 near Gilroy advertised Martinelli’s sparkling cider. There’s even an old water tower on Highway 99 in Ripon that has long carried a billboard for a local radio station.

Billboards started out as board specifically reserved for bills—printed notices or advertisements. The word is related to the Latin bulla, meaning an official seal on a document (such as a papal bull). Perhaps more familiar are the injunctions to “post no bills” seen in public places where advertisers are wont to affix fliers, stickers, or handbills. In the late 19^th century, such activities were so common—especially among theater and circus promoters—that they spawned fierce competition for the limited space available. “Fierce” isn’t an overstatement. One promoter would slap his handbill on top of another, and the poster of the first bill would retaliate in kind. If one promoter caught a rival in the act, it often came to blows.

Even today, some roadside billboards are plastered on existing structures, such as this Martinelli’s ad on a silo near Gilroy along U.S. 101.

Billboards offered several advantages: If you owned or rented the space, no one could complain about you cluttering up public spaces, and your rivals couldn’t (at least legally) paper over your ad with one of their own. Billboards also provided better exposure. They could be made larger and raised higher—some were erected on the top of buildings—to increase visibility.

As time went on, billboards were used less by entertainers such as theater and circus owners, and became increasingly the province of general retailers. Billboard magazine, which became the recognized manual of top-40 music in the 20^th century, started out as a trade publication for—you guessed it—billboards. As the handbill and entertainment industries drifted apart, the magazine moved toward entertainment until it eventually focused on music charts and trends.

The outdoor advertising industry, meanwhile, was diversifying.

Billboards weren’t the only form of advertising to be seen in the open air. As highway travel became more common, advertisers saw an array of opportunities to catch motorists’ attention. Some approached property owners and offered them a fee to allow an ad on the side of their barn. It was an easy way to make some extra cash, especially during hard times, and many farm owners took the advertisers up on their offers. Silos made perfect stand-ins for beer or soda cans, and barns could be seen from far off down the road. Even today, one barn ad in Sonoma County on U.S. 101 touts “Dr. Pierce’s Medical Discovery,” with the additional words “For Your …” painted over with new coat of white paint proclaiming it “A Real Tonic.” You can see it as you travel south on 101 near Cloverdale.

That barn was one of several such “barnboards” for Dr. Pierce’s cure-all pills and tonics painted in large white lettering on barns across the country—some of which still survive. Out west, they showed up in such locales as Toledo, Washington; Logan, Utah; and Cottage Grove, Oregon. A typical deal, for the barn in Logan, called for the owner to receive $25 the first year and $10 in rent each subsequent year.

But just who was this Dr. Pierce?

Born in 1840, Ray Vaughn Pierce was just one of many opportunists peddling miracle elixirs and cure-all potions in the days before the FDA regulated medical products. In other words: he was your typical snake-oil salesman. Whether he was an actual doctor is open to dispute, although he supposedly obtained a degree from the Eclectic Medical College of Cincinnati around the time of the Civil War. It and other schools like it thrived in the latter half of the 19^th century, specializing in the development of herbal medicine, as did Dr. Pierce.

Described by one historian as Buffalo’s favorite doctor, Pierce developed a licorice-flavored tonic called “Golden Medical Discovery” that was supposed to give men “an appetite like a cow-boy’s and the digestion of an ostrich.” It contained, according to one ad, “a very concentrated, vegetable extract,” and its ingredients apparently included such things as valerian root, bloodroot, mandrake, goldenseal, and black cherry bark. The good doctor marketed his elixir as a miracle cure for all sorts of ailments, ranging from laryngitis to indigestion, from blood disease to ulcers.

“It does not nauseate or debilitate the stomach or system, as other cough medicines do, but, on the contrary, improves digestion, strengthens the stomach, builds up solid flesh when reduced below a healthy standard by disease, and invigorates and cleanses the entire system,” one ad declared. It even addressed the age-old problem of irregularity: “As a remedy for Torpor of the Liver … and for habitual Constipation of the Bowels, it has no equal.”

Pierce produced other herbal remedies, including Dr. Pierce’s Anuric Tablets, Dr. Pierce’s Vaginal Tablets, Dr. Pierce’s Pleasant Pellets, and Dr. Pierce’s Extract of Smart-Weed. At the height of his success, around the turn of the century, he was sending out some 2 million bottles by mail each year.

Dr. Pierce painted ads for his tonics, elixirs, and miracle cures on barns across the country. Many have disappeared, but this one on a winery off 101 in Cloverdale remains.

This big red barn off 101 near Prunedale advertises a flea market and antique mall at that location.

Some barns he rented for advertising promoted “Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription” as a tonic for “weak women”—a potion that supposedly cured conditions caused by “the feminine complaint” and even addressed the problem of infertility. A plaque in Utah proclaims that, “according to the locals, it contained ‘a baby in every bottle’” and quotes an ad boasting “there are not three cases in a hundred of women’s peculiar diseases that Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription will not cure.”

Such grandiose claims today would never pass muster with the truth-in-advertising crowd, and they elicited skepticism even during the tonic’s heyday. Collier’s Magazine proclaimed Pierce a quack, and Ladies’ Home Journal accused him of using opium, alcohol, and digitalis in his Favorite Prescription. When lab tests came back negative for each of those alleged ingredients, Pierce sued the magazine for libel and won a $16,000 judgment.

Pierce’s other endeavors included serving one term in Congress and running a hotel for invalids whose guests may have included the Sundance Kid and Etta Place.

Pierce himself died in 1914, and his son, Dr. Valentine Mott Pierce, carried on the family business. Despite its successes, however, Pierce’s company began to fall out of favor as scrutiny of herbal remedies increased in the 20^th century. The era of snake-oil salesman and herbal cure-alls was fading: The Eclectic Medical College in Cincinnati closed its doors in 1939, and the company founded by Dr. Pierce went out of business shortly thereafter. Still, many of those old barn ads remain visible to passing motorists in the 21^st century. No one’s paying rent on them these days, but they endure as a reminder of a simpler time, when Americans were a little more naïve and barn side billboards paid the kind of dividends Super Bowl commercials do today.

The following testimonial for Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription appeared in a newspaper under the heading “Female Weakness”:

Mrs. William Hoover, of Bellville, Richland Co., Ohio, writes, ‘I had been a great sufferer from ‘female weakness;’ I tried three doctors; they did me no good; I thought I was an invalid forever. But I heard of Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription, and then I wrote to him and he told me just how to take it. I took eight bottles. I now feel entirely well. I could stand on my feet only a short time, and now I do all my work for my family of five.

Billboards compete for attention on this hillside along 101 in northern California.

BILLBOARDS GALORE

As more miles of roadway were laid down and more cars began to hit the pavement, advertisers were no longer content with renting barns and silos to promote their products. It wasn’t long before they began to put up their own signs by the side of the road.

Even then, however, billboard advertising was nothing new. Outdoor advertising dated back to the mid-19^th century, and by the 1890s, each state had its own association of “bill posters,” as they were known.

The era of the billboard had arrived.

And it wasn’t long before billboards were going up everywhere. Only a few months after the Rincon Sea Level Road opened in Ventura County, the breathtaking view of the Pacific Ocean was marred by what one commentator called “bill-board fever.”

The Ventura Free Press declared that no fewer than 57 varieties of advertising were being put up along the road. “There is nothing quite so disfiguring to the landscape as huge and glaring signboards and each advertiser is anxious that his particular sign should be the biggest,” the newspaper complained. “It will only be a matter of time, if the sign-board fiends are allowed to continue, until the mountains on one side of the road are shut out of view. Then no doubt the signs will be placed on buoys in the sea off shore and thus shut out the marine view.

“For goodness sake, stop it.”

But California had little recourse. A 1929 report asked what legislation had been enacted to regulate bill-boards in the state, then answered its own question with two words: Hardly any. Only two limits existed at the time: Signs couldn’t be placed on state property “without lawful permission,” or on private property without the owner’s or lessee’s consent. Placing a sign on or over a state highway without a permit was a public nuisance treated as a misdemeanor. But there was no provision, for instance, that would keep billboards from obscuring a driver’s line of sight at an intersection.

To their credit, some billboard companies recognized it was in their best interest to put on a good face. Attractive billboards not only addressed complaints about unsightliness, they were more likely to draw motorists’ attention.

Foster and Kleiser, a company founded in 1901 that came to dominate the western roadside, was among those to take the lead, forming its own art department in 1917. One of its designs featured white latticework below the display space that looked like something you’d see in an upper-class suburban garden. Narrow, rectangular faux columns on either side appeared to support a top crossbeam. The lattice aprons served a dual function: Not only were they aesthetically pleasing, they hid the posts holding up the sign—and, sometimes, obscured less pleasing roadside sights such as garages, garbage dumps, and scrap yards.

Other billboards featured art deco framing, threedimensional lettering, and cutout images that rose above the rectangular frame.

Foster and Kleiser even went so far as to design “sign parks,” complete with benches, drinking fountains, and flower gardens where “nature’s gorgeous colors” supplemented “the work of America’s foremost poster artists.” Neoclassical goddess-like figures they called “lizzies”—featured on numerous company signs from 1923 to 1931—adorned the columns of these signs, holding floral bouquets that matched the flowers growing in the parks’ gardens.

A billboard along Highway 39, near 101 in Orange County, advertises Christmas shopping at Knott’s Berry Farm—and 50 acres of free parking—in 1962. Orange County Archives.

Despite such nods toward aesthetics, the proliferation of billboards continued to vex drivers who felt as though they were driving through a forest of them on stretches of highway such as U.S. 101 through Orange County.

Finally, in 1958, Congress got around to adopting a law to regulate billboards. The Bonus Act offered states an incentive to limit roadside advertising within 660 feet of the new interstate highway system. It got its name because it offered states a half-percent bonus on construction costs for segments of highway that controlled outdoor advertising.

Then along came Lady Bird Johnson. The first lady considered beautification one of her signature goals, and she began a campaign to pull the nation together through the Vietnam War era: “Ugliness is so grim,” she commented. “A little beauty, something that is lovely, I think, can help create harmony which will lessen tensions.”

Johnson began a campaign that resulted in thousands of flowers being planted in the nation’s capital. She urged schoolchildren to engage in projects to “clean up, fix up and plant up” their communities. Meanwhile, she began lobbying to replace the junkyards, “a solid diet of billboards,” and various other eyesores that lined the nation’s highways with a tableau of blossoms and green space.

Billboard companies pushed back against the first lady’s Highway Beautification Act, forcing a compromise under which billboards were banned “except in those areas of commercial and industrial use.” Another amendment required that companies be compensated for removing billboards already in place.

But the act didn’t work the way it was supposed to. Loopholes such as the compensation clause allowed some old billboards to remain in place while new signs went up in ever-expanding industrial zones. Another amendment in 1978 required that billboard companies be paid if their signs were taken down for violating state laws or local ordinances—not just for failing to meet the federal standard. As a result, more than 40 years after the Highway Beautification Act became law, there were more billboards along the nation’s highways than before—nearly half a million as of 2007—while some 70,000 of those that violated the law had yet to be torn down.

A 1995 Los Angeles Times article marking the 30-year anniversary of the act decried the fact that “an island of litter and weed” greeted motorists on the Hollywood Freeway as they entered Los Angeles. Drivers on other freeways found their eyes assaulted by images of “hot-air balloons, high-flying whales and inflatable Godzillas.” The writer began the piece by remarking that it had been 30 years since Lady Bird Johnson had declared war on highway ugliness.

He punctuated that introduction with two words: “We lost.”

NEON NIGHTS

Neon signs hit the road in North America about the same time the federal highway system came into being. The system of producing a bright glow involved passing voltage through a tube containing neon gas, held there in a state well below atmospheric pressure. The process was first used just before the turn of the 20^th century, but it wasn’t until 1923 that it made its U.S. debut at a Packard dealership in Los Angeles. Earle C. Anthony bought two of the signs, with letters spelling out “Packard” (naturally) for $1,250 each.

The Noyo in Willits, built in 1939, still lights up its neon sign after dark.

Three years later—the same year U.S. 101 and the rest of the federal highway system were commissioned—a new technique enabled sign-makers to create lettering in various different colors by coating the inside of the tubes.

Motels loved neon, especially in Las Vegas, where the myriad lights created an otherworldly glow worthy of Area 51 up the road. But all sorts of businesses used it, from burger joints to bars to even sporting goods stores like Bucksport on the west side of 101 in Eureka. There, a glowing fish appears to leap off a sign that proclaims the business has been around since 1948.

That’s the era when neon reached its zenith, as signs multiplied into the 1950s before gradually giving way to cheaper signage such as translucent plastic casings that could be lit up from inside. Such signs became typical of gas stations, for example, as well as many other businesses. But neon didn’t die. In fact, it enjoyed a renaissance of sorts among merchants seeking to stand out and play upon motorists’ nostalgia for a simpler time. Ice cream shops, theaters, and bars in particular continue to make use of it. You can still find the aforementioned cocktail glasses at various points along western highways, which were once headquarters for movie theaters of both the walk-in and drive-in varieties.

Drive along the old “business” alignments of 101 today, and you’ll see plenty of theaters still showing first-run movies, their neon names blazing colorful trails across the night sky. Redwood Theatres built both the Noyo in Willits, in 1939, and the Ukiah up the road on Old 101 a few years later. (The Noyo’s actually on Commercial Street just a few steps east of U.S. 101.) Each has a distinctive neon sign, with the vertical pylon outside the now-Regal cinema in Ukiah enjoying protected status. The theater itself was built with a single screen in streamline modern style, although the interior was later redesigned as a six-screen multiplex.

The small Garberville Theatre has a vertical neon sign of its own and is noteworthy in that it’s still open after more than eight decades on Redwood Drive—the laterbypassed Business 101. Thomas and Margaret Tobin had opened the Garberville Inn on the street in 1923, when it was still just a dirt road and not yet a federal highway. A year later, to heighten the appeal of their establishment, the Tobins built a parking garage for patrons to keep the dust from accumulating on their vehicles. It was a smart move, but it proved unnecessary in the long run: Six years after the garage went up, road workers paved Redwood Drive with oil and gravel. Suddenly, the garage was a luxury the Tobins no longer needed.

As a result, they decided to sell it to a gentleman named William George Cooke Jr., who set about converting the building into a movie hall where first-run motion pictures could be shown. He installed 320 seats with spring cushions and included seating for children near the front, as well as box seats at the rear. Local merchants such as Piggly Wiggly and the Redwood Inn took out ads in the Redwood Record hailing the new theater’s grand opening on August 2, 1935, with the Garberville Mercantile anticipating Leonard Nimoy’s trademark invocation on Star Trek three decades later by declaring: “May It Live Long and Prosper.” The Eel River Café across the street added its congratulations, too. (Speaking of neon, the café’s sign is one that shouldn’t be missed on the old Redwood Highway: Its neon-lit chef can be seen “flipping pancakes” after dark, as the hotcakes flicker on and off in succession above his raised skillet.)

The first feature shown at the Garberville Theatre was a Will Rogers movie called Life Begins at 40, a sadly ironic title considering Rogers would die in a plane crash just 13 days after the film’s Garberville premier. The theater would be open Friday through Monday nights, with two showings each day, at 7:15 and 9 p.m.

Farther up the highway, the Fortuna Theatre opened in 1938. Like the Ukiah and Noyo cinemas, it was the work of the Redwood Theatres company, and it’s also been converted into a multiplex. The vertical neon sign out front went dark for 35 years beginning in 1965, but the theater was restored at the dawn of the new millennium, when 500 feet of new neon tubing was installed and the sign lit up the night once again on Main Street—the business alignment of 101 through town.

The Towne 3 Theatre, a renovated 1920s movie house on an old alignment of 101 called the Alameda, is still open in San Jose, complete with a fancy neon-accented marquee. The road curves westward and becomes Santa Clara Street farther south, and there you’ll find another theater promoted by neon—the now-closed Mexico, which opened in 1949 as the Mayfair and featured a space-age spire encircled by a series of neon rings.

If walk-in theaters were common sights along old alignments of the federal highways, drive-ins were even more prominent. You didn’t need to build a separate sign to attract drivers’ attention: The screens themselves served as their own billboards. All a theater owner had to do was set up a screen so its backside faced the highway, then plaster the face of it with colorful neon and, in some cases, eye-catching scenes such as the neon mural on the now long-gone Valley Drive-in Theatre in Montclair on old Highway 99. Built in 1948, it would have been more appropriate to El Camino Real: The mural showed a Native American watching from a mound as a driver and two passengers in an oxcart cross a stream. In the background, a priest walks out to meet them from the Santa Barbara Mission. The mural featured more than 2,500 feet of neon tubing, and if that wasn’t enough of a draw, the owners added a display of primates called Monkeyland for the younger set to enjoy as they entertained themselves in a playground.

Towne Cinemas in San Jose sits along The Alameda, an old alignment of 101.

Why haven’t you seen many of those big screens along California’s highways? For one thing, those big screens were built along older alignments before the road builders bypassed the cities. For another, most of them are gone now. In the latter years of the 20^th century, the number of drive-ins began to shrink dramatically. Cable TV and increasingly congested highways combined to make watching a movie from the relative discomfort of one’s car—complete with that faraway sounding radio sound—far less attractive as the years wore on. Why take your girlfriend to make out at the drive-in when you could enjoy each other’s company in private while taking in a next-to-new release on HBO via your big-screen TV?

The Valley Drive-In was torn down in 1980, and others fell to the wrecking ball, as well. At that point, there were still 2,500 drive-ins across the country; three-and-a-half decades later, fewer than 350 remained. The 101 Drive-In in Ventura, just off the highway on Telephone Road, opened in 1948 and added a third screen in 1969, but it closed before the new millennium after a half century in business and was torn down in 2001.

Still, a couple of drive-ins remained open along the Central Coast segment of U.S. 101 as of this writing. The Hi-Way Drive-In in Santa Maria opened in 1959 between the highway’s old (Broadway) and new (freeway) highway alignments on Santa Maria Way. Although the single screen doesn’t bear any neon signage, there’s a marquee out front that’s accented in red-letter neon after the sun goes down. Then, up the highway about 30 minutes in San Luis Obispo, there’s the Sunset Drive-In, whose name is emblazoned in large, red letters on the back of a screen that faces the highway and is visible from both directions. Built in 1950, it’s still operating 66 years later, but it isn’t the most impressive piece of neon on that stretch of highway. That honor belongs to the sign for the Madonna Inn, which is less than a mile away. It features the inn’s name, in all-capital white neon, against a pink backdrop that’s just below an intricate neon portrayal of a horse-drawn carriage in red, white, and yellow. Also in neon, a third section of the sign advertises the Copper Café’s “pastries” and “steak house.” Then, of course, there’s the standard vacancy sign in red neon.

Some of the neon treasures are vanishing as old motels and retail stores close, giving way to industrial complexes and other businesses that don’t have to advertise their presence on the highway. When I drove past the Western Motel on El Camino Real in Santa Clara, its eye-catching cactus sign was still there, but holes were all that remained where the neon lights used to be.

Still, neon continues to be a very real presence along the highway, reminding travelers of a simpler time when bright lights up ahead meant a place to stop for the night, a (sometimes) friendly bartender with a cold beer, or a place to drop in and see the latest Bogart or Marilyn Monroe flick. You don’t have to drive off to Vegas to see it; you just have to know where to look.

MUFFLER MEN

Not all roadside markers relied primarily—or even at all—on lettering. Arrows pointing the way to this or that roadside attraction have long been favorites, many of them adorned in dazzling colors. They tell the motorist to “stop here!” without saying it in so many words. One of the most famous arrows among highway buffs is the huge red one that’s the focal point of Roy’s Motel and Café, a lonely stop in Amboy along old Route 66. But there are plenty of others, as well, on motels, cinemas, and liquor stores (still a frequent sight along old highway alignments, from a time before public service campaigns against drinking and driving). In the 1950s and ’60s especially, a standard neon cocktail glass—often tipped to one side and accented with a swizzle stick skewering an olive—adorned many a roadside bar or restaurant.

Then there were the statues: larger-than-life human and animal figures enlisted as mascots for diner chains, auto shops, and golf courses, to name a few. When Bob’s Big Boy wanted to attract travelers, the restaurants put up giant signs accented by a circle of neon that appeared to rotate as it blinked on and off around the outer edge. But the chain went further: It began to station statues of a big boy at their front door to welcome guests. A very big boy.

The character was originally set to be called “Fat Boy,” until a six-year-old youngster named Richard Woodruff walked into Bob’s Pantry, a 10-seat coffee counter owned by Bob Wian in Glendale. According to legend, Wian greeted the kid, who had arrived to sweep the place, with, “Hey there, big boy.” He thought the name was catchy, so he applied it to his signature double-decker burger—reportedly the first of its kind.

The holes in the Western Motel’s cactus sign in Santa Clara show where its neon used to be.

The Big Boy serves up a huge (inedible) burger outside Bob’s in Burbank, where the Beatles once stopped for a bite.

The original character, conceived in the late 1930s, was drawn to resemble Woodruff, with checkerboard overalls and no shirt. It was only later, in the mid-1950s, that the cartoon mascot’s look was updated by a designer from Warner Brothers’ studios, just one town over from that original restaurant, in Burbank. That could explain the wide-eyed look the Big Boy shares with some of the famous Looney Tunes characters. The new big boy was a little more modest, sporting a T-shirt under his overalls, and wore a ’50s-style pompadour curl over his forehead.

The fiberglass big boys came in three sizes: 4-foot statues were used inside restaurants where zoning restrictions didn’t allow them outside the front door. There was also a 6-foot model and a big 12-footer, such as the one outside the Burbank location on Riverside Drive, a little over a mile from the 101. That restaurant, the oldest one still operating, was built in 1948, and you can sit in a booth there that’s marked with a plaque where the Beatles once enjoyed a meal.

Bob’s Big Boy statues were pretty much all the same, with the boy puffing out his chest behind those checkerboard suspenders and hoisting one of those doubledeck hamburgers in his right hand. One in Norco, off Interstate 15 in southern California, adds a little extra character to his wardrobe in the form of boots and a cowboy hat.

But the big boys weren’t the only statues by the side of the road.

Another burger joint, A&W, commissioned International Fiberglass to create a whole family of burger lovers (known, naturally, as the Burger Family) to serve as mascots for its restaurant chain in 1963. Each member of the “family” corresponded to a similarly sized burger on the menu: the Baby Burger was a bare-bones affair, with a small patty and ketchup on an unseeded bun. The Mama Burger added an onion slice, pickles, and mustard to the recipe, enlarged the beef patty, and added sesame seeds to the bun. The Teen Burger, on top of all that, had bacon and cheese, while the Papa Burger was a Mama Burger with a second patty.

There were other family members, too (an Uncle, Grandpa, and Buddy), but the four “nuclear” family members were the templates for the fiberglass figures, which weren’t as big as the Big Boy but struck a similar pose—holding a burger aloft, albeit in their left hand instead of their right. Often, they were placed on top of restaurants for maximum visibility. The Papa Burger, standing over eight feet tall, and the Teen Burger statues each held a mug of root beer in its right hand, but Papa often performed solo: Some locations only wanted to shell out the $600 it cost for the single statue rather than pay the $1,800 price tag for the entire set.

The Burger Family mascots gave way, in 1974, to a “Great Root Bear” promotion, and the chain urged local operators to put the fiberglass family in mothballs. Nevertheless, some of the statues survived and can still be seen along highways across the country—often surviving as mascots for independent burger joints rather than A&W. There’s a Papa Burger statue atop Winkins’ Drive-In off Business 99 in Selma (a former A&W location), and a Teen Burger statue stands guard at the 41 Café off State Route 41 in Lemoore.

Along old Highway 101, a Papa Burger greets customers at one of three Angelo’s Burgers locations in Oceanside.

Not all the fiberglass figures were people. Sinclair Oil set up green brontosaurus statues at some of its service stations, some of them made by the same outfit—International Fiberglass—that churned out the Burger Family figures. Indeed, the company kept itself busy throughout the ’60s, also creating statues, commonly known as “Muffler Men,” that popped up alongside highways all across the country.

The fiberglass statues didn’t just advertise mufflers at auto shops, although you can still see one doing precisely that at Babe’s Lighting and Muffler on the Alameda (Old 101) in San Jose. The blue-shirted statue’s head is inclined slightly down and forward, gazing at what’s in his hands: a muffler, naturally. But the mold used for the statue was versatile. The muffler could easily be replaced by a golf club, for instance, or an ax that transformed the statue into a good likeness of Paul Bunyan. Just paint on a beard, and voilà! The legendary lumberjack was ready to go. In fact, the first figure created from the mold was designed not as a Muffler Man, but as old Paul himself, for PB Café on Route 66 in Flagstaff, Arizona.

That was in 1962, when Bob Prewitt still owned the company called Prewitt Fiberglass. Steve Dashew bought it from him a year later, changed the name to International Fiberglass, and kept churning out those Muffler Men. They were even more expensive than the Burger Family (they were bigger, after all, at 20 feet tall), costing between $1,800 and $2,800 each, with a discount for bulk purchases.

You could modify them as needed for whatever sort of business you wanted to promote. One of the giants was created for a burger/ice cream stop called Frostie Freeze (home of the Hickory Burger) along the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. The building was built in 1949, the highway was signed as the 101 Alternate, and the statue was added later. He was decked out in a white outfit and a chef’s hat, holding—instead of a golf club, ax, or muffler—a gigantic hamburger in his outstretched hands.

A Muffler Man serves as the mascot for Babe’s Lighting and Muffler on the Alameda in San Jose.

Time passed, though, and the shop eventually changed hands to become a burrito place known as La Salsa. No need for a 20-foot-tall burger chef looming over the business? No problem. Just add a sombrero, a stylish mustache, and a colorful blanket over the shoulder, and you’ve got a “taco guy” mascot for your restaurant instead. (The hamburger, of course, had to go, and was replaced by an empty platter equipped with spotlights shining up on the now-much-darker-skinned face of our transformed burgermeister.)

The Muffler Man mold was also used as the basis for pirates, a gold miner, and even a clown. The arms were adjusted for a Native American statue, and a different head was added for some that took on the look of Mad Magazine mascot Alfred E. Neuman. A separate mold was used for the statue’s feminine counterpart, known as Miss Uniroyal because it was used to promote the tire company. She looked a little like Jackie Kennedy, her left hand raised in a mirror of Lady Liberty and holding anything from a torch to a sandwich platter to beach ball. She might have worn a waitress’s outfit, a cheerleader uniform, or a bikini.

While the Muffler Men and Women were ubiquitous roadside fixtures in the 1960s, their heyday was relatively short. Demand started falling in the early ’70s, with more and more freeway bypasses going in. Dershaw got married, and his priorities changed: He refocused his attention on the construction business. He tried to sell the Muffler Man molds, but found no takers, so they languished in a construction equipment yard. The last statues were made around the beginning of 1976, and when the yard was sold in the middle of that year, the molds were destroyed.

It was the end of an era to which scattered Muffler Men like Babe in San Jose remain as a testament along highways such as Old 101.

This Muffler Man once served up burgers but was later converted into a sombrero-wearing mascot for a Mexican restaurant on State Route 1 (formerly U.S. 101 Alternate) in Malibu.