Salt Lake evening Democrat. [volume] (Salt Lake City, Utah) 1885-1887, 1885-06-01
SIGN PAINTING In THE ROUGH.
How Fences and harms are Dashed
With All Sorts of advertisements.

"No," said an advertising sign painter,
at doesn't take much money or much
enterprise to stick few thousand little
advertising boards along the railway and
wagon roaus. IL Is all very cheap. That
board there, for instance, six inches by
three feet in size, costs only $50 per l 200
That's only 8 cents apiece. Very, very
cheap. a couple of cheap boys with a
cheap horse and wagon can put up 200 Of
'em in day. The lettering is all done
by stencil. You can get 'em four feet
long for $40 thousand, 5 feet for $50 and
so on. Take that heavy board with the
trimming, foot wide and six feet long,
painted in blue and white-that's only sc
cents when ordered in 500 of 1000 lots.
That will wear through many years.
There isn't as much of the sign advertis-
ing business done as there was years ago.
The newspapers are monopolizing every
thing. This 'snipe' work along the rail
road fences and country roads hangs out
about as well as anything. OF course the
patent medicine firms send out their own
men who do nothing else but travel and
paint. We have done good deal of that
work for Chicago merchants.
GAS rule 'sniping' is the best, and it
doesn't cost anything. We stick 'em on
anywhere. But where there is a really
good fence or barn it is usually taken up
right quick. Fences are sometimes sold.
but not often. Barns usually bring S..
There are mighty few farmers that won
permit their barns to be daubed for So,
though once in while we strike crank
that you couldn't buy for love or money.
| remember one case out on the Niles
Centre gravel road. A farmer had lust
put up beautiful barn with cleatings,
cupalO, weather vane, everything nice.
1t was all ready for the painters. We
came along and found the farmer gone to
town. His wife was at home. Did she
want the barn painted for nothing? She
was undecided. Finally we found out
she wanted new cloak and we gave her
an order for S. toward the new cloak on
the house we were working for, and told
her we'd paint the barn nicely and the
little advertisement would not hurt it.
The cloak order caught her and we went
TO work When we got through with that
barn it was black from gutter to gable
roof and all, except where we had put on
the white letters. Just as we got through
the farmer came home. He hardly knew
ms OWN pace and came near driving by.
MadF tie was the maddest man Won
ever saw. He was going to arrest us,
shoot us, burn the barn down, and ali
such things. But his wife got her cloak
and the black and white barn still stands.
Sometimes we work good fence on
the sly. Many a time have | crawled
through field on my hands and knees.
with my bucket and brush hung around
my neck, in order to get fence and Get
1t painted unobserved. L painted a splen-
did fence once, and was nearly ali the
afternoon at it, when the owner was plant
ing potatoes right on the other side of it.
once he actually sat down on the top of
the fence, and when he got up had a
streak of paint horizontally across his
pantaloons But ne never discovered the
JOB until after had got away. When a
JOB like that is done there isn't much use
to kick. "-Chicago Herald.