[ His life | The tools | Gold leaf on glass | Why nobody does it now | Twenty signs | The Pattern Book ]

If you grew up in northeast Iowa between Harry Truman and George Bush, you have probably read my father's handwriting without knowing it. Charles Iversen, called Chuck by everyone but the bank, painted signs in New Larvik, Iowa, for forty-four years: storefront windows in gold leaf, barns and brick walls, delivery trucks, the water tower, the gym floor at the high school, and the "Welcome" sign at the edge of town. In the lower corner of nearly every one, in letters a quarter inch high, he signed it: C. Iversen.

He died in October 1994. I'm his older son, James. I teach art at a high school in Cedar Rapids, and every year I show my students how he did what he did, and every year a few of them don't believe a person could do it with a brush. This page is for them, and for anybody who has ever stopped on a sidewalk to look at a gold window.

HIS LIFE
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Dad was born in New Larvik in 1922 and drew on everything he could reach, including, my grandmother said, the inside of the hymnal. In 1942 he went into the Army. Somebody at a supply depot in England found out the farm kid from Iowa could letter, and he spent most of the war painting signs, stenciling crates and lettering truck bumpers, with a tour across France behind the infantry doing the same. He said it was the best training anybody ever got for free.

He came home in early 1946 and painted his first paid job that March, a price board for the farmers' co-op. That winter he went down to Waterloo and worked for an old sign man named Willie Guay, who taught him gold leaf. In the spring of 1947 he bought a small house in New Larvik with a garage behind it, and the garage became the shop. He married my mother, Jeanette, in 1948. I came along in 1950 and my brother George in 1951, and we both grew up in that house, washing quills and fetching cans.

He worked everywhere within forty miles. Spring and summer were walls, barns and trucks; fall was the football programs and the county fair; winter was windows and showcards, indoors where the paint would flow. He was fast and he was careful, which is rarer than either one alone. I never saw him use a ruler for spacing. He did it by eye, and if you checked him afterward with a ruler he was right.

Arthritis got into his right hand in the late 1980s. He lettered his last window in the spring of 1990, at sixty-eight, and hung his mahl stick on two nails over the workbench, where it still hangs. Mom still lives in the house. The shop smells of turpentine to this day, and I hope it always will.

THE TOOLS
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The mahl stick. A light stick about three feet long with a padded knob on one end. A sign painter holds it in his off hand, rests the knob on the work, away from the wet paint, and rests his brush hand on the stick. It keeps the hand steady and off the paint. Dad's was a length of hickory with a ball of cotton wrapped in chamois and tied on with string. He rewrapped the knob every few years and never replaced the stick.

Lettering quills. Long, soft brushes of squirrel hair, set in actual bird quills (that's the name) and fitted onto wooden handles. The long hair holds a lot of paint and comes to a sharp chisel edge, so one stroke makes a clean letter stroke from end to end. Dad had them in a dozen sizes. Between jobs they lay flat in a tin with lard oil worked into the hair, to keep them soft and shaped. For big letters he used stiff flat bristle brushes called fitches.

Sign enamel. Lettering enamel, mostly One Shot, in small cans, thinned a little with turpentine or linseed oil depending on the weather and the surface. It was mixed on a "palette" that was really an old magazine: you worked the paint on the top page and tore it off when it got messy.

The gilder's tip. A wide, thin brush of very fine hair glued between two pieces of cardboard, used for one thing only: picking up a sheet of gold leaf, which is too thin to touch with your fingers. Dad stroked it across his hair before every leaf. The tiny bit of oil and static from his hair was enough to lift the gold.

And the rest: a pounce wheel (a little spur on a handle for perforating paper patterns), a pounce bag of powdered chalk, a chalk line, a T-square, charcoal sticks for roughing in, a box of single-edge razor blades, and a china marker behind each ear.

GOLD LEAF ON GLASS
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A gold window is lettered from the inside, backwards, so the gold sits behind the glass, out of the weather, and reads correctly from the street. Done right it lasts fifty years. Here is how Dad did it, the way he taught me.

1. The pattern. He drew the lettering full size on paper and ran the pounce wheel along every line. He taped the pattern to the outside of the glass and patted it with the pounce bag, so a chalk outline showed through from inside, where he worked.
2. Clean glass. He scrubbed the inside of the glass with whiting and water until the water sheeted off without beading. Any grease, and the gold won't take.
3. The size. Glass gilding is "water gilding." The size, the glue, is plain gelatin dissolved in hot water. Dad used an empty gelatin capsule from the drugstore, cooked in a little pan on a hot plate in the shop. He flowed the size onto the glass with a soft brush over a letter or two at a time.
4. The leaf. Twenty-three karat gold, beaten so thin you can see light through it, comes in little books of twenty-five leaves, each about three and three-eighths inches square. He laid the book open, touched the gilder's tip to a leaf, and brought it to the wet glass. When the leaf gets close, it jumps the last quarter inch on its own and lies flat. Each leaf overlapped the last.
5. Drying and burnishing. When the size dried, the gold tightened against the glass. He rubbed it very gently with a wad of clean cotton until it shone like a mirror. Then he usually gilded the whole thing a second time to fill the pinholes, because with daylight behind it, one layer shows every flaw.
6. Backing up. With a fine quill and black backing paint he painted over the back of each letter, exactly along the chalk outline. This is the part that takes the steady hand, because the backing paint is the edge of the letter.
7. Cleaning off. When the backing was dry, he washed away all the gold outside the letters with water and cotton and a razor blade. The backed-up letters stayed.
8. Outline and shade. Last, he painted an outline and, often, a drop shade in enamel, usually black, sometimes red or deep blue, laid on behind the gold edges.

On the fancy jobs he did "engine turning," rubbing rows of little overlapping swirls into the gold with a velvet-covered dowel before backing it up, so the letters flicker as you walk past. You can still see it in the Roehl Hardware window. Gold on wood and trucks was different again: he painted the letters in an oil size, waited until a knuckle squeaked on it, and pressed on gold leaf that came backed with tissue paper.

WHY NOBODY DOES IT NOW
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In the early 1980s a machine came along that cut letters out of a roll of colored vinyl with adhesive on the back. A sign shop types the words into a computer, the machine cuts them, somebody peels away the extra and sticks the letters on a truck door or a window. No brush, no years of practice, no waiting for paint to dry, and it was cheaper. By the middle of the decade every new truck in the county had vinyl on its doors, and Dad was losing the small jobs that had been the bread and butter of his trade. The new stores out by the highway came with plastic signs, lit from inside, made in a factory somewhere else.

Dad called vinyl "sticker work." He wasn't bitter about it, mostly. He said the machine spaced letters like a man counting on his fingers, and he was right; you can see it on any truck. What he minded was that people stopped being able to tell the difference. The arthritis decided the rest.

There are still a few sign painters out there, and some young ones learning gold leaf from the old ones. I hope there will be more.

TWENTY SIGNS STILL STANDING
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My brother George and I drove the county this summer with Dad's job ledger on the seat between us. These are twenty of his signs that are still standing, from best kept to worst. Most are in New Larvik. If you go, look for the signature.

Not on the list: the high school gym floor, which he painted every time it was refinished from 1952 until 1988. The floor was replaced in 1992. The old center circle is somewhere in a landfill, and I try not to think about it.

Next: The Pattern Book, his alphabets and the rules he laid out every sign by.

Worth a visit: 216 Safe Colors, by Tom Ulmer, a retired sign painter in Allentown, Pennsylvania, who has charted all the colors that come out right on every computer screen and added a list of which color combinations read best from across a road. Black on yellow is at the top of his list. It was at the top of Dad's too.

people have stopped on the sidewalk here since November 1998.

If you have one of Dad's signs, or a story about one, please write:
[email protected]
Last updated September 12, 1999