( continues...) Oil Co., the venerable California firm founded in 1890, asked Y&R to design a sign that would rise next to a cable-supported "sky train" at the World's Fair.
Pedersen began fiddling with the advertising schematic Union Oil was already using — the blocky numbers, the orange-and-blue motif that seemed radical at a time when most of the competition had settled on tamer reds, whites and blues.
"I thought: 'We've got to do something really hot — a big ball, lit from the inside,' " he said.
By the time he had found someone who could mold plastic into two halves of a ball that would reach 12 feet in diameter, he had spent an estimated $50,000, he said. A Y&R manager called in a rage.
"He said: 'What are you doing up there?' " Pedersen recalled. "I said: 'I'm hanging a sign, man!"
Pedersen said he was nearly fired — but Union Oil loved it. Company executives declared that they would erect as many balls as they could. The first went up in Redondo Beach. By the end of the decade, there were thousands, mostly in the West.
They became an oddball expression of unity. Union Oil eventually created tiny versions that could be affixed to car antennas, and distributed millions of them. Nowhere, it seemed, did they have as much resonance as they did in Southern California.
Preservationists attribute that to two things.
First, Los Angeles, largely because its economy catered to so many car travelers, was essential in the development of creative advertising and roadside signs. In 1923, for instance, an L.A. Packard dealership is believed to have become the first U.S. business to use a neon sign. That same year, a sign reading "HOLLYWOODLAND" — later shortened — was erected to advertise a new development in the hills above downtown.
"The 76 sign is part of a tremendous history," said Alan Hess, an Irvine architect and author of 10 books on 20th century architectural history. "The 76 sign was colorful, it was shapely, and it was delightful. It was also functional; your tank is getting low, you see it far down the street and you knew exactly where you were going to get gas."
Second, unlike some European cities or more mature U.S. cities, Los Angeles has few significant public buildings beyond City Hall, the Department of Water and Power building and a handful of others.
Commercial structures are the foundation of the sightline. Right or wrong, those structures are an important part of the region's history, said John English, a board member of the Los Angeles Conservancy and an architectural historian.
"You could look at this and say that it's the most ridiculous thing in the world," English said. "But our relationship to commercial iconography, that really is our heritage."
When the subject is a hunk of plastic, that's heady talk. And it has been drowned out in recent years by another trend: the effort to protect communities' identities by cleaning up their sightlines — starting by targeting tall "lollipop" signs that many planners and corporate executives have come to see as clutter.
It was true across the region, but pronounced in places like Orange County, where civic leaders decided, in the name of maturity, to do away with structures and signs that were built to invoke images of postwar prosperity and imagination — space exploration, for instance, or the solar system. Visiting business executives, those leaders decided, no longer wanted to call their offices to explain that messages could be left for them at the Cosmic Inn or the Inn of Tomorrow.
Tall, flashy signs began to come down at a rapid pace, replaced, with the financial assistance of taxpayers, with lowerlying, more stoic "monument" signs. It was a controversial movement; monument signs are often derided as "tombstones" among those who yearn for more roadside diversity, and English said the loss of commercial art risked "turning everything into oatmeal." But the trend toward uniformity was strong.
"The effort was noble," said Wally Linn, a former mayor in La Palma, one of the cities where the (continued...)