The decades-old sign painted on the side of a brick building on West Seventh Street in downtown Little Rock is worn in places but, for the most part, still vibrantly colored.
It is a time capsule of sorts, recently uncovered after more than half a century.
The Dr Pepper advertisement which, judging by the soft drink’s icons and slogans dates to about the 1940s (before the period in “Dr.” was dropped in the 1950s), owes its survival to a building at West Seventh and Cross streets that had been extended and entombed the exterior wall. When that building, Massery Cleaners and Laundry, was recently razed to make way for surface parking for Metropolitan Emergency Medical Services, the ad was exposed.
The message in fanciful script is endearingly antiquated and haunting.
“Drink a bite to eat at 10, 2 and 4 o’clock. Dr. Pepper in bottles. Good for Life!”
The Good for Life in the tail sweeping back from the final “r” in the product’s name came along after 1923. During the World War II era, the soda was advertised as a good between-meal snack, using expressions such as the “liquid bite” or “Drink a bite to eat at 10, 2 and 4 o’clock.”
“Any historic building is important but when something like this is found on one, it adds a little something to it,” says Mark Christ, community outreach director with the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program. “It’s just sad we had to lose a historic significant building to find it,” he adds, referring to the razing of the Massery, which was also a contributing structure in the historic district.
Whenever old outdoor advertising art is uncovered, it’s an important discovery, says Cynthia Haas, co-author along with Jeff Holder of Ghost Signs of Arkansas, a photographic collection of historic painted outdoor advertising signs published in 1997 by the University of Arkansas Press.
“This is the way products were advertised between the 1870s and the 1950s,” says Haas, arts and education manager with the Arkansas Arts Council.
“The earliest one that’s been found in Arkansas so far dates to the late 1800s.”
There is no way to preserve the painted sign, which, in time, will fade away.
“I’m not going to bother it in any way,” assures the building’s owner Bobby Cassinelli of Little Rock, who bought the building from the Dr Pepper bottling company in 1968. “I hope it stays there as long as it can.”
The recently uncovered Dr Pepper ad hails from around the 1940s and Kerry Kemp, the owner of Art Outfitters art supply store, also on West Seventh just a few blocks away, is confident the sign painter who crafted this work of art was her grandfather Robert Adair.
“He did all of the Dr Pepper outdoor advertising signs in the 1940s and 1950s and also a lot of the Coca-Cola ones,” she says. “There’s a Coke sign in my parking lot on Vino’s next door that’s pretty faded but I’m pretty sure he did that one, too, and he was one of the first group of men to do the gilding on the state Capitol’s dome in the late 1920s or 1930s.”
Born in 1911, Adair began painting signs in 1923 when he was 12.
“During the Depression years, he and his cousin couldn’t find any work here and would walk to Pine Bluff and paint signs there,” explains his daughter Jerry Adair Kemp, 77, who works at her daughter’s business as the bookkeeper.
“He once painted a real innovative Coca-Cola sign next to one of the bridges crossing from Little Rock into North Little Rock and was given a trip to Coca-Cola offices in St. Louis to explain how he did it,” she says of the sign which, through an optical illusion, changed appearance depending on the the angle from which it was viewed. “I remember my mom and little sister got to take the trip with him and they were all very excited about it.”
Using a wooden mahl stick to rest his hand, Adair created his signs with brush and paint. He created advertising signs on buildings. Other days, he might use gold leaf to paint glass office doors.
“When I was in elementary school, one of my friends once commented that my dad had the most beautiful clothes of anyone they knew because they had every color on them,” Jerry Adair Kemp says, laughing. “We used to joke that if Daddy was ever cut, he would bleed paint.”
She remembers playing around him in the backyard of their home on West 28th near High Street (now Martin Luther King Jr. Drive) while he was working on various projects. She recalls how her father folded pieces of paper, origami style, to make small containers to hold paint.
“We were thrilled when that wall became exposed,”says Elizabeth Darr, another Adair granddaughter who works with her sister and mother at Art Outfitters.
She and her sister have fond memories of their grandfather.
“I do calligraphy,” Kerry Kemp says. “And sometimes he would call me up and say, ‘I did some of your work today,’meaning he’d worked with a pen instead of a paintbrush. And I’d respond with, ‘Well, I did some of your work today, too,’ if I’d done some painting. But he was much better working with a pen than I was with a brush.”
She also remembers visiting her grandfather in his Asher Avenue studio and watching him work. He loved his craft, she says, and continued to paint as long as he was able, working the last few years of his career for Mizell Signs in Little Rock. Adair died in 2000 at 89.
“This building I’m in burned shortly after I bought it in 2003,” Kerry Kemp says. “When I was restoring it, I said I was going to paint a Dr Pepper sign on the wall in here because I love my grandfather and I love Dr Pepper but I haven’t done it yet and probably won’t ever get around to it.
“Maybe I can get a big photograph of the sign that’s just been uncovered and display it instead.”
Style, Pages 27 on 09/24/2013