Editor’s note: The following account follows an inquiry made by the writer, Chris Kuchem, after seeing a photograph printed in “125 Years with the Gallatin North Missourian,” a book published in 1990. On page 88 is a photograph of Swofford Motors which once conducted business just east of today’s Daviess County Library in Gallatin, which led to this letter.
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Dear Editor:
Back in 1979, a family friend invited me to see his car collection. Besides the cars, he had decorated his garage walls with old vintage LeMans posters (ca. 1920’s) and other auto related stuff. That inspired me and my best friend to do the same thing. We began scouring towns within a 200 mile radius of KC on weekends looking for old signs — particularly gasoline, oil, and anything else auto related. After building our collections for a while, I knew that I really wanted a Ford sign badly. My chance at one finally came in late May of 1981.
The Ford dealership in Princeton, MO, had gone out of business in early 1981 and they advertised their upcoming liquidation auction in the Kansas City Star paper. I knew this was my opportunity. There just had to be an old Ford sign there. We drove up to Princeton that Saturday morning in May only to find they didn’t have any old Ford signs on the premises. Ford Motor Company had dictated that all dealerships comply with new signage requirements which included the backlit plastic face signs. The dealer in Princeton had complied and, thus, all that was there were the new Plexiglas signs — of no interest to me. Disappointed, we boarded up to head for home. But instead of backtracking home on I-35, we decided to take a back roads route that took us through Trenton, Jamesport, and eventually Gallatin.
As we came into Gallatin from the east, we turned south on Main and when we got onto Grand, I looked westward and my heart stopped. There it was, an old double-faced porcelain Ford neon sign hanging over the sidewalk in front of Don Swofford Ford (I found out later that Don never did comply with Ford’s request and that’s why that old sign was still there). As we got closer, I noticed the windows were soaped up and the lot was vacant. Now my heart was beating fast. Could it be the dealership was out of business? We weren’t leaving town without finding out for sure. We went to Casey’s to see if anybody there knew the owner and soon found out it was Don Swofford.
I called Don from a pay phone (somebody explain to the kids what a “pay phone” is). We talked for a few minutes as he told me he had just closed the business a month earlier. I then got to the big question: “What are you going to do with the Ford sign out front?” Don said someone else had asked him about it a few years earlier but that was then and this is now. He asked what I might give for it. I didn’t want to risk insulting him, so I said: “You just tell me what you want for it and I’ll tell you if I can swing it.” He told me, I did indeed have that much cash in my pocket, and I said “I think we have a deal.” I went to his house, handed him a stack of $20’s, shook his hand, and left.
I’m not going to divulge what I paid him for it but it didn’t set me back too far. My wife was even on board with it — so how do you beat that? Nevertheless, now I have a new concern. I need to get the sign off the building and I need to do it FAST. We were in our old Dodge Dart and had nothing in the way of the equipment we’d need to remove the sign. So we pointed the Dodge toward home, and hit the WARP drive button to get back to KC and retrieve my work truck. Honestly, I also feared that every minute I didn’t secure that sign wasn’t going to work in my favor. If Don were to change his mind, that would be awful!
We got back to Gallatin that evening with bad weather coming up right behind us. We drove my pick-up truck with ladder racks on the sidewalk right up under the sign. Standing on the ladders laying atop the rack, we both lifted the sign off the mount and got it down into the bed. We made it.
A week later, my friend and I got inside the can, bypassed the broken neon tubes, and wired up what remained to see if we could light it up. It worked and to our delight, the Ford lettering lit up red (neon gas burns red) and the oval ring lit up blue (argon gas burns blue). I got replacement tubes for the broken ones and it’s been working fine for nearly 37 years.
This sign must date back to the 30’s. I assume it was always in Gallatin. The building we got it off of did not date back to the 30’s — it was built in the late 50’s. There’s a photo of the sign in Darryl Wilkinson’s book “125 Years with the Gallatin North Missourian” that was taken in 1966, judging from the newest cars parked out front. If anybody knows of or has photos of this sign hanging in front of a different building prior to where it was when we got it, I’d sure like a copy.
Chris Kuchem, Kansas City