The Orange Crush Ghost Sign

Feel fresh! Drink Orange-Crush. The diamond logo, the row of bottles, the promise of a carbonated beverage: this wall is a piece of American soda advertising, hand-painted the way it would have been when painted brick was the billboard of its day.

What a ghost sign is

A ghost sign is a painted wall advertisement that has outlived the campaign, and usually the company, that paid for it. Before printed billboards took over, sign painters (the trade the Walldogs descend from, and the reason for the name: the “wall dogs” were the crews who painted ads on brick) lettered ads directly onto buildings. Decades of weather fade them into ghosts.

The 2007 Walldog Wave included two ghost sign restorations among its ten walls, and this is one of them (the Kodan Feed Mill signs are the other). Where most of Algoma’s Walldog murals are new compositions honoring town history, the ghost signs bring the town’s actual advertising layer back to the surface. Orange Crush fits the event’s before-1960 rule perfectly: the brand’s diamond-label era is straight out of the mid-century main street this district still is.

Who painted it

The project leading artist was Bernie Gietl of Carlinville, Illinois, and the wall was sponsored by the Algoma Optimist Club. The Main Street Program’s walking-tour brochure lists it as entry B in the lettered mural key.

A small archival note: for years the only online trace of Gietl’s involvement was a misspelled photo filename on a 2007 sign painters’ forum page. The brochure settled it. That is what this register is for.

The Walldog Wave

Over three days, June 21 to 23, 2007, more than one hundred Walldogs, the international guild of mural and sign painters who keep the old hand-lettering craft alive, painted ten murals on historic downtown Algoma buildings. The event was conceived through the Algoma Main Street Program’s preservation work and coordinated by local Walldog Dave Petri. This register documents every wall in the set.

If you painted here in 2007, or have photographs from that week, we would genuinely like to hear from you.

Sources

• Historic Algoma Walking Tour, Volume II (Algoma Main Street Program brochure; ed. Leon Raether)
• Letterville sign painters’ forum, Walldog Wave 2007 meet page (contemporaneous photos)
• The Walldogs, past events: Walldog Wave, Algoma 2007 (via Internet Archive)