P aul Barber reaches into a bucket, retrieving the feathery remnants of a dead bird and a chunk of a wasp’s nest. “The things you’ll find in an old sign,” the veteran sign-maker of over 50 years says with a grin, dusting his hands off on his jeans. “There was a lot of bird’s nest in this one.”
We’re standing inside one of his family’s old shops on the corner of Pennsylvania Street in Vallejo, where a 200-pound neon chick shrouded in butcher paper stands out among endless shelves of tools and ladder-lined walls. A cluster of people — a historian, two neon advocates, the owner of the sign and Barber’s brother, Mark — surround it like surgeons at an operating table, keenly inspecting it for lettering patterns and precise tracings.
After nearly a century of watching over Petaluma, the city’s iconic landmark — and one of the last surviving remnants of its heyday as the “egg basket of the world” — was removed from its roost above a faded brick building. But it won’t be gone for long.
Last Thursday, the neon chick made the 30-mile journey on a flatbed truck to the Vallejo shop, following the success of a $22,000 fundraising campaign to ensure its continued survival…