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I was driving around with my dad and we found ourselves downtown and he asked me if I wanted to get a photo of Fort Worth Champion Spring Service's sign. I said, "Hell, yeah," and he proceeded to pull right up on the curb.
I got out and snapped this photo. It's an old as hell neon sign. The place has been there since 1928. Their sign features a leaf spring and a shock absorber.
I think it may well be out of business because it was closed, locked up and there wasn't a car in either of its two lots, one on each side of the building.
And it's website address comes up with one of those obnoxious pages you get when a website is long gone, the one with advertising replacing the original website.
Once this restaurant's namesake, Vivian Courtney (click on her name to view a video tribute to her and photos of the inside of her restaurant), died in 2004 it was closed. The main building, which was as unique as the sign, was leveled (wished I'd taken a shot of it before it was bulldozed) but the place's unique sign remains to this day.
In fact, if you want the sign you can have it. John T. Roberts posted this @ Fort Worth Architecture, "If anyone is interested, the old neon Vivian Courtney's Restaurant sign is available to anyone who wishes to take it away. It is a two-sided exposed neon sign with the letter 'V' on top. It sits at the corner of Jacksboro Highway and Roberts Cut-Off Road @ 5915 Jacksboro Highway. I tried to find a home for it with two organizations but they did not have a place to put it. Now I'm offering it to anyone who thinks they can remove it and preserve it. The sign is about 28 feet tall and about 12 feet wide at the widest point."
Me and my friends ate their several times. It was a cool a place, with photos and posters from Old Hollywood --- we're talkin' John Wayne, Elvis Presley, Gone With The Wind, etc. --- hanging on the walls and in each booth there were equipped with miniture jukeboxes that really worked. You put in a quarter and got to choose three songs.
It had a buffet at lunch or you could order off the menu. The eats were simple good ol' white trash cuisine dishes.
A beautiful place that is now in the dustbin of history. Too bad. To me, the old stuff is, and still will be, the best stuff.
Yeah, as I get older I cherish the good ol' days more.
Yes, I'm sentimental but that comes with age and there's nothing wrong with getting older because you get smarter and realize that the modern stuff is just stuff that's not worth a damn (iPods & cell phones, for example) in my opinion.
When me and two ladies from work went to Thrift Town, on Jacksboro Highway in far west Fort Worth, Texas, I decided to take pictures of the surrounding area while they shopped. In the same shopping strip as the thrift store was an Arby's with one of its original huge neon signs, which looks like a tall ass cowboy hat. I wanted to document this bad ass sign so I took this picture of it. I love the colors, maroon, yellow and white. And look at the words "HURRY IN" followed by a notice that the place is "OPEN LATE". So why be in such a hurry if it's open late?
My second ex-wife told me she once worked at an Arby's in Erie, PA, her hometown, and said that the 'roast beef' was actually a HUMONGOUS and heavy piece of frozen meat formed into a round ball that they cut up in the back. So just think of that when you bite into one of their roast beef sandwiches. I know they're good but that shit arrives totally frozen and in a huge ball-like mass.
Yeah, I want to "hurry in" and eat that shit. NOT.
Anyways, here's an interesting tidbit I found on Wikipedia.org about Arby's:
"In the mid to late 19th century, a saloon was founded in West Texas by a retired Civil War Captain, Daniel J. Arby. The saloon gained much renown throughout the pan-handle for it's fine southern food and large gaming hall. After five years of outstanding popularity among Texans, Arby decided to expand his saloon to neighboring towns where the menu expanded and included his famed roast beef sandwich and family recipe barbecue sauce. After generations of the Arby family passed down the recipes and the saloon chain gained popularity in the early 20th century, the saloon was updated to restaurant status and included nightly entertainment (everything from magicians to minstrel shows). In the 1930s the family lost almost everything as the United States fell deeper into the Great Depression and was forced to sell their beloved restaurant chain. The Arby's name changed hands over the next 30 years, being owned at one point by the great Howard Hughes, until it was finally bought by brothers Forrest and Leroy Raffel in Ohio, who were determined to own a fast food franchise based on a food other than hamburgers. The brothers were insistant on changing the name to the preferred name of "Big Tex," but that name was already being used by an Akron businessman. They eventually decided on the Arby's moniker, based on R.B., the initials of the Raffel brothers [1] and also because they realized they could accomplish this without changing the original name, thus Arby's, LLC was born. (By coincidence, R.B. can also be short for roast beef, the company's main product, a point which was used when the backronym "America's Roast Beef, Yes Sir" was used as an advertising campaign in the 1980s.) They maintained the cowboy hat logo in reverence of the humble beginnings of the fast-food chain."
UPDATE: This sign is gone. So is the Arby's restaurant. It's boarded up. This is why I take photos around town of stuff like this knowing at some time or another it will be gone to make way for something new, er, worse. It's important to document with your camera your surroundings because one day a picture you took something of will no longer exist.
My buddy, Motel Todd, got his nickname, bestowed upon him by yours truly by living at the Caravan Inn for a year and a half, from March '98 to October '99.
This motel has been at its same location, at the corner of Jacksboro Highway and River Oaks Boulevard in Fort Worth, for as long as I can remember, and that's way back to the '60s.
In fact, my step-father told me a funny story, that I can't recall the particulars of at the moment, about him driving his car into the place's pool in the '60s.
Todd's room was a typical motel room with the usual amenities. I think he paid $520 a month for his one room, though he had to pay weekly and he didn't have a kitchen but used a microwave and cooler instead. He said the free coffee was in the lobby sitting on a little table in the corner.
Located on Arlington's Division Street, a four lane thoroughfare through the middle of town, that is populated with pawn shops, seedy motels, suspect car lots, bail bondsmen businesses, car repair places, beer joints, dives and other shady flotsam and jetsam enterprises, is the Why Not? Club, which advertises in neon outside its front entrance "COLDEST DRINKS IN TOWN."
As I drove up and down Divison looking for photo ops, after taking a trip over to Arlington Camera, a place full of stuck up salespeople who cater to their favored clientel over unknown individuals truly interested in photography, a place with a snobby staff (why are these photo geeks such dicks and clueless as to what they're selling?) for a Nikon Day demo in order to check out the then new D700, which I eventually purchased off of eBay on Black Friday --- the day after Thanksgivings Day ---- in 2008, I spotted this classic beer joint, just a small, simple square red brick building in the shape of a shoe box, and stopped by to get a photograph, using my D80, of the bar's groovy as hell sign.
Took a lunch time trip with a couple of co-workers to a Salvation Army thrift store on Fort Worth's north side and as we were driving down NW 28th Street we came upon this wild ass lookin' tattoo parlor. The woman driving stopped in its parking lot, all gravel, and I hopped out of her SUV and snapped this pic. Look at the clown. Look at his pants. See that chopped off arm clinging to his pants? OH MY GOD.
And, hey, this place has a badass website. Check it out here by clicking this link Apathy International and here's a story about the place from the FW WEEKLY, Skin Deep.
I've never gotten a tattoo. Not that I wouldn't want one. I just have never figured out what I'd want tattooed on my ass. Well, not my ASS, literally. But if I do think of something to get emblazoned onto my flesh I'll go to this place for sure. In fact, this might inspire me to really think hard on what I'd want. Now, if I think of something then I'll draw it myself and take it to them. If I'm gonna get some "ink" then I want it to be something I've drawn, something original.
Anyway, this place is fucking cool, period.
I snapped this photo while in a co-worker's car heading west on Interstate 30 near the Montgomery Street exit. Since the shot was kind of f-ed up because I shot it with a slow lens and from inside a car going 70 mph I used Capture NX and Nik Software's Color Efex Pro 3.0 Polariod Transfer filter to make it look like this instead.
Then when I hit the Internet Tubes to find out more about this SODYPOP billboard from Pepsi (I drink Coke) I found some truly upset Pepsi drinking mofos. Check out these links 'cause these blogger folks are pissed off:
Nikdaum.com
Suck At Life
Even The Paranoid Right Wingers See A Twisted Political Angle In It
And the Urban Dictionary says 'sody pop' is a "hick" phrase for soft drinks. I'm a hick and I've never used sody pop when referring to a soft drink. I always say Coke. As in, "What kind of Coke do you want?" Or, "What do you want to drink?" In Texas no one I know says soft drink or sody pop. It's Coke or Pepsi or Sprite or Iced Tea or whatever.
I was driving around with my dad and we found ourselves downtown and he asked me if I wanted to get a photo of Fort Worth Champion Spring Service's sign. I said, "Hell, yeah," and he proceeded to pull right up on the curb.
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