Put a Star on It: A Brief History of the Welcome Sign

City markers and gateways have a history that stretches back centuries, but modern “Welcome” signs are the type developed in the age of the automobile. We see them through windshields – landmarks at the edge of town in all corners of the country, decorated with local symbols of culture, character and values. The gateway heading into old-time Greenville, TX proudly displayed their racism: “Welcome to Greenville – the blackest land – the whitest people.”

Reno’s arch, “The Biggest Little City in the West,” was built in 1926 to commemorate a new highway. Just a few years later, Las Vegas made one of its own. Never mind that Las Vegas – a stop on the L.A.-Salt Lake Railroad with a population of a couple thousand – didn’t appear on most maps in the 20s. Ripe with enthusiasm for construction of the dam, the city erected an arch over Fremont and Main by the depot that read, “Welcome to Las Vegas, Gateway to Boulder Dam.” The sign was painted wood and enough of an eye-sore that neighboring hotel owners lobbied for its removal little over a year later.

By the late 50s, Las Vegas had come into its own and was no longer a railroad town. Travel by air and automobile was booming, car culture was in its prime. Those driving in from Los Angeles on Hwy 91 found motels, resorts, and casinos lining the Strip all the way from the airport to downtown. Fifty years after the birth of the city, it was as if the perfect place for a city marker had suddenly emerged.

Whose idea was it to make the Welcome sign and place it there by the airport? Here, at the beginning of the story, we rely on anecdotes passed down over the decades. Most say it was Ted Rogich from a small local company called Western Electric Displays Inc, aka Western Neon, that sold the idea to Clark County. Another story has it the other way around, with a group of hotel and casino owners approaching Rogich. Either way, the first record we have of the idea is in Clark County’s Board of Commissioners meeting, Feb. 5, 1959, where a representative of Western presented the idea. The location of the sign was already established. The idea was approved by county commissioners and would be put out for bids. Western and their larger competitor, Young Electric Sign Co (YESCO), both bid for the job, with Western’s offer of $4000 winning approval in April. The design itself was approved on May 5th. We shall have a sign.

Ray Dennis Steckler was a low-budget filmmaker based in Las Vegas whose movies ranged from campy horror, to travelogue, to porn – sometimes all at once. Summer of 1965 he was the cameraman on a sexploitation thriller called “The Velvet Trap”. He shot a scene where the frame opens on a car coming down a long highway. The camera turns, following the car as it passes, and ends with a close-up on the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign – its big screen debut.

In the early years the sign shows up in snapshots and 8mm home movies taken by travelers – the kinds of people who parked at John Woodrum’s motel, or simply stopped in the middle of the road because there was so little traffic. Through the years in these travel photos we see new buildings popping up in the distance and little changes made to the sign by generations of maintenance crews. Later, the sign shows up on home movies shot on VHS, with mega-resorts in the background. The sign begins appearing as a kind of unofficial Sin City logo in scattered news and travel photos in the 60s and 70s eventually landing on the local phone book cover. It slowly grows in visibility, appearing in TV shows, music videos, video games and everything else.

Today the sign is adapted, copied and used on every possible thing you can think to sell, from the tacky to the sincere. Betty Willis herself once kept a scrapbook of these adapted uses but there would soon be too many to follow. Even the accolades were overwhelming. “People always want me to take pictures in front of the sign with showgirls or something,” she said, “it gets to be a burden.”

In the early 2000s, the Welcome design was used on a Nevada license plate, a charitable initiative supporting activities for the Las Vegas Centennial. This may have been the first time the public recognition of the sign could really be measured and the effort was a bonanza raising tens of millions of dollars which are used for cultural and historical programs to this day. (Ms. Willis had one of these plates on her car – hers read, MYSGN.) Safe and legal public access to the sign was finally made possible in 2008 with the construction of parking spaces and a pedestrian walkway. Clark County and the Nevada State Historic Preservation Office succeeded in having the sign listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2009. On the morning of October 2nd, 2017, the day after the Route 91 shooting, it became a spontaneous memorial further illustrating the importance of the sign.

There isn’t any one time when the sign became the icon. It happened slowly over time by pure endurance until everything else was blown up and it became the last piece of the fabulous 50s left standing. Even Mr. Woodrum’s motel, the Klondike Inn, has been gone for more than a decade. Much of the original Welcome itself sign was rebuilt with sturdier materials in the factory at YESCO, who took ownership of the sign with their purchase of Western Neon, and has maintained it ever since in a contract with the county. I’m told of efforts to tear down and replace the sign in the 70s, 80s and 90s that were thwarted by public outcry. These stories are hard to verify and true as they may be, come across sounding like legends of survival in a town once all too willing to dispose of its history. Perhaps the thing that most helped the sign survive was that it was built out on the fringe, on a small piece of land in the middle of the road.

Until that time comes when they blow it up and build a high rise in its place, drive carefully, come back soon.