Signage of the Apocalypse #3

If it’s too inept…

If you read my haphazard Blogger profile, you’ll notice that one of my favourite books is Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. It’s a sad and wonderful collection of short stories about small-town characters, woven together by the experiences of a young reporter named George Willard.

Like George, I grew up and got my first newspaper gig in a small town. And like George, there was a defining moment when I knew I had to leave.

Now, unlike George, my departure wasn’t facilitated by a death, a failed romance, a fight and an adolescent epiphany - though it did make me briefly consider my hometown (Woodstock, Ont. - hmm, it even sounds like that book title) to be “squalid and commonplace.”

My epiphany was written on the back of a 1970 Chevelle.

Woodstock is one of those towns with a “main drag”, where the main dragsters cruise endlessly and pointlessly up and down all night long (Dundas Street, from the Tim’s to the McD’s and back), showing off their pseudo-muscle cars with their Cragar rims and chrome headers and whatnot.

Some of these cars had catchy slogans (or car stereo brands) plastered across their back windows. The Chevelle in question had the following, stuck on with those gold-coloured, trapezoidal letters that people used to use for boat numbers and mailboxes:

OK, so this graphic is a mock-up based on my fuzzy memory - it could have been a Malibu or a 442, and I don’t know if it was powder blue - but the spelling has HAUNTED ME FOREVER.

Four spelling mistakes in seven words! You couldn’t do worse if you tried.

I’d think that if you were driving down to the Canadian Tire or the Co-Op to buy letters to permanently pimp your ride with a classic, stick-it-to-the-man phrase (anyone know where it originated?), you might check the spelling with a friend who had passed Grade 10. But no, 1980s Woodstonian, you did not.

One look at that car, and I knew my time was up. Like George Willard, I packed my bags and left town for good, letting Woodstock “become but a background on which to paint the dreams of my manhood.”

Except my manhood will go through a spell checker first.

[Previous Signage of the Apocalypse here and here. Apologies for the posting gap - I was having “broken pipe” problems between Blogger and Netfirms, which seem to have been resolved. For now.]

Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 09-08-2006 | 02:09 PM
Posted in: Apocalypse signs