Awesome. I hope they do it. 
http://timesdaily.com/stories/...ca-Cola-signs,195091
FLORENCE — An iconic pair of giant neon signs that lit the nighttime sky now rest in a field in an industrial park, but a group of preservation-minded people is trying to bring them back to life.
The big Coca-Cola signs once sat atop the bottling plant on South Court Street, and could be seen from O’Neal Bridge over the Tennessee River. Erected in 1948, the signs contained an estimated 5 miles of neon tubing.
The bottling plant, which was considered state of the art in the late 1950s, was torn down in 2004. Now, Coca-Cola is distributed from a facility in the Florence-Lauderdale Industrial Park.
“I would give anything to see it somehow restored to the city skyline,” said Mark Beumer, a former Coke employee and one of the leaders in the effort to restore the signs. “Those signs were part of the skyline from 1948 until it was torn down. It’s a tragedy they’re not there welcoming people to Florence.”
Coca-Cola operations came to the Shoals in 1908, Beumer said, first in Sheffield and then moving to Florence in 1916.
The soft drink originally was available only as a fountain drink. Bottling began in 1900, and the distinctive curved, pale green glass bottle was introduced in 1916, according to the Coca-Cola website.
Neither the company nor the local bottler actually owned the two big signs, said Larry Faulkner, a Florence native who initiated the effort to restore the signs.
“Columbia Sign Co. in Sheffield owned them,” he said. “It was a promotional tool to say, hey, look what we can do with neon.”
Beumer said the local bottler paid a monthly fee to Columbia to use the signs. Columbia Sign is no longer in business, he said, and the current owner of the Coca-Cola distributor was not interested in erecting the signs in the industrial park.
The first step in preserving the signs will be finding a place to erect them, said Billy Ray Warren, president of Historical Preservation Inc., of Florence. The second step would then be raising money to perform restoration, he said.
And Warren has no doubt they can be returned to their original condition.
“Yes, they can be saved,” he said. “Where they are located is outdoors, but they spent their whole lifetimes outdoors, so they are perfectly restorable.”
City Councilman **** Jordan is among those trying the find a new home for the signs. He said the man who has them is willing to sell them.
“The signs are intact, but they are going to need some repairs,” he said. “The big thing is finding a building to put them on.”
Both Beumer and Faulkner said the repair and restoration costs will be considerable, and will require long-range fundraising. But for them, the effort is worth it.
Beumer and his parents worked at the downtown bottling plant for years. He has specific memories of how the signs worked.
“Harold Hammond was the general manager. He kept a screwdriver in his desk that controlled the timing of when the signs came on,” he said. “He wanted them on exactly at dusk, and he would call the National Weather Service to get the exact times of sunset and adjust the signs every week. They went off at 1 a.m. It was his theory that no one had any business drinking Coca-Cola after 1 a.m.”
Beumer had the signs placed on the Alabama Register of Historic Sites in the late 1980s.
Faulkner said he got interested in restoring the signs while watching a Boston Red Sox game on TV and noticing a large neon sign near the stadium. It reminded him of stories about the Coke signs in Florence.
“I’ve heard so many stories of guys who went off to war, and when they got back, they drove across the bridge and would see that sign and know they were home,” he said. “My dad was one of those guys.”
Warren said he has heard the same stories from people returning home from long trips.
“So, these signs are a piece of our culture, maybe even our psyche for some of us who are old enough to remember them,” he said.
Faulkner has created a Facebook page dedicated to the signs tagged Historic Neon Coke Sign Florence Alabama.
Robert Palmer can be reached at 256-740-5720 or robert.palmer@TimesDaily.com.
