Signs of the times

As you travel through Cincinnati in your charter bus, coach bus, party bus, mini bus, passenger coaches or school bus rented from Bus Rentals Cincinnati, you can’t help but notice the plethora of road signs, advertising billboards, neon signs and so on decorating your route. Some are innovative, others are controversial, some are downright ugly. But no matter what your feelings, as you ride down the road in your charter bus, the signs have served their purpose, they caught your attention.
For a celebration of all things to do with signs, take your rental bus down to Monmouth Street, and visit the American Sign Museum. According to Tod Swormstedt, president and founder of the Museum, the American Sign Museum is the only one of its kind in the world. Tod’s family has been involved in the sign business since 1911, and they own Sign of the Times, a trade journal for the sign industry. In 2005, Tod got the idea of collecting signs, big and small, and displaying them in a museum to help people understand signs.
Rental bus visitors enter the museum through a “Sign Garden”, a sheltered area hung with neon spectaculars for car washes, cocktail lounges, gas stations, and even a church. A smiling fiberglass Big Boy holds aloft a dripping cheeseburger next to blinking signs for Holiday Inn and a winking Speedee McDonald's. According to Tod, these are American icons, and one of the purposes they serve is to remind rental bus visitors about an America that has all but vanished in an age of high tech communication and online shopping.
Not all the signs are purely for advertising commercial interests. There are also industrial signs, warning notices, high voltage posters. In fact, anything that was installed on a vertical surface, and served the purpose of informing or imparting information, is likely to have a space in this museum. A stroll further back into the Signs of the Main Street exhibit proves this. Here you can find signs for shoemakers, haberdashers, dentists, druggists, factories. Most are displayed as they were originally, in life sized store front replicas.
For rental bus visitors on a nostalgia trip, museum founder Tod says that he tries to collect signs from the 60s, and works backwards. "We cover every type of sign: wood, metal, gold leaf glass, light bulb, neon, plastic...", says Tod, as he personally leads our rental bus group through the museum. This isn’t a unique thing, because Tod leads every tour himself. All he asks for is 48 hours notice to schedule a tour.
For a rental bus trip in Cincinnati, give Bus Rentals Cincinnati a call to find out how they can help you arrange your rental bus transportation needs. Choose from their fleet of rental buses, and take advantage of their friendly, personalized service.