CEDAR RAPIDS — Nesper Sign Advertising, known for thousands of signs in Eastern Iowa and the G-rated jokes on its large sign facing Interstate 380, will be celebrating its 100th anniversary next year — even though its owner recently discovered the company is actually going to be 102 in 2025.
When Phil Garland, the company’s president, bought Nesper in 1990, he was told Walt Nesper opened the business in 1925. But earlier this month, he came across a 1941 Gazette article that reported Nesper opened his sign shop in 1924 at 221 Fifth St. SE.
Today, the company, at 4620 J St. SW, has 30 employees, including six installers who are certified for crane operation and welding. Garland’s wife, Donna, handles the company’s finances, son Nick is the plant manager and son Tom is the sales manager.
The Garlands still are thinking about what kind of centennial celebration they will have, probably in the summer, but already have taken on a signature job for its centennial year — re-creating the giant ear of corn sign for Theatre Cedar Rapids, which also turns 100 next year.
The original corn sign was a landmark for around 40 years atop the building’s marquee when it was a movie house at First Avenue and Third Street SE. No one knows if the old sign, removed in 1964 due to disrepair, still exists somewhere.
But Garland has the scoop on the new sign: 32 feet tall and weighing about 1,000 pounds, compared to the old sign’s 3 tons. Instead of light bulbs, it will have LED lighting, which will use much less power than the old 300-amp sign.
“This is going to be a signature legacy of Cedar Rapids for decades to come,” Katie Hallman of Cedar Rapids, the theater’s executive director, said. “People are going to travel from all over the place to take selfies with this thing.”
The sign business
Nesper always has been locally owned.
Founder Walt Nesper ran the company for decades before selling it to the Steve Sovern family, who ran it for 30 years until selling to Garland in 1990.
Nesper does not do billboards. Rather, it provides signs on businesses’ property, Garland said. Those signs, he said, are heavily regulated by government.
Before the current technology, Nesper had 50 employees providing about $800,000 worth of signs. With the new technology, that total has grown to around $6 million, Garland said.
The COVID-19 pandemic severely impacted the sign business, so Nesper briefly switched to making sneeze guards.
Then the August 2020 derecho hit, damaging most of the signs in Eastern Iowa. Nesper switched back to making signs, and it took about two years of 12-hours shifts to catch up, Garland said, noting the company still is operating at maximum capability.
Also, Nesper’s business, once limited to the Cedar Rapids-Iowa City area, has expanded to jobs all over the U.S. Garland’s previous experience as a national account manager in the sign business helped expand the company’s geographic reach.
Evolving business
The commercial sign business evolved slowly in the past 100 years, moving from hand painting to fluorescent to neon to programmable LEDs.
“A lot didn’t change until about the time I arrived,” Garland said. “We had sign painters painting by hand. Everything was cut with a jigsaw — cutting metal and bending it by hand.”
At one time, signs as large as 12-by-40 feet had to be drawn or traced by hand. One machine now does what was formerly the work of four people, and does it faster. Forming metal letters, a time-consuming task formerly done by hand, is now handled by a machine that creates a metal letter in 15 seconds, Garland said during a plant tour with The Gazette.
The Nesper plant has been solar-powered for six years, and it recycles as many things as it can, Garland said.
Another new aspect of the business is wrapping vehicles with vinyl that comes in various colors and can incorporate advertising, other messages, or just plain color. Wrapping other things — like switch boxes and even walkers — also is being done, he said.
Twice-daily jokes
The Nesper plant’s scrolling sign, adjacent to the northbound lanes of I-380, has provided community service information for 45 years along with the popular daily jokes. Two jokes are posted seven days a week, except on major holidays. That’s about 32,000 jokes in the sign’s history.
Fresh material, Garland said, “is a struggle, to be honest with you, at times. So we have two people that program it.”
