Way back when I was a journalism student, I thought up an idea for a story on whomever it was who had to change the light bulbs in the Honest Ed’s sign. All those little bulbs, blinking away, tended to by who-knows-who?I never pursued it. But for a couple of decades it sat there in my mind, waiting for a rainy day. Now, here he is in front of me, the guy. In a manner of speaking.“I worked on it, rewiring all of the bulbs in the 1980s, when they decided to change to an electronic flasher system,” Everton Ingleton, a 44-year employee of Pattison Sign Group tells me, standing at the corner of Markham St. and Bloor. So, see, he did change the light bulbs, once, though not in the way I was thinking. Others at the company did that job. “There was a service crew did that maintenance, come around, replace the bulbs when they burnt out,” Ingleton says. It’s been a while since anyone did that. And no one will any more.Read more:Honest Ed’s sign to get a new home over Mirvish theatreTuesday morning, Ingleton and I were among a crowd of a few dozen people who assembled to watch as the famous Honest Ed’s sign began to be taken down.“It’s going to be a loss for the city,” Ingleton said. “And it was a showcase for the company.” The biggest incandescent sign project most employees there would ever work on, that’s for sure. “You’d spend a lot of hours getting it ready, especially for the holidays when Mr. Mirvish would want it looking good.”Specifically, one of the five sections that bore the store’s giant logo — in red, white, and yellow circus type embedded with blinking lights and surrounded by a swirling border — was being removed carefully, in pieces. The section weighs about 8,000 to 10,000 pounds, and comes apart off the wall in 10 pieces. Two crane trucks and a small crew of hard-hatted workers spent hours taking it down.This would t ...
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