Light Years
Bill Baughman's Leather District loft is the perfect gallery for his 30-year accumulation of nostalgic neon.
It was a romance that took a dozen years to blossom.
It began around Christmastime 1979, when Bill Baughman spotted a neon clock in a Cleveland shoe-repair stand. Baughman was already a collector and connoisseur of neon clocks - the variety found in gas stations, dry-cleaning shops, and clothing stores across America in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. He approached the owner and asked to buy the clock. The shoe repairman told Baughman, in a not-so-tactful manner, to get lost.
Baughman, who now has more than 100 neon clocks in addition to neon signs, pinball machines, and a restored jukebox, was undaunted. Every year at Christmas, he returned to the shoe stand and asked if he could buy the clock. Every year, he was sent away with a terse reprimand. Then one day, his persistence paid off. The neon clock had broken, and the beleaguered owner decided to simply hand it over to Baughman instead of bothering to have it repaired.
"He said, 'You've waited long enough for this,' " Baughman recalls, sitting in the 2,000-square-foot loft he owns in Boston's Leather District. "He actually turned out to be a very sweet guy."
All the clocks hanging in Baughman's condo have a story behind them. Not only can the 49-year-old business consultant recall where he found each, but, in most cases, he also remembers the people he met while tracking down parts to repair them.
What draws Baughman to the clocks and other vintage electrical ephemera is what they represent - a nostalgic and quickly vanishing era of roadside American culture. Indeed, he is working with other preservationists to set up a neon district somewhere in the city where historic neon signs could be publicly displayed.
"I have a fondness for the whole era," he says. "Also, the restoration is fun and relaxing for me. Especially when you do the kind of work that I do. It's very cerebral. It's a nice change of pace to take a bunch of rusty pieces, put them back together, and create something that's fun to look at."
Baughman's collection began nearly 30 years ago, when he started finding discarded neon clocks in trash cans, at flea markets, and buried under bric-a-brac at yard sales. He discovered broken clocks in the basements of old bars and restaurants, and as his reputation as the guy who rescued neon clocks grew, friends began finding them for him as well. Soon, they also started finding unwanted neon signs. Today, his collection is a treasure.
"The likelihood of walking into a junk store - or even Brimfield [the huge antiques market held in central Massachusetts] - and finding these clocks at the ridiculously low prices that I saw when I began collecting is very unlikely," he says.
His home and workplace, with high ceilings and exposed brick walls, is a shrine to his collection. The loft in a former industrial building had been converted into an architect's office before Baughman bought it in 2005. He has creatively partitioned it so that the kitchen, bedroom, bathrooms, guest room, and office are on one side of the loft, leaving the rest of the space a wide-open gallery for his pink, green, and yellow neon art.
Because the street-level loft has large storefront windows, a fair number of curiosity seekers do stop and stare. "If I have the door open on a nice summer day, people will come in, because they think it's a clock store or a gallery," says Baughman. And when clients come to the loft for business meetings, there is always the danger that work will be neglected in favor of pinball and listening to Patsy Cline on the jukebox.
Baughman's passion for nostalgic neon has not subsided. He is in the process of resuscitating another neon clock, and he is waiting for the arrival of a sign he purchased from a diner in Indiana. There is, he admits, a downside to all his success in finding these neglected artifacts of America's past: "I'm running out of space," he says with a smile.
Christopher Muther is a member of the Globe staff. E-mail him at muther@globe.com. 