LITTLE ROCK — I really, really wanted to keep that highway sign.
Every day when I drove past it - lying where I had cut it down when another driver ran a red light and knocked my Jeep off the road - I wanted it more.
That pretty red-white-andblue I-630 sign would make a nice wall-hanging memento of my brush with eternity. So one day I stopped and rescued it.
When I asked if I could keep it, though, Randy Ort, spokesman for the Highway Department, said no.
Except he was not so abrupt.
He understood why I wanted it, he said, and that he wished he could let me keep it, but if he did he "would be shirking [his] responsibility as a public employee."
So instead of giving me the sign, Randy gave me a tour of the place where they make the signs for 16,440 miles of Arkansas roads.
Tony Sullivan, a civil engineer who oversees the sign shop, actually led the tour of the concrete-block building where 14 state employees manufacture new signs and rehabilitate old and wrecked ones. All of the signs on state roads come from this shop, which is at the department's headquarters off Base Line Road.
Few signs are beyond recycling. Tony, who has worked for the state for 29 years, showed me a stop sign that someone had plugged with several bullets. To fix it, they will pound the holes flat, send the sign through the big sander to take off the old paint and apply new paint.
But it's not really paint. It's actually a white reflective sheeting with a sticky backing, which they apply to the blank aluminum signs.
Then with a process similar to the screen printing on Tshirts, they spray a transparent red ink (or whatever color, if it's not a stop sign).
Some of the aluminum blanks arrive already cut to shape, and they cut some from sheets of aluminum.
While the aluminum is practically indestructible, the film loses its reflectivity after 10 years, Tony says, and the crews in the state's 10 districts replace the signs. They use a grease pencil to write the date of installation on the back of each sign.
A basic highway sign costs $5 per square foot plus the pole and labor costs of erecting it.
Theft is a recurring problem but not a major one. The most popular signs have been the ones for Black Oak, Arkansas (while that band was popular), and signs for Bill Clinton's birthplace and boyhood home.
They also have produced "Adopt a Highway" signs for some outfits known for civic activities such as the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, NORML (the group trying to legalize marijuana) and Beer Depot.
They make the logo signs that include information about businesses at interstate exits.
The restaurants, gas stations and others provide their logos and pay permit fees to appear on the signs, Randy says. The signs are strictly to provide information for travelers, not to advertise.
They also make deercrossing signs, and Tony has hanging in his office the last elk-crossing sign that has a picture of an elk on it. The new signs now have only "ELK CROSSING."
When somebody knocks down a sign, Tony says, especially one that controls traffic, the department wants to know about it lest a driver unknowingly blows through an unmarked intersection and crashes with another car.
"We don't like the sun to set on a stop sign."
Arkansas, Pages 19 on 10/07/2007