If the smell of just-baked waffle cones on a sweltering summer day isn't enough to lure passers-by to Doumar's, a slightly faded sign behind the iconic Norfolk eatery just might.
Like the curbside service of $3 cheeseburgers and $2 ice cream cones, the restaurant's Granby Street placard is understated and a bit old-fashioned.
"Doumar's Cones and Bar-B-Q," it beckons in slanted red and yellow letters. This way, an arrow points.
To the east, on Atlantic Avenue in Virginia Beach, similar letters - this time in white - call tourists and natives to a stately brick hotel on a hill.
"Cavalier," they announce from atop the historic inn's windowed atrium.
And, until about two years ago, a kindred set of hand-painted letters adorned the side of Bob's Gun Shop on Granby Street in Norfolk, advertising hunting and fishing gear and reminding customers that "Quality & Service is the Difference."
Their messages are clear, even years after their last coats of paint have dried. Less pronounced is the specter that links the trio of local landmarks: Virginia Beach artist Wallis Damon Sr., better known as Wally or, to some, Rembrandt.
From the mid-1950s to the early 2000s, Damon was the man behind many of the hand-painted billboards that straddled the region's highways, bridges and fields, advertising everything from churches to Hooters restaurants.
The advent of digital billboards and versions covered with inexpensive vinyl sheets has nearly rendered their hand-painted predecessors extinct. Many have been lost forever, their fleeting visages preserved only if someone thought to take a photo or save some small piece.
Damon died in 2009, and none of his larger-scale works remains. But thanks to photos the painter snapped of every roadside masterpiece, his legacy lives on.
"They're like little time capsules," Los Angeles-based billboard photographer Robert Landau said of billboards like Damon's. "When you look at them, it takes you right back to a certain time - the style, the fashion, the language. They really capture so much about the time of the culture that produces them."
Scanned versions of Damon's yellowing Polaroids and 3x5s - in some cases the last vestiges of a business, and a time, that has been long lost - are now featured in an online collection hosted by the Virginia Beach Public Library.
They're more than a reminder to drink Coca-Cola or shop at Cavalier Ford, said reference librarian Mary Lovell Swetnam. The billboards, linked together by the hands that painted them, also connect us with our past.
"It's a slice of Americana," Swetnam said.
Since the late 1800s, "Americans have been cajoled, instructed, scolded, and just plain entertained by billboards," James Fraser writes in "The American Billboard: 100 Years."
From subways and city streets and long stretches of open road, they have called us to the circus and to war, to the supermarket and to the polls. "Get in the Game With Uncle Sam" they've cried. "Buy Liberty Bonds," along with Wrigley's gum.
They promoted products - "Be Sociable... Have a Pepsi" - and people - "This time, Nixon" - and causes - "Forest fires burn more than trees" - before Facebook and Twitter made marketing a one-click endeavor.
"Before the Internet and all that, billboards were kind of a more instant reflection of the culture," said Landau, whose work has appeared in books, magazines and exhibits around the country.
"Now, of course, everything is instantaneous, but in the '50s and '60s, if you were Ford or Chevy or Coca-Cola, the way to get people to remember your product was to put up a big billboard on the side of the road."
Damon dedicated his life to doing just that, and unwittingly ended up also creating Hampton Roads history with the strokes of his brush.
At the age of 17, Damon left his hometown of Beverly, Mass., for the University of Connecticut's art school, where he studied under Norman Rockwell, said his son Wally Damon Jr. But the painter soon abandoned his studies for World War II, landing in France on a cold January day in 1945 in the heat of the Battle of the Bulge.
He sketched through the conflict - despite crushing his right hand, his painting hand, in a mishap with a trailer hitch - and along the way captured the famed Rue du Gros-Horloge clock in Rouen, France. The Army eventually assigned him to oversee French civilians and prisoners of war tasked with painting signs before he headed home in the summer of 1946, his son said.
Damon's return meant another try at art school before leaving to open a sign shop in Presque Isle, Maine, at the age of 22. There, he met and married Barbara, a red-haired beauty with whom he would spend the rest of his life.
The newlyweds moved to Roanoke, and then Harlan, Ky., looking for sign work before a "help wanted" ad drew them to Norfolk.
They arrived in Wards Corner in about 1954, and Damon signed on as a painter for Colonial Outdoor Advertising.
Damon's first sign in Tidewater was a simple one: white letters on a black board announcing that the Myers Field off Church Street was "Home of the Norfolk Tars," a minor league baseball team that called the region home until 1955.
The family relocated to Chic's Beach three years later, and, after a brief detour to Brunswick, Ga., from 1960 to 1963, returned to the beachside borough for good.
There, Damon and Barbara raised their three sons in a little red house, and then a little red beach cottage at the corner of Lake Drive and Greenwell Road.
There, Damon staged his studio, stacking his paint buckets and tools on shelves in the garage and hinging an old signboard to the wall for a desk.
There, he mocked up his designs for Colonial, Turner and Adams outdoor advertising companies, among others, before starting his own, Damon Sign Co., around 1970.
There, his passion became his life's work.
Damon became a Chic's Beach fixture, volunteering for the neighborhood's fire department and the nearby Little Creek Lions Club. The sound of his tan painting truck, laden with ladders and gear, rattling along the driveway signaled to his neighbors the start and end of each of his workdays.
In the summers and on weekends, Damon - bespectacled and often shirtless beneath a shock of dark, curly hair - recruited his sons, Wally Jr. and Donny, for the family business. Gus, the eldest, was blind.
Wally Jr. had the unenviable task of helping to hoist the swing stage, a heavy wooden board about 20 feet long and a foot wide, onto the side of the billboards his father was hired to paint. They would rig the narrow platform using ropes and pulleys and a set of large, question mark-shaped metal hooks.
There, Damon would perch for hours, and sometimes days, painting everything from oversized hamburgers to serene beach scenes.
He painted a sandy, waterfront landscape for the Virginia Beach Resort Hotel & Conference Center on the first billboard drivers saw after crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. He created juicy steak dinners for the Jolly Ox Restaurants and crafted ads for the Gentleman's Quarters at the Oceanfront - "Where a man can unwind."
In the 1980s, he painted an announcement for the Christian Broadcasting Network, calling folks to visit CBN Center, the "New Home of The 700 Club TV show."
One of his most recognized billboards pictured a tanned blonde in a yellow bikini perched high above Northampton Boulevard in Virginia Beach, her head rising above the top of the sign. "Coppertone," the 1970s advertisement read.
But Damon was most proud of an earlier billboard he had painted around 1964 for the new MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk.
The sign, located near Janaf Shopping Center, pictured Gen. Douglas MacArthur, his brow slightly furrowed beneath his tan Navy cover, in front of the memorial. "Visitors welcome daily," it read.
Damon rallied against people who said billboards were eyesores, painting one that same decade featuring four beautiful women. Underneath he wrote, "Just another ugly billboard," his widow recalled.
That one was her favorite.
It was a dangerous job: torrid in the summer and frigid in winter, fraught with wasps' nests and pigeon poop and falls that resulted in scrapes and bruises, bloody brows and at least one concussion, Damon Jr. recalled.
The father-son team got stuck once or twice on their elevated painting platform after colleagues forgot to return with ladders to retrieve them.
That happened one time as they worked on a Smith & Welton billboard hung high above Monticello Avenue in Norfolk. The duo shouted and shouted, but the people on the street below didn't think to look up until the Damons sent a can of paint sailing their way, landing "splat!" on the pavement, Damon Jr. said.
Despite the discomforts, and the risks, Damon loved it.
He took pride in each stroke, and he enjoyed the peaceful moments when, suspended high above the land, he could pop open his lunch - typically a Spam sandwich stored inside an emptied paint can - and take in the view, his feet dangling below him.
Water towers, street signs and murals also were Damon's canvases, and he joyed in painting soapbox-derby cars for his children and their friends.
He set down his brushes in about 2001 and soon after began showing signs of dementia, his family said. He died in 2009 at the age of 83, preceded in death by his son Gus, who'd passed away of a brain tumor years before.
His remaining sons and widow have kept much of his workshop and office intact. They only recently had the heart to sell his old tan work truck.
In his bedroom still hangs one of his more seductive paintings: a rendering of a ravishing redhead leaning on a doorway, covering her breast with a long-stemmed red rose. Her blue eyes pop off the canvas.
The family still argues about who the woman was. Damon Jr. suspects it was his blue-eyed mother, who, in her younger years, had red hair.
"It's not me," the 84-year-old Barbara Damon said, giggling.
"That's me," she added, pointing to a more modest picture hanging above the bed.
Providing his work to the city library was a way to ensure that Damon, his art and the history he captured will forever be preserved, said Swetnam, of the city library.
The collection also was a labor of love by Damon Jr., a retired carpenter who volunteered about 100 hours of his time last summer to help scan and catalog about 1,100 photos, Swetnam said. The collection went online last fall and now features about 276 images. Swetnam and her colleagues are working to upload more.
Among them is a photo of Damon's last job: an update to a Ramada billboard near Interstate 264, raising the advertised price of a room from $30 to $34.95 a night.
Damon would've been "tickled to death" to know he has his own collection, Barbara Damon said. He used to drive her around in his truck, pointing out his billboards - "I did this one. I did that one. This one is mine" - just in case she'd missed one.
Some of Damon's colleagues have continued the tradition of painting billboards by hand, even if the demand is small.
Charlie Dick, who owns Major Sign Co. in Suffolk, remembers socializing and working alongside the Damon boys when he was younger. His father, too, was a billboard painter, one of about a half dozen, including Damon, who worked in the region, he said.
Now there's just not much demand for the art, though the commercial sign company still occasionally receives orders to hand-paint billboards: Grandy Farm Market & Greenhouse and Jimmy's Seafood Buffet in Kitty Hawk.
Most billboards these days are covered with vinyl prints, which cost about half as much as hand-painting.
"I don't think we can go back," Dick said. "What was is gone."
Kathy Adams, 757-222-5155, kathy.adams@pilotonline.com
Pilot researcher Jakon Hays contributed to this report.
By Kathy Adams | The Virginian-Pilot
If the smell of just-baked waffle cones on a sweltering summer day isn't enough to lure passers-by to Doumar's Barbecue, a slightly fading sign behind the iconic Norfolk eatery just might.
Like the curbside service of $3 cheeseburgers and $2 ice cream cones, the restaurant's Granby Street placard is understated and a bit old-fashioned.
"Doumar's Cones and Bar-B-Q," it beckons in slanted red and yellow letters. This way, an arrow points.
To the east, on Atlantic Avenue in Virginia Beach, a similar set of letters - this time in white - calls tourists and natives to a stately brick hotel on a hill.
"Cavalier," they announce from atop the historic inn's windowed atrium.
And, until about two years ago, a similar set of hand-painted letters adorned the side of Bob's Gun Shop on Granby Street in Norfolk, advertising hunting and fishing gear and reminding customers that "Quality & Service is the Difference."
Their messages are clear, even years after their last coats of touch-up paint dried. Less pronounced is the specter that links the trio of local landmarks: Virginia Beach artist Wallis Damon Sr., better known as Wally or, to some, Rembrandt.
From the mid-1950s to the early 2000s, Damon was the man behind many of the hand-painted billboards that straddled the region's highways, bridges and fields, advertising for everything from churches to Hooters restaurants.
The advent of digital billboards and versions covered with inexpensive vinyl sheets has nearly rendered their hand-painted predecessors extinct. Many have been lost forever, their fleeting visages preserved only if someone thought to take a photo or save some small piece.
Damon died in 2009, and none of his larger-scale works remain. But thanks to photos the painter snapped of every roadside masterpiece, his legacy lives on.
"They're like little time capsules," said Los Angeles-based billboard photographer Robert Landau. "When you look at them, it takes you right back to a certain time - the style, the fashion, the language. They really capture so much about the time of the culture that produces them."
Scanned versions of Damon's yellowing Polaroids and 3x5s - in some cases the last vestiges of a business, and a time, that has been long lost - are now featured in an online collection hosted by the Virginia Beach Public Library.
They're more than a reminder to drink Coca-Cola or shop at Cavalier Ford, said reference librarian Mary Lovell Swetnam. The billboards, linked together by the hands that painted them, also connect us with our past.
"It's a slice of Americana," Swetnam said.
Since the late 1800s, "Americans have been cajoled, instructed, scolded, and just plain entertained by billboards," James Fraser writes in "The American Billboard 100 Years."
From subways and city streets and long stretches of open road, they have called us to the circus and to war, to the supermarket and to the polls. "Get in the Game With Uncle Sam" they've cried. "Buy Liberty Bonds," along with Wrigley's gum.
They promoted products - "Be Sociable... have a Pepsi" - and people - "This time, Nixon" - and causes - "Forest fires burn more than trees" - before Facebook and Twitter made marketing a one-click endeavor.
"Before the Internet and all that, billboards were kind of a more instant reflection of the culture," said Landau, whose work has appeared in books, magazines and exhibits around the country.
"Now, of course, everything is instantaneous, but in the '50s and '60s, if you were Ford or Chevy or Coca-Cola, the way to get people to remember your product was to put up a big billboard on the side of the road."
Damon dedicated his life to doing just that, and unwittingly ended up also creating Hampton Roads history with the strokes of his brush.
At the age of 17, Damon left his hometown of Beverly, Mass., for the University of Connecticut's art school, where he studied under Norman Rockwell, said his son, Wally Damon Jr. But he soon abandoned his studies for World War II.
He sketched through the conflict - despite crushing one of his hands in a machinery accident - and along the way captured the famed Rue de Gros Horloge clock in Rouen, France. The Army eventually assigned him to oversee French civilians and prisoners of war assigned to paint signs before he headed back home, his son said.
Damon's return meant another try at art school before leaving to open a sign shop in Presque Isle, Maine, at the age of 22. There, he met and married Barbara, a red-haired beauty he would spend the rest of his life with.
The newlyweds moved to Harlan, Ky., and then Roanoke, looking for sign work before a "help wanted" ad drew them to Norfolk.
They arrived in Wards Corner about 1954, and Damon signed on as a painter for Colonial Outdoor Advertising.
Damon's first sign in Tidewater was a simple one: white letters on a black board announcing that the former Myers Field off Church Street in Norfolk was "Home of the Norfolk Tars," a minor league baseball team that called the region home until 1955.
The family relocated to Chic's Beach three years later, and, after a brief detour to Brunswick, Ga., from 1960 to 1963, returned to the beach-side borough for good.
There, Wally and Barbara raised their three sons in a little red beach cottage at the corner of Lake Drive and Greenwell Road.
There, Damon staged his workshop, stacking his paint buckets and tools on shelves in the utility room and hinging an old signboard to the wall for a desk.
There, he mocked up his designs for Colonial, Turner and Adams outdoor advertising companies before starting his own, Damon Sign Co., around 1970.
There, his passion became his life's work.
Damon became a Chic's Beach fixture, volunteering for the neighborhood's fire department and the nearby Little Creek Lions Club. The sound of his tan painting truck, laden with ladders and gear, rattling up the driveway signaled to his neighbors the start and end of each of his work days.
In the summers and on weekends, Damon - bespectacled and often shirtless beneath a shock of dark, curly hair - recruited his sons, Wally Jr. and Donny, for the family business. Gus, the eldest, was blind.
Wally Jr. had the unenviable task of helping hoist the swing stage, a heavy wooden board about 20 feet long and a foot wide, onto the side of the billboards his father was hired to paint. They would rig the narrow platform using ropes and pulleys and a set of large, question mark-shaped metal hooks.
There, Damon would perch for hours, and sometimes days, painting everything from oversized hamburgers to serene beach scenes.
He painted a sandy, waterfront landscape for the Virginia Beach Resort Hotel & Conference Center on the first billboard drivers saw after crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. He crafted ads for the Gentleman's Quarters at the Oceanfront - "Where a man can unwind" - and created juicy steak dinners for the Jolly Ox Restaurants at Coliseum Mall, Janaf and Pembroke Mall.
In the 1980s, he painted an announcement for the Christian Broadcasting Network, calling folks to "Visit CBN Center New Home of The 700 Club TV show."
One of his most recognized billboards pictured a tanned blonde in a yellow bikini perched high above Northampton Boulevard in Virginia Beach, her head rising above the top of the sign. "Coppertone," the 1970s advertisement read.
But Damon was most proud of an earlier billboard he painted around 1964 for the new MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk.
The sign, located near Janaf Shopping Center in Norfolk, pictured Gen. Douglas MacArthur, his brow slightly furrowed beneath his tan Navy cover, in front of the memorial. "Visitors welcome daily," it read.
Damon rallied against people who said billboards were eyesores, painting one that same decade featuring four beautiful women. Underneath he wrote, "Just another ugly billboard," his widow recalled.
That one was her favorite.
It was a dangerous job: torrid in the summer and frigid in winter, fraught with wasps nests and pigeon poop and falls that resulted in broken bones, bloody brows and at least one concussion, Wally Damon Jr. recalled.
They father-son team got stuck once or twice on their elevated painting platform after colleagues forgot to return with ladders to retrieve them.
That happened one time as they worked on a billboard hung high above Monticello Avenue in Norfolk. The duo shouted and shouted, but the people on the street below didn't think to look up until the Damons sent a can of paint sailing their way, landing "splat!" on the pavement, Wally Damon Jr. said.
Despite the discomforts, and the risks, Damon loved it.
He took pride in each stroke, and he enjoyed the peaceful moments when, suspended high above the land, he could pop open his lunch - typically a Spam sandwich stored inside an emptied paint can - and take in the view, his feet dangling below him.
Water towers, street signs and murals also were Damon's canvasses, and he joyed in painting soap box derby cars for his children and their friends.
He set down his paint brushes in 2001 and soon after began showing signs of dementia, his family said. He died in 2009, preceded in death by his son, Gus, who'd passed away of a brain tumor years before.
His remaining sons and widow have kept much of his workshop and his office intact. They only recently had the heart to sell his old tan work truck.
In his bedroom still hangs one of his more seductive paintings: a rendering of a ravishing red head leaning on a doorway, covering her breast with a long-stemmed red rose. Her blue eyes pop off the canvas.
The family still argues about who the woman was. Wally Jr. suspects it was his blue-eyed mother, who, in her younger years, also had red hair.
"It's not me," the 81-year-old Barbara Damon said, giggling.
"That's me," she added, pointing to a more-modest picture hanging above the bed.
Providing his work to the city library was a way to ensure that Damon, his art and the history he captured will forever be preserved, said Swetnam, of the city library.
The collection also was a labor of love by Wally Damon Jr., a retired carpenter who volunteered about 100 hours of his time last summer to help scan and catalogue about 1,100 photos, Swetnam said. The collection went online last fall and now features about 276 images. Swetnam and her colleagues are working to upload more.
Among them is a photo of Damon's last job: an update to a Ramada billboard near Interstate 264, lowering the advertised price of a room from $35 to $30 a night. The photo in the collection still shows the original rate.
Damon would've been "tickled to death" to know he has his own collection, Barbara Damon said. He used to drive her around in his truck, pointing out his billboards - "I did this one. I did that one. This one is mine" - just in case she'd missed one.
Some of Damon's colleagues have continued the tradition of painting billboards by hand, even if the demand is small.
Charlie Dick, who owns Major Sign Co. in Suffolk, remembers socializing and working alongside the Damon boys when he was younger. His father, too, was a billboard painter, one of about a half dozen, including Damon, who worked in the region, he said.
Now there's just not much demand for the art, though the commercial sign company still occasionally receives orders to hand-paint billboards for businesses in rural North Carolina, such as the Grandy Farm Market & Greenhouse and Jimmy's Seafood Buffet in Kitty Hawk, Dick said.
Most billboards these days are covered with vinyl prints, which cost about half as much as hand-painting.
"I don't think we can go back," Dick said. "What was is gone."
Pilot researcher Jakon Hays contributed to this report.
Kathy Adams, 757-222-5155, kathy.adams@pilotonline.com
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