Sign Design for Coddingtown Mall - Santa Rosa, Calif. - by John Nicolini for Electrical Products Corporation

            Image appears courtesy Lorri Nicolini

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4-25-20

For over EIGHT years, I have been working to uncover the back story of one of my all-time favorite NorCal signs – the towering rotating neon sign with a starburst on top at Coddingtown Mall in Santa Rosa. Last week, the missing puzzle piece arrived in an email. The overall story of how I come to this post today is long, and encompasses at least 20 micro stories – an interconnected web of people, experiences, Google searches, and good old-fashioned note taking – I’ll save that saga for the few that actually dig this kind of stuff. Here’s the super abbreviated version… Last week, I reached out to the daughter of John Nicolini, one of the “dream team” of sign designers working for Electrical Products Corp. (EPCO) in Oakland in the early 1960s. I wanted to share with her some of the images I had found of her father’s sign-related work and see if she had any of his original sign renderings. She said that she didn’t think that she did. Nicolini was a lifelong artist and left EPCO/Federal in 1968 to start his own business. Most of the work that she had of his was more recent. And then came the magic question… “Did your father ever show you some of the signs he designed, perhaps while driving around town?” She paused for a moment. The answer was “Yes!” There was a shopping center sign up in Santa Rosa… a sign that he was particularly proud of. Her mother has a photo of the original rendering. The photo was displayed at the celebration of his life ceremony (John Nicolini passed in 2014). The next day, John's daughter sent me an image file. See above. John Nicolini – born in San Francisco in 1923, graduate of Fremont High School in Oakland, a WWII veteran, a graduate of CCAC in Oakland, lover of sports and Jazz, and a lifelong artist – designed the sign for Coddingtown Mall in Santa Rosa. I’m not sure why this matters but I know that for me, it does.

Taken on: July 12, 2020

Tags:

Electrical Products Corp.

EPCO

rendering

illustration

Coddingtown

mall

Santa

Rosa

California

1960s

Santa Rosa

John Nicolini « less

Sets appears in: • Electrical Products Corp. (EPCO) • Santa Rosa Sampler

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