First Posted: 1/26/2015
LIMA — “Modern electric illumination is rapidly giving Lima a metropolitan aspect by the establishment of an ever-growing ‘great white way,’ and by stimulating the general tendency of people to stay out of doors more and to stay up later at night,” The Lima News observed March 17, 1929.
Lima’s “great white way,” the News noted, had been “reproduced in miniature” in a window display at the Ohio Power Co. on Main Street. “Electric signs flash at intervals, producing a realistic effect and emphasizing the power of light. The display was arranged by the Artkraft Sign Co. and the design is the work of Sam Kamin of that concern.”
A native of Toronto, Canada, Kamin was director of art and engineering at Artkraft. In 1931, he would join with James A. Howenstine, another Artkraft employee, to found Lima’s Neon Products Inc. with a “joint stake of only $453,” according to an Aug. 29, 1955, article in the News.
Over the next four decades NPI would be responsible for putting those flashing signs — first in neon and later in Plexiglas — in every corner of the country. Kamin and Howenstine also would contribute to the U.S. war effort in the early 1940s, challenge the dominance of The Lima News in the late 1950s and create WCIT-radio in the early 1960s.
The neon sign was introduced to the U.S. in 1923 by the Claude Neon firm of Paris. As the French patents expired, companies producing neon signs proliferated.
On Aug. 31, 1930, the News reported, “Sam Kamin, 1010 Faurot Ave., and James A. Howenstine, 308 N. Nixon Ave., Saturday announced the opening of the Neon Products Inc.” at 217 E. Elm St. The firm “will produce a line of neon window advertising specialties as well as manufacture and market neon tube plants.” Howenstine came to Lima from Columbus in January 1930 to be general manager of the Artkraft plant. Kamin arrived in Lima in 1922 and had worked at Artkraft since 1923.
By June 1932, NPI had offices at 310 E. Market St., a plant on Shawnee Street and an order for 600 neon signs from Procter & Gamble. “The heavily laden motor truck left Lima Thursday afternoon bound for St. Louis,” the News reported June 17, 1932. “Sam Kamin, president and general manager of the concern, said the signs (advertising P&G soap products) will be erected at as many groceries in St. Louis and immediate vicinity.”
After just more than a year in business, NPI moved in October 1932. The Lima Morning Star & Republican-Gazette reported on Oct. 24, 1932, that NPI was moving into a factory on East Wayne Street that formerly had been occupied by the Gramm-Bernstein truck company. Kamin successfully petitioned City Council in April 1933 to have the name of the Wayne Street extension leading to his plant changed from Paper Mill Avenue to Neon Avenue.
Not even the Great Depression could slow NPI’s growth. Under the headline “Neon Co. thrives in depression,” the News reported Sept. 30, 1937, that NPI had gone “from scratch to $40,000” in monthly sales while employing more than 125 people. Kamin and Howenstine led an aggressive sales force. A photo in the March 27, 1938, edition of the News shows Kamin and Howenstine standing next to an airplane. According to the caption “The pair flies about the nation with nonchalance to hawk their wares in this fine new Stinson cabin plane which Howenstine pilots.” NPI eventually would have sales offices in New York, Chicago, Boston, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and St. Louis.
NPI’s flight to the top was not without its bumps, however. In September 1936, 16 men walked off their jobs in the tube department after the company began hiring women, who, according to a headline in the News on Sept. 22, 1936, were “seen as a menace.” The 13 women were hired to replace men removed from the assembly line to learn tube bending.
“The workers left their benches claiming the employment of women is inimical to their earning capacity,” the paper wrote.
Women’s presence in the workforce was viewed as essential during World War II. “A huge work room with 20,000 square feet of space lay vacant two months ago at the Neon Products Inc. plant,” the News reported Jan. 9, 1944, “but today the same room is a beehive of activity with more than 100 women and men doing an important job to help keep those bombers over Berlin. The new operation, latest to be started in Lima in the war effort, is the manufacture and assembly of electric wiring harnesses for B-24 Liberator Army bombers.”
By 1948, according to the November 1950 edition of the Kiplinger Letter, “well over 3 million signs had been produced at the Lima, Ohio, factory. Sales reached $3.5 million a year. The 250-employee plant was stepping fast to keep up with postwar demand.”
Most businessmen “would be tempted to rest comfortably on top of such a prosperous enterprise,” Kiplinger wrote, but Kamin and Howenstine began experimenting with Plexiglas, which had been used in World War II for airplane canopies, and devised a sign “superior in many ways to the neon sign. Essentially it was a simple box with steel edges and Plexiglas sides, lighted from the inside with fluorescent bulbs.”
As a result, Kiplinger noted, “in just 18 months sales climbed toward the $4-million mark. Better than in the best days of neon. About 400 nationally known firms like Philco, Sherwin-Williams, Philgas and Firestone use the new signs to advertise their wares.”
Business Week on June 10, 1950, ran a story on NPI’s switch. “Employees had to be retrained, too. Of 75 tube benders, only 10 are still bending tubes. The rest were absorbed into silk-screen and hand-painting work. Other employees learned to work with the ovens and handle the plastic sheets on the presses.” Neon signs became a small part of NPI’s business.
In 1957, Kamin and Howenstine entered the newspaper business with a combined $100,000 investment in the Lima Citizen, a move that caught the attention of Time magazine. “Though for 25 years bustling Lima, Ohio (pop. 55,700) had supported only one newspaper, a second daily was born there last week and thousands cheered,” Time wrote in July 1957. “Reason: Limaites had come to hate their longtime standby, The Lima News. The News was long regarded as a forward-looking, studiously fair paper, and it was seldom, if ever, attacked for abusing its monopoly position in Lima (pronounced as in Lima bean). But people started changing their minds about the News in February 1956, when the family-owned paper was sold to Raymond Cyrus Hoiles …”
The Citizen set up shop in the old North Star Woolen Mills building at 711 W. Vine St. In November 1962, Howenstine stepped down from NPI and joined the newspaper there, moving to an office on the second floor.
The Citizen foundered in January 1964. “It was obvious two or three years ago that it would come down to a kill-or-cure situation,” Howenstine told the Blade of Toledo in a Jan. 4, 1964, story. “Mr. R.C. Hoiles (owner of the Freedom chain) has had $700,000 a year to spend to put us out of business while we have had nothing.”
Although the Citizen folded, WCIT radio, which Kamin and Howenstine opened in the West Vine Street building in August 1963, survived.
Meanwhile, NPI, which occupied 379,000 feet of production and storage space and employed more than 400 people, was sold to Essex International Inc. of Fort Wayne, Ind., in March 1969. Kamin left the firm in October 1970.
On March 31, 1977, the News reported that NPI, by then known as the Kolux NPI Division of General Indicator Corp., would cease operation in Lima on May 31, 1977. “About 100 salaried and hourly personnel are affected by the decision,” the News wrote.
Howenstine, 75, died in December 1973. Kamin, dubbed “Mr. Sign” by the newspapers, died at 82 in September 1984.
