Save the 76 Ball - ray pedersen

We Won!

kim — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 11:25:12 -0800

Nearly one year after we launched our campaign asking ConocoPhillips to reconsider their "destroy all balls" policy towards the historic blue and orange Union 76 Ball gas station signs, the Texas energy giant announced to the Wall Street Journal that they have changed their course. Focus groups held last fall told them what nearly 3000 signers of the Save the 76 Ball petition have already told us: people love the 76 Balls, and don't want them to disappear.

The 76 Balls that come off their poles are no longer being smashed or cut into pieces, but being preserved for donation to museums like the American Sign Museum, Petersen Automotive Museum, NASCAR Hall of Fame, Museum of Neon Art and perhaps even the Smithsonian! And a new type of 76 Ball, colored red rather than orange, will soon be installed at up to 100 gas stations in the west.

But there are still good reasons for signing our petition. We believe that a select few historically and architecturally significant orange 76 Balls should remain where they have always glowed and spun, like at William Pereira's modernist 76 station in Beverly Hills, one of the spheres along Highway One in Malibu, and the station in Marysville, WA where 76 Ball designer Ray Pedersen buys his gas. Also, ConocoPhillips has declared that no private individuals will be able to get a 76 Ball, which will be a disappointment to our campaign's supporter Michael Madsen. We respectfully ask that ConocoPhillips reconsider this policy, and present one 76 Ball to the individual who conceived, designed and hand-painted the first 76 Ball for the 1962 Seattle World's Fair: Ray Pedersen.

And most importantly, we ask that ConocoPhillips commit to pay all costs associated with crating and shipping donated 76 Balls to the selected museums, thus enjoying greater tax benefits and sparing these institutions from having to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars out of their limited budgets in order to receive the gift of the 76 Ball.

Our heartfelt thanks to everyone who has supported this campaign through 2006 and into 2007. This is inspiring proof that citizens have the power to reach large corporations and inspire positive change.

Preservation Online feature "On the Ball: How the 76 Ball Was Saved"

kim — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 20:24:15 -0700

From Preservation Online, the online magazine of the National Trust for Historic Preservation

www.preservationonline.org

On the Ball
How the 76 Ball Was Saved

Story by Arin Greenwood / July 13, 2007

About a year and a half ago, Kim Cooper and her husband, Richard Schave, were driving in Los Angeles—perhaps to get some dumplings for lunch, she recalls—when at a stop light she happened to look up and find herself shocked by what she saw: changes to the Union 76 gas station on the corner. Big changes.

The colors of the station were different: The standard orange and blue colors that had been there for as long as Cooper could remember were gone, and they'd been replaced with bright and jarring red. And the station had installed a sign—a terrible sign, Kim says, a sign that looked like a gigantic, blood-red "blister pack" that aspirin might come in.

"Now that 76 Station had never had a 76 ball, but it was the standard orange and blue. And suddenly it wasn't anymore," Cooper says. "I just sat there festering, going, 'That doesn't look right. That looks really wrong. Did corporate, like, send out the wrong plastic?'"

After lunch, Cooper went home and tried to find out why the gas station looked so different. She discovered that Unocal, a California company and the gas station's previous owner, had been sold to ConocoPhillips, a Texas company whose corporate color is the red Cooper found so jarring.

Cooper found out that ConocoPhillips weren't just changing the colors of the old Union 76 stations; they were taking down the large, spinning, iconic 76 balls, destroying them.

"I had a gut reaction to the loss that shocked me," Cooper says. And so she asked her husband, who designs Web sites, to put together a site so she could try to stop ConocoPhillips from taking down the 76 balls. That night, using free software from Drupal.org, Richard created www.savethe76ball.com, and it soon became clear that Kim was not the only person who noticed—and resisted—the loss of the orange spinning sign. People began signing the petition on the site; a talking (and seemingly depressed) 76 ball made several appearances in the syndicated comic strip Zippy the Pinhead; "And then, next thing I knew, the BBC was doing a story, 'Hey, can we have our balls back?'" Cooper says. "And it really just steamrolled from there. "

Why were people so interested in this spinning signage and its seeming demise?

John Cirillo, who keeps a Web site devoted to gas station signs, remembers when the 76 ball first debuted—at the 1962 World's Fair, in Seattle. "I grew up in Seattle where they had Union 76 stations in good numbers. At that time [in the late 1950s], Union was still using the big round orange disk, which doesn't look bad either. But in 1962, we went to the Seattle World's Fair, and the Union 76 exhibit was a sky ride across the fairgrounds. And there at that exhibit, the world saw for the first time those big round orange 76 globes. It made a big impression on me at the age of seven. "

Cooper and her cohort Nathan Marsak—they give crime tours of Los Angeles together—say their quest to save the 76 ball has a hint of nostalgia to it, too. Nostalgia for a unique California that they think is slipping away, bit by bit. "What's important about the 76 ball is that it's very much our version of the sun. California. Beach culture. It's a big orange orb that spins, for example, in the exact same way the planet spins," Marsak says.

All these distinctive signs of California, Marsak says, are being taken down by out-of-state companies that don't have any attachments to the distinctive signage that mean so much to Angelinos. "Small changes do make a difference," Cooper says. "In the long term, you lose 50 signs, not just 76 balls, and that's really going to change the landscape. But even just one brand disappearing is kind of one piece of the chorus, one bit of the music that creates this kind of wonderful, groovy, pop world. "

Cooper and Marsak are standing at a Union 76 station at an intersection in Los Angeles that also has a Starbucks, a check-cashing shop, and a place where a person can get accordion lessons. The station's pumps and shop are outfitted in bright red, but the orange 76 ball is still orange and blue. Cooper goes inside the shop to ask if the ball still spins; a moment later the ball begins rotating, and Marsak says that when he was a kid, he and his family would buy their Halloween pumpkins from a stand across the street from this station. He says that this Union 76 station used to put a jack o' lantern mask over this spinning 76 ball. "What will kids see now? What will they remember?" he says.

More than 3,100 people have signed the "Save The 76 Ball" petition to date. People are buying a lot of "Save the 76 Ball" t-shirts and miniature 76 balls that can be stuck on a car antenna. And ConocoPhillips seems to be making concessions in response.

"We were a little surprised, but thrilled, that our customers wanted us to make the balls available for all to see," says Philip Blackburn, a ConocoPhillips spokesperson. "We are making the balls available out of our pride in being part of this West Coast tradition and in response to the feedback from our customers. "

ConocoPhillips is planning to keep the spinning signs, but to change them from orange to red. It plans to donate 30 or so of the old orange 76 balls, some to museums such as the American Sign Museum in Cincinnatti and the San Diego Auto Museum, and one to Ray Pederson, the man who designed the original ball for the 1962 World's Fair.

Ray Pederson, for his part, says he is both pleased and a little bit flummoxed by this outpouring of interest in his 76 ball. Ray remembers that coming up with the idea of the ball was simple. "They wanted signage for a ride at the World's Fair. The only conceivable thing I could think of was a giant rotating ball. You'd see that big ball all the way across the park," he says. "I spent so much money on it they almost damn fired me. ConocoPhillips is now replacing the balls with the red color. I said to them that it doesn't bother me at all, the balls being red. It's fine. I don't think they destroyed anything. I've done so many designs. It's OK, it's cool. The thing lasted for 50, 60 years. That was several lifetimes ago," he says. "The ball was just part of a milieu of things I did. I designed Yoplait packaging, cigarettes. I didn't think much of doing things like that then. It was just part of the game. It was my idea to do the antennae balls, too. I've got about 15 of those damn antennae balls."

And yet, Pederson says: "A year ago I was down on Newport beach, coming in on a yacht there from Catalina. And I tell you from 10 miles out we saw the ball, and I said, 'Yup, there's my ball. '"

Ray Pedersen To Get A Ball (also, you)

kim — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 10:35:39 -0800

76 Ball designer Ray Pedersen has been informed by ConocoPhillips that they wish to honor his contribution to the brand's history by presenting him with one of the classic orange and blue 76 Ball gas station signs for his personal collection. Ray is trying to find the best place to store this large and lovely artifact, and we hope to report back to you soon with additional details. Kudos to CP for recognizing Ray with this generous and gracious offer!

In recognition of this cool news, Ray Pedersen has kindly agreed to personaly autograph a very limited number of 76 Ball antenna toppers, which we are making available to his fans. If you would like one, just click.

LA CityBeat article: Americana- Saving Ray's Balls

kim — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 10:07:53 -0800

[Americana] Saving Ray's Balls

We've all experienced it: a late night when you've run out of gas or are in desperate need of a bag of Funyons. Just when you've given up, out of the unforgiving void emerges a beacon of hope in the form of a floating orange and navy orb. Such is the magic of the 76 ball, the electric signage of what were once known as Union 76 gas stations, a glowing (literally) example of effective branding for nearly half a century. That is, until ConocoPhilips acquired California Unocal in 2002 and instituted a plan to replace the balls beginning in 2005, enacting a "destroy all balls" policy for the felled orange giants.

Enter Kim Cooper. The Los Angeles-based cultural historian's quest to save the eight-foot, 400-pound balls took shape when her local 76 station's ball disappeared, only to be replaced by a flattened disc with a red background instead of the familiar orange. "I didn't know at first exactly why I was so upset when they got rid of the ball in my neighborhood," Cooper says, but as the campaign grew, she found that the 76 ball held a special place in the collective memory of West Coast natives. "Several families have told me that it was their child's first word; that every time they drove past a 76 station their child would say 'ball' and it became this special family memory."

Cooper began the fight to save this icon of the American West from her living room with the site Savethe76ball.com, eventually bringing on her partner from the 1947 Project historical crime blog, Nathan Maransk. Together, the two amassed almost 3,000 signatures in an online petition that demanded ConocoPhillips save some of the balls to be put on display in museums. As a result of their efforts and the extensive media coverage thereof, the Texas-based oil conglomerate recently announced that it will donate several of the balls to museums across the country.

Although thrilled with their success, Cooper says the battle for the fate of the balls is not yet over. The Save the 76 Ball Project is also asking that a few select, historically significant balls be preserved at their original locations, that ConocoPhillips foot the bill for transporting the unwieldy orbs, and that a ball be given to the original designer, Ray Pederson, who built and hand-painted the first ball himself for the Seattle World's Fair of 1962.

-Ayse Arf, from LA CityBeat

Seattle P-I article: A roadside icon, the 76 ball, comes 'round again

kim — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 09:11:57 -0800

Photo by Scott Eklund / Seattle P-I

A Save the 76 Ball campaign aims to preserve the former gas station mainstay, designed by Ray Pedersen. Pedersen, who lives in Bellingham, first displayed his creation at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair. Pedersen gases up at this station in Tulalip, coincidentally one of the last gas stations in the U.S. with one of the icons.

A roadside icon, the 76 ball, comes 'round again
Fans save Ballard High grad's vanishing slice of Americana

By CASEY MCNERTHNEY
P-I REPORTER

Stopped at a traffic light two blocks from her Los Angeles home, Kim Cooper stared at the 76 gas station she has driven past hundreds of times and tried to figured out what was wrong.

Then she got a terrible, unsettled feeling.

"I'd always remembered seeing a big, beautiful 76 ball," she said of the '60s-era rotating sign that had illuminated gas pumps across the West Coast and at her neighborhood gas station.

"And they had replaced it with this flat sign and a color that looked like a slab of raw liver."

A Web search informed her that the balls had begun to come down three years earlier, in 2003, a few years after Unocal sold the brand to Tosco Corp., which then became part of ConocoPhillips.

Color experts hired by the company said the orange balls didn't fit with the company's bright red and white designs.

Cooper never met Ray Pedersen -- the Ballard High School graduate who designed the orange 76 ball and debuted it at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair -- but that day launched a Web campaign to save a slice of Americana that was quickly vanishing from the nation's landscape.

Cooper's online petition has attracted about 3,000 signatures and recently persuaded ConocoPhillips to change course -- installing about 75 newly painted red balls in high-traffic locations in California and saving about 30 of the old orange ones for museums.

Even the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History is considering adding a 76 ball to its collection, a spokeswoman said.

"I got a call about that, and I said, 'You've got to be kidding,' " said Pedersen, a 1944 Ballard High School grad. "But it's been out there for 45 years, and it's become part of the American psyche. It's an icon, right?"

Pedersen, 80, studied business at the University of Washington, and in 1954 was hired by Young & Rubicam, a Los Angeles company that designed Union Oil's advertising.

Union Oil's circular orange logo with blue letters had been used for more than a decade when Pedersen was hired, and the company wanted to establish itself as the gasoline leader in Los Angeles, which is still North America's largest gas market.

In late 1961, after Pedersen designed several successful print and TV ads, his boss sent him to Seattle with an assignment to create advertising for the 1962 World's Fair Skyride, sponsored by Union Oil.

The Skyride, now used at the Puyallup Fair, traveled from the northeast corner of the fairgrounds to a second kiosk 1,400 feet across.

Pedersen's boss expected typical, square signs near the boarding kiosks. "But those flat lollypop signs were boring," said Pedersen, who awoke one night with a vision.

Pedersen knew hundreds of people would be waiting in line and wanted a sign they could see from all angles. He designed murals, showing people where they could go with Union Oil and complementing the ride's brilliant reds. But he needed something that would stick in people's memory.

"You know how you wake up in the middle of the night?" asked Pedersen, who lives in Bellingham. "It was like that -- and I had this idea of a big ball."

When a Union Oil senior vice president saw the 8-foot globe installed a few days later, he said it was the best sign he'd ever seen.

"We've got to put one of these on every station we own," Pedersen recalled him saying, adding that the vice president, who later became CEO, initially ordered about 3,000 balls for stations in 13 Western states. It's been reported that the numbers peaked in 1969, when more than 18,000 gas stations in 37 states had 76 balls.

Pedersen, who handled the Union Oil account for 12 years, said it seemed natural to follow the station balls' success with replica antenna toppers.

Millions of the toppers traveled the world and spawned dozens of competitors. Kim Koga, executive director and curator of the Museum of Neon Art in Los Angeles, remembers one on her family's Volkswagen Squareback in the late '60s. She also remembered the unique artistic value of the illuminated, rotating station balls.

"It was kind of minimalist in shape and the writing and the color," she said. "It shouts '60s orange and was such a popular part of the American landscape, we had to save one."

But it wasn't easy. Letters and e-mails went unanswered by ConocoPhillips, which didn't want to discredit its trademark and brand by distributing the old balls.

Koga tried for months to track down a ball -- even contacting a Los Angeles company she knew had helped take them down. Finally, last week, after months of discussions with ConocoPhillips, the company said the museum could own one.

"We were pleasantly surprised that we had underestimated the affection that people have for the orange 76 ball, so we decided it would be a good thing to set aside about 30 vintage orange balls so they could be viewed in public arenas such as museums," ConocoPhillips spokesman Phil Blackburn said.

The Museum of History and Industry in Seattle received an e-mail from ConocoPhillips asking if it was interested in acquiring a 76 ball, spokeswoman Mercedes Lawry said. Museum officials thought it was an interesting artifact, but didn't see how it would fit with its mission, she said.

After finding out that a local man had designed it for the World's Fair, Lawry said the museum might reconsider its assessment.

The switch to more modern red and white designs came after surveys showed that customers preferred well-lit, bright gas stations, Blackburn said. While ConocoPhillips plans to install new red 76 balls at California stations, no plans for new balls in Washington have been made, he said.

And the orange balls continue to come down.

Cooper, an author and cultural historian, knew of only one 76 ball that remained in Western Washington -- at a station in Tulalip off Interstate 5's Exit 199, coincidentally where Pedersen buys his gas.

However, the ball has been painted red, and neither a station employee nor Blackburn knew when the change occurred.

"Orange is a color you can own, and Union Oil did," Pedersen said, standing under the sign this week. "That's probably why they picked it in the beginning. For years, when people saw orange they thought of Union Oil.

"Now it's gone to a liver red that is almost like McDonald's. They're making a huge mistake."

Cooper said it would also be a mistake not to save one of the balls for Pedersen -- the Seattle native who designed the icon of American motor culture.

Blackburn said the balls are "absolutely not for sale," despite dozens of requests from collectors, including "Reservoir Dogs" star Michael Madsen.

"It is important that the brand be protected," Blackburn said.

"Though there may be a historical case to be made to consider an individual collector if the circumstances and criteria can all be worked out to mutual satisfaction."

Where Pedersen might put it? That's still in question.

"I live in a community with a bunch of Republicans that have their flags up," said Pedersen, a self-proclaimed liberal veteran.

"I said if I get a ball, I'll put that up on a pole, see what they think about it."

ABOUT THE 76 BALL

Debut: 1962 Seattle World's Fair (opened April 21, 1962)

Size: The first sphere was 8 feet, Pedersen said.

Weight: 400 pounds

Where it was: In 1969, more than 18,000 stations reportedly had 76 balls. Dodger Stadium also had a 76 ball, and the gas station sign spawned millions of replica antenna toppers.

Price of regular gas in 1962: 31 cents a gallon

Price of regular gas in 2007: $2.59 a gallon

More online: Visit savethe76ball.com

P-I reporter Casey McNerthney can be reached at 206-448-8220 or caseymcnerthney@seattlepi.com.

76 Ball in the Los Angeles Times

kim — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 14:58:37 -0700

LOS ANGELES TIMES

Gas Station Icons Being 86ed

After 45 years of guiding drivers to their next fill-up, 'meatball' 76 signs are becoming casualties of corporate consistency.

By Scott Gold, Times Staff Writer
May 14, 2006

In January, an earnest woman named Kim Cooper was driving through Lincoln Heights when her neighborhood gas station caught her eye. The station's familiar 76 insignia, its stocky blue numbers splashed against a sea of orange, had been supplanted with a sign that looked like, well, everywhere else. The new 76 was set against a backdrop of red, and a boring red at that -- "a queasy color," she recalled with a grimace, "like liver."

Cooper, the publisher of a magazine called Scram -- a "journal of unpopular culture" -- does not typically concern herself with the goings-on of megacorporations like ConocoPhillips, owner of the 76 brand.

But the 76 logo, she decided, isn't just an ad. Not anymore. The orange balls that have rotated above gas stations for 45 years are a piece of roadside Americana, and in Southern California they are an iconic part of the sightline, not much different than palm trees or the Hollywood sign. They no longer belong to a boardroom, Cooper decided, but to the public.

"I felt," she said, "that this shouldn't pass unnoticed."

Later that day, Cooper launched an Internet blog -- www.savethe76ball.com -- dedicated to the balls' preservation.

At first glance, it seemed a little frivolous. In a city of transit and transients, is this what preservationists are left with - - fighting to save relics of urban design known in the subculture of petroliana as "meatballs"?

It hasn't taken long, however, for the campaign to catch on. Heartfelt response has poured in, not just from random drivers, but from prominent voices in architecture and design, a board member of the Los Angeles Conservancy, even the 79-year-old man who designed the balls in the first place to mark the 1962 World's Fair in Seattle.

Houston-based ConocoPhillips, which has been quietly replacing the balls with more modern-looking signs for at least six months, declined to respond to detailed questions about its decision. In a written statement, a spokeswoman said the balls were being replaced - - and the logo's color changed to red -- to give a "common image" to the company's 76, Phillips 66 and Conoco gas stations.

"We appreciate motorists' loyalty," the statement said. "Though our look is a little different, the quality of our products and our commitment to our customers remains the same."

To Cooper, 39, who has also worked on an online crime diary of the year 1947 in Los Angeles and provides guided tours based in part on that work, it sounds like a bunch of corporate hooey, "the complete rejection of the goodwill that this brand has built."

"You can look at them as some ugly thing that should be thrown away," she said. "Or you can see them as the best expression of America -- a gleeful, bright California image, a masterpiece of salesmanship and graphic design."

Many of the 1,600 postings to Cooper's online petition suggest that she is not alone. "Please don't destroy my childhood memories," one reads. Another asks: "Why does everything we love in life go away?"

While the testimonials trickle in, the balls continue to fall each week. In Echo Park, at Alvarado and Sunset. Below Griffith Park, at Franklin and Beechwood. And at Dodger Stadium, where Union Oil had a fruitful sponsorship from the start of construction, where Vin Scully once responded to home runs by announcing that Union 76 would be making a donation in a player's name, and where, during some evening games, the orange ball beyond centerfield sometimes made it seem as if there were two suns setting over the city.

In 1961, Ray Pedersen was a hard-charging, 34-year-old art director for the advertising firm of Young & Rubicam, working out of its downtown Los Angeles office. Union Oil Co., the venerable California firm founded in 1890, asked Y&R to design a sign that would rise next to a cable-supported "sky train" at the World's Fair.

Pedersen began fiddling with the advertising schematic Union Oil was already using -- the blocky numbers, the orange-and-blue motif that seemed radical at a time when most of the competition had settled on tamer reds, whites and blues.

"I thought: 'We've got to do something really hot -- a big ball, lit from the inside,' " he said.

By the time he had found someone who could mold plastic into two halves of a ball that would reach 12 feet in diameter, he had spent an estimated $50,000, he said. A Y&R manager called in a rage.

"He said: 'What are you doing up there?' " Pedersen recalled. "I said: 'I'm hanging a sign, man!"

Pedersen said he was nearly fired -- but Union Oil loved it. Company executives declared that they would erect as many balls as they could. The first went up in Redondo Beach. By the end of the decade, there were thousands, mostly in the West.

They became an oddball expression of unity. Union Oil eventually created tiny versions that could be affixed to car antennas, and distributed millions of them. Nowhere, it seemed, did they have as much resonance as they did in Southern California.

Preservationists attribute that to two things.

First, Los Angeles, largely because its economy catered to so many car travelers, was essential in the development of creative advertising and roadside signs. In 1923, for instance, an L.A. Packard dealership is believed to have become the first U.S. business to use a neon sign. That same year, a sign reading "HOLLYWOODLAND" -- later shortened -- was erected to advertise a new development in the hills above downtown.

"The 76 sign is part of a tremendous history," said Alan Hess, an Irvine architect and author of 10 books on 20th century architectural history. "The 76 sign was colorful, it was shapely, and it was delightful. It was also functional; your tank is getting low, you see it far down the street and you knew exactly where you were going to get gas."

Second, unlike some European cities or more mature U.S. cities, Los Angeles has few significant public buildings beyond City Hall, the Department of Water and Power building and a handful of others.

Commercial structures are the foundation of the sightline. Right or wrong, those structures are an important part of the region's history, said John English, a board member of the Los Angeles Conservancy and an architectural historian.

"You could look at this and say that it's the most ridiculous thing in the world," English said. "But our relationship to commercial iconography, that really is our heritage."

When the subject is a hunk of plastic, that's heady talk. And it has been drowned out in recent years by another trend: the effort to protect communities' identities by cleaning up their sightlines -- starting by targeting tall "lollipop" signs that many planners and corporate executives have come to see as clutter.

It was true across the region, but pronounced in places like Orange County, where civic leaders decided, in the name of maturity, to do away with structures and signs that were built to invoke images of postwar prosperity and imagination -- space exploration, for instance, or the solar system. Visiting business executives, those leaders decided, no longer wanted to call their offices to explain that messages could be left for them at the Cosmic Inn or the Inn of Tomorrow.

Tall, flashy signs began to come down at a rapid pace, replaced, with the financial assistance of taxpayers, with lowerlying, more stoic "monument" signs. It was a controversial movement; monument signs are often derided as "tombstones" among those who yearn for more roadside diversity, and English said the loss of commercial art risked "turning everything into oatmeal." But the trend toward uniformity was strong.

"The effort was noble," said Wally Linn, a former mayor in La Palma, one of the cities where the effort was widespread. "We were trying to maintain an image."

The 76 balls, which in most cases are being replaced with either ground-level signs or taller signs in the shape of discs, are merely the latest structures sacrificed to that image campaign.

But Pedersen, among others, can't figure why ConocoPhillips would want to abandon such a powerful image.

"It's their nickel," he said. "But this was a franchise. It just doesn't make any sense."

While the website encourages a boycott of ConocoPhillips, conservationists aren't expecting to save many balls. Many would be content to preserve a few samples as reminders of a different era in urban design.

"It simply improves people's lives to be surrounded by things that somebody cared about," Cooper said. "Yeah, it was an ad. But it was really cool."

Earl Ma's feature article from Check The Oil! magazine

kim — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 18:32:48 -0700

A shorter version of this article appears in Check the Oil! Magazine, May '06

SOS

76 Balls featured in L.A. CityBeat's design issue

kim — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 20:54:01 -0700

The Old Ball Game (link)

Last autumn, ConocoPhillips began to pluck the famous orange balls from their posts at Union 76 and Unocal gas stations and replace them with flat, rectangular signs that aren’t even orange. This sent loyal customers and commercial-design mavens into a fury. To fight back, local writer Kim Cooper launched Savethe76ball.com in January. Ray Pedersen, the ball’s designer, soon took notice, and the two joined forces to launch the campaign “Save Ray’s Balls.”

The ball was born at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, when Pedersen was approached to create a marker for 76 at a unique skyride installation. “But hanging a sign on it,” said Pedersen, “would be tantamount to ruining something architecturally beautiful.” Instead, he ran a pole up the center of the base and hung a sign on that. As it spun, Pedersen recalls, “It looked like hell. It was a lollipop. I said, ‘We need a ball … and I’d like to light the damn thing from inside. Everybody looked at me like I was crazy.”

Nevertheless, Pedersen started building the ball. But he was nearly fired for racking up almost $50,000 in expenses. When he saw his boss standing beneath the prototype, waving his arms and pointing at it, Pedersen thought he was “in deep doo-doo.” Much to his surprise, he says, his boss emphatically shouted “Goddammit, we’re gonna put one of these up at every station!”

“They were a beacon,” continues Pedersen. “You could see them all over the place.”

The 76 ball at Dodger Stadium was removed during recent off-season renovations, when fans wouldn’t be present. “It’s like, let’s get rid of this one quick, because when the season starts, people have a chance to notice,” Cooper says. “I was really hoping we could rally to save it.”

What becomes of the fallen balls? Last month, several were discovered in Fresno. Behind a chain-link fence lay at least a half-dozen orange spheres, one facing out as though from a detention camp of other lost souls of signage, damned to a death of rust and cobwebs.

Returning the balls to their rightful posts is possible, but not imminent. Almost 1,500 people have signed the online petition, threatening to buy their gasoline elsewhere if their stations take down the ball.

When ConocoPhillips bought Union 76, it intentionally didn’t purchase the rights to the ball. “It was going to be a little extra to buy, and they just said, ‘We don’t need them,’” asserts Cooper. Those rights now belong to Chevron.

“Once the Conoco people do this, they’re gonna destroy the personality of 76,” says Pedersen. “But that’s their nickel, right? They’re not gonna change.”

–Ryder Palmere (CityBeat)

Ray Pedersen on Steve Parker's Car Nut Show

rss — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 20:11:40 -0800

Listen to 76 Ball designer Ray Pedersen interviewed on Steve Parker's the Car Nut show, Newstalk 920 K-PSI Palm Springs. Ray talks about the genesis of the ball and his wild and wooly days as an ad exec for Young & Rubicam in the fifties and sixties. Show was recorded 3-05-06.

Visit www.steveparker.com for more info on cars, trucks, motorcycles, auto racing and auto lifestyles.

Subscribe to the Save the 76 Ball feed and stay tuned.

Nathan Marsak says "Save the 76 Ball!"

rss — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 16:19:53 -0800

Nathan Marsak, author of the book “Los Angeles Neon” and co-author of the Save The 76 Ball Petition, delivers an impassioned podcast plea that the remaining 76 Balls be kept safe from harm.

stay in touch! subscribe to the channel.