Vintage signs, oil cans and more in man’s bric-a-brac collection

Bob Grant’s collection started simply enough. He was at an antique sale with a friend, and he saw an old kick plate that bore the words “Grant Batteries.”

The purchase led to his third career, which consisted of hunting down old signs and gas station memorabilia and buying and selling them.

He’s still up for the occasional sale or trade, but these days, he does it infrequently enough that he’s willing to use the word “retired.”

It was his third retirement. He had a career in the Air Force, but he can’t talk much about that.

“I worked at Area 51,” Grant said. “So of course, I wasn’t there, as far as anyone knows.”

He later ran his landscaping business, but it’s the collecting that became his passion. The backyard of his home on the foothills of Sunrise Manor looks like someone dropped a ghost town in it. There are five buildings that were constructed by Grant, much of it with salvaged materials.

One building is full of oil cans in a variety of sizes and from scores of companies.

“The ones with the interesting graphics are the most valuable,” Grant said. “This Parrot can is one people really go for. I’ve got these cans here with the Sinclair dinosaur in three different colors.”

None of the three dinosaurs is the green one the company currently uses.

Grant has traveled near and far gathering his collection, going to farm sales in the Midwest (“They sell everything, including the dirt,” Grant said.) to local sales in the valley. Some of his favorite pieces are local artifacts he’s gathered while walking around in the nearby desert. A backyard room with floor-to-ceiling shelves is filled with locally produced soda bottles, silverware from long-gone casinos, perfume bottles, ashtrays and assorted bric-a-brac.

Another building houses some of his earliest pieces and some of the more unique ones. He owns an old cash register with buttons labeled for various filling station services; an art deco cigarette machine; a spark plug cleaner; and what he says are some of the hardest signs to find: restroom signs.

“It’s actually easier to find a lot of the bigger signs,” Grant said. “Most places just had one restroom sign, and if they were getting rid of it, they just tossed it in the trash. The bigger signs might get taken down and stored somewhere.”

It’s a restroom sign Grant uses to illustrate his restoration skills.

“The bottom of this sign was painted over with black paint, and they changed what it said,” Grant said. “I cleaned that off, and now you can’t see any of that black paint, and you have the original wording on the sign.”

For the most part, Grant likes to keep his collection in the same state of disrepair it was in when he acquired it. He strives to have the pieces as original as possible and isn’t a fan of extreme restoration.

“I don’t like what they do on ‘American Restoration,’ when they make it look brand new,” Grant said. “I really don’t like it when they take a vintage piece and turn it into something else entirely.”

Reality television, which airs the show, has tried to reach him, but he’s not interested at the moment.

“ ‘American Restoration’ called, and I turned them down,” Grant said. “I came home one day, and my son told me ‘American Pickers’ had called and left a number. I’ve never bothered to call back.”

Despite Grant’s disinterest in those reality shows, he enjoyed a recent visit from Mark Hall-Patton, director of Clark County Museums and one of the experts on the reality TV series “Pawn Stars.”

“It’s a great collection,” Hall-Patton said. “He really does enjoy what he does, and he’s very knowledgeable about what he has.”

Some of Hall-Patton’s favorite pieces in the collection were old Las Vegas signs, including several blue on white diamond-shaped signs that were common in California and others that referenced old place names that are no longer used. A large display thermometer listed an address on “Hoover Dam Highway,” an alternate name for Boulder Highway that was never officially the road’s name.

“I really liked the backyard display,” Hall-Patton said. “It’s not a museum exhibit — it’s a private collection, but for an individual”s collection, he’s really come up with some nice stuff. I hope that someday, some of that will make its way into a public collection so that it can be used to teach future generations.”

To reach East Valley View reporter F. Andrew Taylor, email ataylor@viewnews.com or call 702-380-4532.