Luke Williams and his brother Chuck co-founded American Sign and Indicator in Spokane in 1951 with the invention of the electronic time and temperature sign. The company went on to become the largest electronic sign company in the world throughout the sixties and seventies, and continued making some of the largest scoreboards for sports arenas during the eighties when the brothers sold their interest in the company. Luke Williams was a rugged capitalist and self-made multi-millionaire when I met him in January, 1990. Although in his late sixties, he had just started a new company, American Electronic Sign, and I had just been hired as their one and only graphic artist – my first full-time job out of college.

This was a time when the feasibility to do graphics on a computer was in its infancy. I was using a Macintosh II, the first Mac with color, and a whopping 1 megabyte of memory. I also had a black and white flatbed scanner. This was simply amazing technology at the time, and I was tasked with creating presentation artwork. The way it typically worked was a salesman would take a picture of a business site, say a grocery store. I would scan the photo and then with my newly updated Aldus FreeHand 2.0, draw one of our beautiful electronic displays under their existing sign. I had special fonts that matched the dot patterned fonts used on the actual sign, so I could quickly type a custom message on the drawing. The artwork would then be printed and faxed to the salesman at the site. I know it seems antiquated now, but at the time this was cutting edge and customers were amazed that we could create visualizations for them so quickly. I also created ads, newsletters, fliers and other materials of the kind I still do today.

Mr. Williams took a liking to me and often treated me to lunch where he discussed his views on business, and asked me my ideas on what we could do to help improve sales and build the company. His own adopted son, Mark, also worked for the company in the warehouse, but his son wasn’t too bright. Mark once got arrested for patrolling the streets of downtown Spokane with a loaded shotgun while dressed in a gorilla suit. Don’t ask.

Anyway, I think Mr. Williams looked to me as the son he wished he had, and he was my first mentor in the business world. He was driven, highly personable and seemed to be grooming me for a more influential position in the company. He promoted me to advertising manager, although I was still the only graphics person there. But after a year and a half of working and improving my graphics skills, I was offered a job teaching at my Alma mater, where I was beginning my master’s degree. I asked Mr. Williams if I could work part-time while I did this. He agreed, although from then on he called me ‘Professor.’ In his mind this was not a compliment. When I was asked by the university to teach more classes, I couldn’t continue to work at the sign company and we had to part ways. It was all for the best, at least for me, because soon after I left, the company was sued for patent infringement and a year later was headed for bankruptcy.

As Mr. Williams would say, “it’s not personal, it’s just business.”

I still admired the man, and he agreed to be one of my references. He died in 2004. I own and have read his autobiography.