Guys who are handy enough to do wheel alignments tend to be handy with other things, as well, and so handpainted bears invariably spring up at shops with Bear equipment.
While Joe Powers has regulation metal signs obtained from Bear, his shop also sports a handpainted bear looking north on traffic tootling down 16th Street. Joe Powers' shop is called Jim Wilson Wheel Alignment. It appears to be a universal rule in the wheel-alignment business that no matter how long the original owner of the shop has been dead, his name must be retained.
Some previous owner--maybe Ken Fausey--painted the bear at Jim Wilson's. An unknown sign artist painted the doorway bears at Moe Allen's in 1955, although one or another of the mechanics does the repainting these days. Jack Thomas, whose three locations are designated "Official Bear Stations," took creativity the furthest. He actually made stencils of the Happy Bear, and used them to paint bears all over the shop.
"I still have the old stencils," he says. "You'd take a stencil and spray yellow and then spray a little red tongue."
The homemade bears at all these shops have been painted and repainted so many times over the years, they have diverged like Darwin's finches, isolated on the islands of the Gal pagos, until bears at different shops have evolved into a number of different bear subspecies. The doorway bears at Moe Allen's look pretty much like the originals, but the bear that hangs over the sidewalk looks like a cousin making his living in the teddy bear line.
The bear at Jim Wilson's certainly has a grin, but he also has the morning-after look of a man paying for a hard night on the town. His jaw appears to be painfully dislocated--a condition even Joe Powers, looking at the sign as if for the first time, will grudgingly recognize. Although wheel-alignment guys tend to choke over the word "cute," they do show a remarkable devotion to a logo that is just that.
"That is the business, absolutely," says Joe Powers.
John Miner is sitting at his desk at the repair shop he manages in Glendale, his head in his hands. John does not appear to be having a good day. There may not be too many good days around this place. The shop fixes up used cars, some of them repos, before they're sold at West Valley Thrift Resale on Glendale Avenue.
When the topic of his bear signs is broached, however, John springs up. "They painted them over!" he says in dismay. John is young, slender and much too pleasant to suffer head-in-the-hands kinds of days. He leads the way outside and points up at the wall, and, sure enough, you can see all that remains of the two bears that used to grace the corner of the building.
Actually, the middle portion of the two bears had been missing for a number of years, but you can tell that the happy faces have been cruelly covered with white paint. The paint job appears to have been done pretty sloppily, since it entirely missed the two sets of feet. "It was about the only thing that smiled at me when I came to work in the morning," says John, actually looking distressed. He chats for a little bit, the afternoon being slow, and then offers his own contribution to historic Phoenix sign lore. "Did you see the names of the people who used to own this place?" John walks around to the other side of the building and proudly shows where, faded from the sun and left over from some previous incarnation of the structure, the prize-winning moniker "Gomer Moses" is painted on the wall. Clearly, John is cheering up. Gomer Moses is the sort of name a bear lover would cherish.
When he goes back inside, one of the mechanics is passing around a quesadilla that has arrived for lunch.
