Casper Artist Saves Vintage Wyoming Neon Landmarks One Sign At A Time

CASPER — Connie Morgan was 17 and living in Manhattan when a fascination with neon lights drew her in, but it wasn’t the lights on Broadway.

She lived in Manhattan, Montana, and the newspaper ad she saw there led her to ask her parents if she could borrow the car. She drove to a neon art show at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman.

“As soon as I walked in the room and saw all the art, all the neon hanging on the ceiling and on the walls, I just said to myself ‘That’s what I want to do,’” Morgan said.

Now 51 and in her 29th year of bending glass tubes into neon signs, Morgan has a successful business called GloW Neon Lights in downtown Casper. She’s one of a few still preserving and practicing an art that loses a little more every year.

The neon and argon artist continues to take on challenges using her skills such as helping with restoration of the old Powder River Tumble Inn cowboy sign and more recently agreeing to help the Frontier Auto Museum in Gillette with a neon park project.

Morgan said she went to San Francisco after high school to the now-closed National Neon Institute to get her initial training in the neon trade. The 14 weeks just covered the basics.

“That was the first time that I ever sold a sign was when I was going to school,” she said. “I made a sign for a bead shop.”

Art was always part of her life. But she said considering her ability to bend and weld glass and form it to a pattern never really felt like art until she moved from an initial job at a sign shop in Detroit to Seattle.

“I got a job there in a sign shop called Western Neon and pretty much everyone that worked there was involved in the arts somehow,” she said. “We would put on art shows.”

Cleaning And COVID

Morgan said she arrived in Casper 14 years ago and first worked at another sign shop learning about vinyl signs and applying them to vehicles. Then, her then husband left her and her children, and she left the sign business to clean houses.

While cleaning houses, Morgan asked the owner of the sign shop if she could use the neon equipment in the back for projects. She started making and fixing signs. That led to Casper Yellowstone District entrepreneur John Huff contacting her about a sign he wanted repaired.

They met in a building Huff owns on West Yellowstone Highway.

Huff mentioned that he wanted to turn the then empty space over to an artist. Morgan said she blurted out that she wanted her to open a shop space but at the same time was asking herself, ‘Why are you saying that?” Huff helped work out a deal where she moved into the building.

“By the time COVID was shutting everything down, I had my store open,” she said. “I had lost all my cleaning jobs because of COVID, but I wasn’t super stressed about it because I knew this place would grow by word of mouth.”

It has.

And as the only neon sign shop in the state that she knows of, business has come from near and far with people digging out old beer signs and reassessing old business signs and many just wanting a new neon sign.

“I do a lot of commission work,” she said. “It’s mostly just people who want stuff for their home.”

Morgan said the neon signs first became a thing in 1923 for a Packard dealership in Los Angeles. For most of the past century, neon still had a niche for advertising businesses until fluorescent lights made inroads and then in the 1990s LED lights came into play.

But neon has never gone away.

“Neon draws your eye in, it’s bright,” she said.

Tools Of The Trade

In her shop, Morgan opened a door to secrets of neon. Inside the cabinet were stacks of light tubes that she orders. The tubes have various phosphor coatings on the inside that when mixed with one of the inert gasses produces a particular-colored light when electrified. The light tubes in signs hold neon or argon gas.

Morgan said neon gas can interact with the phosphor to make pink, orange, and red colors while argon is used for all other colors. During the process of making the sign, she said she adds mercury to the argon so that the glass colors become vibrant.

Tools of the trade for a neon artist include a ribbon burner for creating sweeping curves and letters with glass, a cannon fire for melting and bending as well as a hand torch. She also uses a glass file and a “blow hose” to blow the glass.

The main machine for the trade to create the light and colors in the tubes is a manifold and vacuum pump powered by a large transformer that cleans out the tubes and puts them under a vacuum through an electrical charge. The gas is inserted after the vacuum is created.

Morgan said the tube bending part of the job is not easy and the glass available now is unleaded unlike the glass that she trained on. She said the leaded glass used in the past was easier to bend and did not require as much heat.

When she conducts a class on glass tube bending, she warns her students that proficiency takes a while.

“The biggest thing about bending glass is getting a feel for it,” she said. Tube-benders need to become skilled in various techniques including “gathering the glass” where she said the artist needs to “micro-push” the glass as it’s heating in on itself but not push it together to maintain the thickness of the tube.

“There’s a lot of techniques,” she said. “They take a long time to learn.”

She showed Cowboy State Daily a Pepsi sign that she recently completed for a pizza business in South Dakota. A retired sign maker in Cheyenne made a cabinet for the sign and the inside uses LED lights and then she created some neon glass art for the outside.

Art All Over

Among her many neon projects, are a Hannya mask for a tattoo shop in Fort Collins, Colorado,  a sugar skull for a Mexican restaurant in Casper, a neon sign on 100-year-old barn wood that reads “Hey Y’All” sold to a buyer in Nashville, and she is working on a project for an out-of-state customer who wants a neon portrait of his dog that is 4-feet tall.

“He’s actually going to meet me in Jackson Hole so he can come pick it up,” she said. Morgan said customers have been as far away as Florida and she has had several in neighboring states.

In addition to those other jobs, she continues to work when possible on the Tumble Inn Cowboy sign. Morgan said the sign still needs to be wired and Huff who has handled the restoration of the metal and electrical components is moving forward on that.  She has fixed much of the glass that wasn’t broken and is working on areas of the sign that need glass replacement. 

A pattern for part of the sign was on a worktable as Cowboy State Daily visited.

She also is excited about the Gillette neon park project. A sign for it was on the floor ready for her to dig into.

“The Frontier Auto Museum has collected broken down neon signs from all over the state and they’re bringing them to me to fix the neon,” she said. “They’re going to put them up in Gillette. A neon park here in Wyoming is pretty cool.”

As a neon artist, there are not many signs driving around Casper or the state that escape her attention. She lists signs she sees in Casper like the American Theatre, Lou Taubert’s Ranch Outfitters and the electrical union building that she would love to see redone and one at an old bar on the west side of the state that has a sign that needs to be turned on again.

In a culture that wants everything done quickly, Morgan is thankful that most of her customers understand the century-old process around neon will never be instant - whether it is a new sign or an old fix.

“I would say 99% of the people are super patient with me, they understand that it’s a piece of art,” she said. “And they just want me to take my time so that they can get the best product.”

Contact Dale Killingbeck at dale@cowboystatedaily.com

Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.