It was the era of Burma Shave signs — those pre-interstate-highway years when oversized barn signs screamed “See Rock City,” or when other barns pitched tobacco ads like “Chew Bull Durham.” It was the fading heyday of two-lane highways when billboards appeared just off the road’s edge — sometimes dramatically so, while one’s car or truck pulled out of a sharp curve. It was way back when logos and signs and making one’s mark were viewed differently than today.
More peculiarly, it was when road signs that proclaimed ”Prepare to Meet God,” or ”Get Right with God,” or “Jesus Is Coming Soon” appeared alongside highways all across America. To some, these were affirming messages — but to others, the seemingly ubiquitous religious slogans were annoying, even startling! The fact is, though: One Appalachian minister named Henry Harrison Mayes made most of them.
Had he sought publicity, Mayes might have become the era’s most famous resident of our hometown. But he did not. So during the 1950s most in our town viewed him as harmlessly eccentric, “a character,” a man of singular passions — the kind of person whom Charles Kuralt would champion when the CBS journalist began broadcasting “On the Road” reports from his journeys across America.
Among those of us who grew up in that mountain-rimmed valley, Mayes was known as ”the Sign Man” or “the Cross Builder.” He lived near the valley’s center in a cross-shaped house. He kept its lawn filled with cross-shaped signs. I never saw him in a car or truck. Instead, he rode a bicycle onto which a religious message board was attached. But most vivid of all, he created a massive cross of electric lights; that cross still hangs about ten feet from the ground along a mountain at the base of our town’s main avenue, and every night, the cross gleams above the entire valley, as if the sign were floating.
Mayes’ crosses were not some ploy of the Ku Klux Klan (which used crosses to send racist messages). Instead, Mayes was a sincere, humble man on a self-perceived mission. He designed, constructed and transported all of these signs at his own expense — at least that’s what we understood. Indeed, a host of other lore sprang up about the Cross Builder: That he had erected signs in virtually every state in the union; that he had named his children after earth’s planets (as part of a commitment to perpetuate his mission into outer space); that he even donated signs to NASA for future use on earth’s moon or on other planets. The stories seemed endless. Today, some of Mayes’ items are on display in the Museum of Appalachia in Norris, Tennessee — affirming that despite the man’s gnarly attributes, he was real.
In a sense, Mayes was to religious road signs what Colonel Harland D. Sanders was to fried chicken. For much of both men’s lives, they lived about fifty miles apart. Sanders was about eight years older than Mayes. Each focused on something common, something the rest of us took for granted. Each fashioned that common thing into products of his own creation. Then each reproduced those products nationwide. One of Mayes’ slogans might have appealed to the colonel himself: ”Advertising God Since 1918″!
Each man also linked his dreams to highways, to automobiles, to trucks and to a belief that, somehow, success in that era was wedded to the future of highways. Today, concerns such as global warming and ecology cause us to question such assumptions. But as a boy, I simply saw both men coming and going in our town. I understood that each acted, thought and used words in unusual ways. Yet I could not see what they saw, as if I were spiritually and creatively blind to the reality that a person’s story isn’t finished until long after his death. We do not author nor finish our life stories.We are all rough sketches, works in progress, glimpses and drafts of stories yet to come.
