8 FEBRUARY 26-MARCH 4, 2026 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | Keeping the Lights On CORKY SCHOLL MAY BE GONE, BUT THESE NEON LOVERS WON’T LET SAVE THE SIGNS GO DARK. BY TEAGUE BOHLEN “Neon is the fi fth most abundant element in the universe,” says Todd Matuszewicz. That’s how the co-president of Save the Signs ends every tour he gives of Morry’s Neon, where he’s worked on and off since the 1990s, or at J.J. “Neon Dad” Bebout’s Subjective Coffee, which serves as the Save the Signs headquarters. “It isn’t terrestrial; it does not exist on the earth; it comes from the heavens into our atmosphere, and we breathe it in and out every day,” he explains. “When we look at Hubble telescope images of star nebulae, we’re seeing cosmic neon lights. And, as Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson remind us, we ourselves are made of star stuff.” The founder of Save the Signs, Corky Scholl, is now star stuff; sadly, he passed away last August at 48. But Matuszewicz and other true believers are keeping his passion alive. A photojournalist with 9News for many years, Scholl was devoted to the preservation and protection of Denver’s roadside signage, those landmarks that so many grew up with, each viewing laying more of a foundation into both their memory and the collective recollections of the city populace as a whole. “These signs are part of our culture,” Ma- tuszewicz says. “They’re temporal markers, right? Look at the motels with neon signage along Colfax. People had weddings there. They had quinceañeras. They had vacations there. They have these memories that tie that time to that sign. It’s not just commercial; there’s far more to them than that.” Neon signage is beautiful, of course; while it evokes a sort of noir-era standard, it has a lingering aesthetic appeal that’s also time- less. That’s what inspired the photojournal- ism project that would eventually become Save the Signs. In 2012, Scholl had just pur- chased a home off East Colfax Avenue, and he realized that the classic signs he passed by every day was apt to disappear almost overnight, city markers just lost to time. So he began documenting them, often posting on the StS Facebook page several times a day. As the reach of social media extended, so did the preservationist effort to, well, save the signs. Now, in 2026, scores of signs that might have been scrapped have instead survived, with plans to restore and celebrate them. Those plans are being carried out by a team dedicated to keeping the lights on Scholl’s Save the Signs movement. Co-president with Ma- tuszewicz is Corky’s wife, Melissa Scholl, who over- sees the long-term collec- tion and stewardship of all the historic signs and related ephemera she as- sembled with Corky over nearly two decades. Vice President Kit Watkins, from legacy Denver busi- ness Watkins Stained Glass, is responsible for com- munity liaison work with property owners regarding landmarking, restoration, tax credits and preserva- tion grants. Chris Geddes is the Save the Signs secretary, as well as a preservation specialist for the City of Aurora and lecturer in the UCD Historic Preserva- tion program. And Bebout serves as treasurer. He’s a coffee entrepreneur who runs Roostercat in Denver and whose West- minster shop, Subjective Coffee, is both an ad-hoc neon museum and the “clubhouse” for a group that calls itself “the Sign Posse,” according to Matuszewicz. But they’re not alone in the Save the Signs organization. Six more artisans, both local and regional, serve on an advisory board, and three more in a community cohort. And the groups’ overall connections in the landscape of Denver preservationism are strong, with ties to History Colorado, Historic Denver, Colorado Preservation Inc. and the Univer- sity of Colorado Denver’s Dana Crawford Historic Preservation Program. Many of these connections came through not only Scholl’s efforts but the work of Ma- tuszewicz, who began his journey in neon two decades before Scholl founded Save the Signs. “I didn’t grow up loving neon signs,” he says. “I had no relationship to neon at all.” Then his wife came home from a retreat and mentioned that she’d met someone whose son was going to neon school. “I im- mediately said, ‘I’m going to neon school.’ I had never before considered it. Hadn’t thought about it once,” he admits. “But we moved to Minneapolis, where they had a training facility, and I went to this artist-run vocational school. Almost everything they taught me was wrong. I couldn’t fi nd a job until a friend hired me at a big sign company, Nordquist, and I ended up in a union shop. I was there for three years as the only tube bender in the shop. Their big clients were malls. My claim to fame at the time was that I made the Mall of America letters. They’re ten-foot letters, but it’s not all that impres- sive since they’re all just straight tubes. But people recognize it.” Matuszewicz worked for different sign companies here and there before getting an offer from Morry’s, where he worked until 2000 – when he left, a bit burnt out, to become a Waldorf School teacher for several years. “I like to say that teachers have an expiration date,” Matuszewicz laughs. “I’d just reached mine. I loved being with the kids, but it was time for them to learn from someone else.” It was also time for Matuszewicz to learn from someone else. So he enrolled at Met- ropolitan State University of Denver and earned a chemistry degree while working again at Morry’s, helping position the legacy business for a new owner as the old guard retired. Then Matuszewicz’s wife again mentioned something that would change his life: “She said something about seeing this ‘Change Makers’ thing at CU Denver, and said maybe I could do that.” The Change Makers fellowship was de- signed for professionals nearing the end of one career and exploring the possibilities for their next move. Matuzewicz ended up in the inaugural cohort of that program, where he toyed with a few ideas — being a busker doing nothing but “killing songs” (his cohort thought that wasn’t such a great idea), joining up with a kombucha business he’d worked on in years past (they were sort of “meh” on that one). “And then I said, ‘Well, maybe I’ll save the neon signs of Colorado.’ As soon as I said it, people were like, ‘Yes.’ Sometimes the universe just lines up,” he notes. Coming to know the backstory of neon was just as fascinating as learning the process to preserve it. “I was doing research on pre-World War II Denver neon,” Matuszewicz recalls. “You know, going through the old newspapers, searching for every mention of neon. One of the amazing things was the way people talked about it even then. Neon was expen- sive — still is, since it’s handmade — and not everyone could afford it. But they used those signs that did exist as a point of reference: Oh, we’re the delicatessen next to the theater with the neon sign.” That all changed with the establishment of sign codes. “It started with Lady Bird John- son in 1965, with the Highway Beautifi ca- tion Act. That was really aimed at junkyards and billboards, but neon got swept up in that movement, especially when the city of Denver started enacting ordinances in response to it. Now, I don’t mean to say that I’m against the beautifi cation of highways,” Matuszewicz says, and laughs. “Lady Bird Johnson wasn’t a villain. It was just the times. It was also the start of the environmental movement, which I think had to do with those fi rst pictures of Earth from space. The big blue marble, right? I mean, it’s one of those things most people now take for granted as something we’ve always had, but that photo didn’t exist when I was young. That was taken in my lifetime. It was a budding awareness of ecology, and part of that was control over the visual element of our cities.” One of the realities of neon signage that most people don’t know, according to Ma- tuszewicz, is that often the businesses that boasted them didn’t actually own their signs. “Lots of classic signs — Pete’s Kitchen, the Satire, the Riviera Motel — those were all owned by sign companies, who lease the signs to the businesses and have a mainte- nance contract,” he CULTURE continued on page 10 KEEP UP ON DENVER ARTS AND CULTURE AT WESTWORD.COM/ARTS The Riviera Motel’s neon sign is a bright spot in Aurora. SAVE THE SIGNS
