APRIL 2025

I Owe a Lot to Baseball

It’s April and that means baseball is back. I was just thinking about how it has affected my life in lots of unexpected, sometimes weird, ways. When I was a little kid growing up in Tulsa, my dad would take me to the Tulsa Oilers minor league baseball games at Oiler Park, a dilapidated old ballpark that eventually collapsed during a game. That’s where I fell in love with kraut dogs and I’ve probably eaten thousands of them since then. I just read that each hot dog you eat reduces your lifespan by 36 minutes. I’m in big trouble.
At my very first little league practice in second grade, the coach hit pop flies to the kids and the first one I tried to catch missed my glove completely. It hit me right between the eyes on my nose, and broke my glasses in half. I always thought it broke my nose too, but no one bothered to take me to the doctor. Fast forward to 2024, I got food poisoning and blacked out, hitting my head pretty hard. When they did a CT scan, the doctor asked me if I had hit my face. No, why? Looks like your nose is broken and you have a partially deviated septum. Ah, well, that was from little league baseball over 50 years ago. But, at least now we know for sure.

Turns out I was a pretty good ball player and in 7th grade I was asked to play on an all-star team for a tournament. There was an age limit and your birthday had to be after October 10th. Mine is October 15th, so no problem right? The tournament people called and asked if we were trying to be sneaky. And that is how we discovered that my birth certificate is wrong—by nine days. It says I was born on October 6th. Seems like that would have been easy to fix, except the hospital in the small town where I was born burned to the ground a few years after I was born, and there was no way to prove my actual birthday. To this day my driver’s license and everything else says October 6th.
I kept getting better at baseball and, when it was time to go to college, I got the opportunity to play at Oklahoma State University. At the time, it was one of the top ranked baseball teams in the NCAA. My sophomore year the Cowboys went to the finals of the College World Series. But, after that I knew I wasn’t going pro and I needed to start taking art and graphic design seriously. I decided to play one last summer of baseball and then move on with life. As fate would have it, the head coach from a smaller college saw me pitch and offered me both a baseball scholarship and an art scholarship. And in that small town at that small college I met some of my longest best friends, my first wife, and learned the basic skills for my career.
In the last few years I’ve been lucky to accompany Tony Hawk down on the field as he threw out the first pitch at a Padres game and hang out in the owner’s box. I’ve gotten to attend some great Padres games with my own son and daughter. And I’ve had Padres games on TV to bond with my now 87-year old dad through the last few seasons. I owe a lot to baseball.
Now on to other things…

Neon signs are cool.

For as long as I can remember, I have loved old neon signs. Maybe the fact that my family and I went to Las Vegas a lot when I was younger had an influence. But I’ve always loved a great old motel neon or a local laundromat or whatever it might be. I have been known to pull over and take photos of hundreds of old neon signs as I travel across the country. And I would estimate that about 1/3 of the accounts I follow on Instagram are just photos of old signs and buildings.

Great Instagram accounts for cool neon signs, buildings and travel:
@neonsandsigns @signs_of_oklahoma @nevadaneonproject @oldmotelsigns @thisguycjones @vintageroadside @americansignmuseum @signquanon @deadmotelusa @theneonmuseumlasvegas @roadsidepeak @thephotomotel @jfpo @vintageroadtripcollection

I really want to go to the Neon Museum in Las Vegas and the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio. In recent years I have had the incredible good fortune to design THREE new retro-style neon signs. One for Meadow Gold Mack’s Route 66 Outpost, one for Buck’s Vintage, and one for a group of shops on Route 66 called the 66 Collective I’ve been helping conceptualize. So, I thought I would share some photos of the signs I have been a part of. The Buck’s Vintage sign is still under construction, so I just have tech drawings at this point. The 66 Collective sign just got installed on March 21st.
Check ‘em out!

Free fonts.

Unlike many graphic designers, I never really wanted to be a full time fine artist. I was always interested in type and design layouts and logos and advertising. I loved magazines and amazing poster designs. I enjoy creating art as well, but I was never someone who had to “settle” for going into “commercial art” as they used to refer to it. I have always loved typography and fonts and love the way letter forms can work together and make interesting designs. I am old enough to have begun my career prior to the use of computers. That’s an old guy story for another time. But the significance of it is that, once computers became useful in design, the explosion of new fonts took place, and the boundaries of design using these fonts expanded greatly. One of the early digital font foundries that popped up and went on to become part of typography history was House Industries. I don’t remember how I discovered them, but it was early on…I recently found out I am still in their early customer registry book as House Industries customer number 11. I was lucky enough to be the art director at Snowboarder Magazine at the time, so my ability to help shape the use of all these new fonts that were popping up from all over the world had a lot of visibility. I would often spend an entire afternoon scouring the relatively new thing called the internet, finding obscure websites in Japan and Denmark with free weird fonts to download. I still have them all, and over the years I have accumulated more than 10,000 fonts…and this is before Google Fonts and Adobe Fonts. I love “found fonts” that might have been created by a local farmer who hand painted signs for his fruit stand, or a small town billboard using a font made up just for that sign. So, last year I made some fonts that I had been thinking about for a long time.

Much like the fun fonts that I used to download for free from someone in Japan, I have made my five fonts free for you. Get them here:

HOUSE CLEANING: ALL PAINTINGS 50% OFF!

It has come to my attention that I have a shelf in my studio full of Fez Men paintings that really need a new home. A few of these are left over from my art show a year ago. A few of these are newer paintings. Some are small 4” x 4” size and a few are up to 24” x 24”. The one thing they have in common is that they are now 50% off! That means the little ones are only $25! This is the cheapest I have ever sold these but it’s time to clean house and work on some new stuff. So… just enter the code FEZ50 at checkout and you’ll get 50% off any of the paintings and any of the “found art” pinball sculptures currently in my online store. Get ‘em now!

After writing lovingly about baseball, and mentioning my college career, this shirt popped up in my feed on Instagram…a line of shirts and jerseys celebrating great teams and eras in college sports. And lo and behold, my Oklahoma State Cowboys team was one of the highlighted teams. So, I just thought I’d drop this here to validate myself shamelessly.