A giant oval roadside sign, roughly 50 by 30 feet, raised high on two white steel posts above the canopy of a corner filling station. Its face carries the Amoco torch: AMOCO in heavy black letters across a white oval, beneath a fan of red and orange segments and a red-and-yellow flame rising from a teardrop crest at the top, over bands of pale blue below. The face sits in a deep, rounded rim of white-painted metal, so from the side the sign reads as a thick disc standing on edge.
A giant sign has crowned this corner since 1932, when the Hi-Pointe Standard Station put up its Big Sign, a 40-foot disc built of 44 tons of structural steel and lit by nearly 6,000 bulbs and 2,900 feet of neon tubing. Standard’s red crown faced downtown, and a neon torch over the word SERVICE faced west. Pilots were said to steer by its glow. The sign was costly to run, and in 1959 it came down when the station was rebuilt. The owner, Steve Stephenson, replaced it with a 50-by-30-foot plastic sign, billed as the largest in the world, that read Standard. In 1985 it was wrapped in aluminum and changed to read Amoco, and in 1993 it was taken apart, repainted and put back together. BP bought Amoco in 1998, and for years the sign stood above a BP station, one of the Amoco signs BP kept up to hold on to the brand. In 2017 BP revived Amoco, the station below became an Amoco again, and the sign was repainted with the updated logo.
