By signcraft
Posted on Monday, March 31st, 2025
Sometime in the early 1950s, Bob Whelan was a young man working in the county courthouse—doing “an old man’s job” as he calls it.
“One of the men who worked there,” says Bob, “told me, ‘What the hell are you doing here? There’re so many other places you could work and do all sorts of things and better yourself…’ About then, I met a sign painter who showed me which brush to use and how to use it. I started practicing strokes on newspaper, practicing three hours a night—horizontal, vertical and curves.
“I turned the newspaper sideways on the easel and used the lines of type as guidelines to make the strokes. That’s how you practiced back then. I did that for quite a long time. I kept showing the sign painter my practice papers and then one day he asked me if I wanted a job.”
“Within a year or so, my lettering was as good or better than his. I was getting 88 bucks a week and I asked for $100. Most other sign painters were getting $140.
“He said ‘Well, maybe you’re not very happy here…’ After a few days, I said, ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m not very happy here.’ I quit and rented a little barn for 25 bucks a month and bought a little heater. In the first week, I made more money than I did working for him.”
Bob grew his business from there, doing all sorts of commercial sign work. Eventually he sold the business and moved to upstate New York. In 1975, he was doing a gold leaf window for a bank when a passerby asked if he could gold leaf a truck for the fire department. Bob had done several in the past and was glad to do it.
When the fire equipment dealer saw Bob’s work, he asked if Bob would do all the trucks that he sold. Bob began specializing exclusively in fire trucks. After a few, he started counting them and he’s now at about 645 trucks done solo, all over the country. He’s gone as far as Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to letter a fire truck.
Today he is 90 years old and still at it. While he says he isn’t “a kid anymore, and I can’t climb around on a fire truck like I used to”, he gets a hand when he needs it from Jim Fetten, whom he helped learn how to letter when Jim was 17. Jim’s work and his approach to doing gilded emblems on vinyl film have been featured in SignCraft.
“No one believes it when I tell them my age,” Bob says. “It’s kind of fun when they guess you’re 15 or 20 years younger than you are. If there’s a secret to it though—I don’t know it. I don’t have any medical issues and I don’t take any medication.”
The precise nature of gold leaf work suited Bob well. He is a self-proclaimed perfectionist who puts a lot of value in doing very high-quality work.
“I like producing nice work and having a reputation for that,” he says. “I want it to be perfect. I’m proud of my work and the quality has to be there.
“I’m used to working alone. I also didn’t want people hanging around while I was working, and some people couldn’t understand that. But I needed to concentrate and people distracted me because they wanted to talk. It was fine if they wanted to just watch, but I couldn’t be talking and working.”
Most of these trucks get more than just lettering on the doors. There’s usually the department’s shield, wide gold leaf striping and traditional scroll work with dimensional shading added, using tinted varnish. It’s all 23kt gold leaf.
“I came up with several scroll designs that were my own,” he says, “and some other things that made my work unique. For example, on a wide gold leaf stripe, most guys would twist the burnish right down the middle. That makes a little button in the center of the stripe. I twist with the center of the velvet pad above the line once, and then twist below the line for the next twist and so on. That way, you don’t see the center of the twist, and it looks like a wave as you look down the line.
“There’s a lot to laying out a truck. I want the whole thing to be beautiful, but don’t put too much on it. It’s about balance. You don’t want the lettering too large or too small. I don’t like skinny little stick letters on a huge truck.
“There are styles of lettering that just don’t fit a fire truck. It may be a beautiful letter style, but it’s not for a fire truck. Fire truck lettering should have taste and it has to have class and it absolutely must be legible.
“This is also a problem with a lot of signs. The letter style might be beautiful or pretty, but if it’s not legible, it can’t do its job. If you can’t read it easily, what’s the point? The choice of letter style, the colors, the shadows—they all help determine legibility. Say you put a black shadow on gold or yellow letters on a white background. What will people notice? The shadow, not the letter. It’s a waste. The sign has to be read in order to do its job.”
Bob is known for more than just his outstanding fire truck lettering. He is an award-winning portraiture artist who has been commissioned to do portraits of CEOs, judges and even a saint. He’s also a stage actor who has had parts in soap operas, national commercials and bit parts in major films. He recently unveiled his latest portrait commission, a senior district court judge in Alexandria, Virginia.
He’s a singer, too, and has performed in musicals and has sung with the Mendelssohn Club of Albany for thirty years. Self-taught in all these endeavors, Bob believes you can learn most anything if you put your mind to it.
He took up fine art and portraiture in midlife and today it is his main focus—although he still does a fire truck now and then. “If I can sit and paint in my studio all day,” he says, “I’m happy. But people still want me to do their trucks.”
For Bob, full retirement from fire truck lettering sounds as if it is still somewhere down the road, even though he’s been winding it down for the past five years.
“Many times over the years I’ve mentioned, ‘This is my last fire truck.’ Lue, my wife, would answer, ‘Oh, another last truck and another last truck…’ Next thing you know there are two trucks coming into some firehouse that need lettering. Of course, I’m not going to do all the work personally, because I can’t physically climb like I used to. I need help from someone like Jimmy Fetten.
“For four of these fire companies, I’ve done all of their trucks for over 40 years. They ask me to ‘just squeeze in two more.’ They don’t want anyone else to do their trucks, so here I am with two more trucks to do next month. But I’m 90 years old, and these two may be my last trucks. Or maybe someone else will call with another last truck.”
1937 International for Westmere Fire Department in 1980
