Historic neon sign hung at a Kansas City BBQ joint for decades. Will it shine again?

Knowing it would cost $7,000 or even more to restore, neon artist Olivia Shelton wondered what to do with the 300-or-so-pound broken neon barbecue sign propped against the wall of her shop, brought there at least five years ago by the city from the Historic 18th and Vine Jazz District.

To her, the vintage sign was gorgeous: yellow arrow, blue porcelain, white cursive letters spelling out Dixie Lan Bar-B-Que. The sign’s history and story, however, were a mystery to her.

“It’s a beautiful sign,” said Shelton who, with her brother Dylan Steinmetz, co-owns Element Ten, a neon studio on Troost Avenue, where they work alongside their father, Randy Steinmetz, a neon sign creator for more than 40 years. “A lot of craftsmanship obviously went into it. To see it lit again would be so cool.”

But the sign is no mystery to Sherrie Bartlett of Raymore. It’s a memory: the restaurant at 1518 E. 19th St. that her grandparents, Bertha and Oswald Bartlett, opened in 1951 and where, until 1980, the family served ribs and brisket, pulled pork and chili-smothered hot dogs. For nearly 40 more years, the sign hung unlit on an empty building until the city lowered it to the ground and hauled it to the neon shop for safe keeping.

Before a Star reporter this month contacted Bartlett, 68, and and told her about the sign, “we didn’t even know where it was,” she said.

“When I was really small,” said Bartlett, who works as a substitute teacher, “we would always go in and my grandfather would, you know, do all the meat preparation. Everything. And we’d see him chopping the ribs and putting the sauce on it. And they also served these hot dogs. Everybody just swarmed over these hot dogs. They made their own chili. And they put their own sauce and chili on. As kids, going in there, we would sit down and get a hot dog and grape soda.

“My dad, when he worked in the evenings, he would bring home a slab of ribs and hot dogs. There were a lot of good memories.”

And it was a thriving business, where everyone in her family worked. “They did everything as a team,” Bartlett said. “Even my mother’s side of the family, her mother worked at Dixie Lan once. So it was definitely a family-run business.”

Chief among that were her dad, Oswald Jr., her uncle Billy, aunt Susie and uncle Bertram who would go on to marry a young model with a barbecue pedigree of her own — Gwendolyn Gates, sister to Ollie. In 1946, their father George W. Gates opened Gates Ol’ Kentuck Bar-B-Q at 19th and Vine streets before it moved to other locations as the Gates Bar-B-Q chain of restaurants.

“He was a very fun-loving guy,” Arzelia Gates, Ollie Gates’ daughter, said of her uncle Bertram. “We were all crazy about him. He kept us in stitches.”

Competition between Dixie Lan Bar-B-Que and Gates Bar-B-Q was always friendly, Bartlett said.

“Each one of them had their own following,” she said. “They each did a healthy business. They had a healthy respect for one another.”

Once her grandfather retired in 1975, the business slowly faded, she said. Fresh out of college, she was too young to take it over.

But she too would be excited to see the neon sign spark back to life.

Nick Vedros, the president of the Lumi Neon Museum, would be glad to accept it as a donation in the hopes of finding a sponsor or sponsors willing to help pay to restore it. The Kansas City nonprofit is working to put up dozens of classic Kansas City neon signs at Pennway Point, the entertainment district with the Ferris wheel now being built west of Union Station.

Only problem: As far as anyone can tell, the sign still belongs to the city of Kansas City, which took it down. Shelton said she has tried to contact city leaders to see what, if anything, they want to do with it, but has received no responses. The Star also contacted a city spokesperson, but has not yet heard.

At one point, Shelton said, she thought “a dream scenario” would be to remount it in the historic jazz district where it was lit for so long.

“It doesn’t belong to us,” Shelton said. “That’s what makes it hard. We’re kind of stuck. I don’t want to say stuck with it, because we’re happy to have it. It’s safe here. But it’s hard because we can’t make choices for the future of the sign. And we haven’t been able to get in touch with the city to hear what they would like to do with it.”

Whether at Pennway Point or the jazz district, Bartlett would just love to see her grandparents’ neon.

“That would be really neat to just acknowledge them,” she said, “because they worked very hard on their business. It was a pillar in that community. My biggest regret is that we did not keep that going. Because it could have easily, it could have easily kept going.”