900 square feet. For six plus years now that has been the limits of my living space give or take a few feet. For most of my adult life, my dwellings have been full fledged houses with real green grass property. When the time came, post divorce, to establish residence at a post divorce income level, I was able to get into a classic multiple unit facility with a bit of a walk from the parking lot. This meant I would have neighbors all around me 24 /7 and as such daily actions such as ferrying signs and signals in would come under some scrutiny outside the walls of my humble dwelling. Indeed, it is true an eyebrow or two was raised.

Now, I could have collected anything in my life. I believe there is a gene within my families DNA that perpetuates this. Over the years I have collected many different things from coins and stamps. In my youthful years, trinkets that little boys often pick up in their meanderings, bottle caps, beach glass handfuls of rocks. Later it would be model trains. Some collections endure while others vanish into the folds of time. These flirtations were later replaced with my boyhood love affair with…comic books <choir sings, clouds part and heavenly rays of sunshine stream down>. I worked hard to support that collection and enjoyed it thoroughly. I began to envision myself a writer and artist in the pulp comic world, but reality fermented other considerations and I placed that dream in an acid free, Mylar sleeve.

Passions come and passions go. Well, perhaps they rise and fall as they never really leave. The circumstances of our lives put these passions into perspective. It wasn’t until I received a gift on my 18th birthday that one of my interests gained a whole new dimension. I had loved traffic lights since I was a small boy. I will never understand why, but through out my childhood I had this overwhelming fascination for traffic signals. My mom, sensitive to this, managed to adorn my room with some form of traffic signal decor. This is not uncommon for children as it is one of the ways parents teach them traffic safety.

Jump to my 18th birthday and on this sunny summer afternoon my folks present me with an honest to goodness real, fresh from service traffic light. Could this be? Could a plain old citizen have one in his home? I had seen these in business and restaurants so I assumed they were expensive to acquire, but damn if there wasn’t one right in front of me, green and mean and ready to be hooked up. Clearly branded on the back Crouse-Hinds, I now knew the manufacturer but it would be two and a half decades before a little thing called internet would tell me the model (Type R). What’s more that there were dozens of different varieties past and present. A collectors dream!

collecting traffic lights is like eating Lay’s potato chips, you can’t stop at just one

I have heard fellow collectors say that collecting traffic lights is like eating Lay’s potato chips, you can’t stop at just one. True to form my collection currently boasts in excess of 60 signals in various conditions. Some of these date back as far as the 20’s and 30’s. Not all of these are within the boundaries of my 900 square foot abode however, most are stored elsewhere until they receive the attention they deserve.

As for my stoic roommates, these guardians of the intersection serve now at my leisure. A bit of entertainment and a distraction to tinker with. Oh sure, I could have pursued a coin collection, (as my son often wishes when a sizable find needs to be lugged home) but there is nothing that is as deeply rooted with me as there is with this fascination and admiration for the venerable traffic light.

and because we needed a few more traffic signals here…

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All photos ©2020 Threefeetfromthestreet

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I sell signals…

…and signal related equipment through Facebook and eBay. Please look at my ebay listings and then contact me at 3liteguy Signal Salvage – Traffic Signals for Sale to purchase.

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