BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KERO) — Well after years of being missing a piece of Oildale history is finally back home.
Thanks to a group of dedicated volunteers, the missing Trout's Sign has finally made its way back to Kern County.
“This sign was stolen from Oildale in 2017, went missing from here to rural Tuolumne County, which is up 50 miles east of Modesto,” said Mike McCoy. “Well, there's a local businessman named Chris Hayden, and Chris said he would put up reward money and hire a private investigator, and that private investigator, Paul Lopez, is the one that actually found it.”
Even more coincidence, McCoy has a special connection to the county where the sign was found.
“I was a school superintendent up there for the high school district. I had a farm up there, so I just got a truck, a big, strong friend went up there, had all my friends meet me that lived up there, and we went up in a rural area behind an old country house, and we got the sign and then brought it back down the hill and brought it to Bakersfield,” he said.
“How is it that you guys want to now take the sign and restore it to obviously, you know, be back and be a prominent addition to your neon courtyard, but also hold on to some of the character and the memory and history that's here,” I asked McCoy.
“Well, we're going to restore it, but we're not going to over restore it. So we're going to retain some of the original patina, but we are going to stabilize the paint. We're going to freshen up the paint in some regards. We're going to redo all of the electric part, and we're going to bend all the neon,” McCoy said.
“People ask, you know, why are signs important? But they tell the story of a family. They tell the story of a business. This tells the story of Vern Hoover, who had this incredible music institution for 40, 50 years. And so now we brought it back, and it tells the story of that family,” he said.
Now, McCoy said, we can expect to see the trout sign fully operational, neon and all, the first Saturday in May.
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