Nov. 14—The iconic upside-down fork in the "Milt's" logo made the restaurant's neon sign immediately recognizable to hungry truckers and travelers.
Designed by Milt Huggs himself, the late founder and proprietor of Milt's Coffee Shop, the neon sign stood like a beacon for decades at the 59-year-old diner.
Then, on Tuesday, it was gone.
Early that morning, workers from California Neon Sign unmoored it from its steel pole, used a crane to drop it gently on the back of a truck, and hauled it to the Kern County Museum, where it will continue to shine along with dozens of other well-known Bakersfield and Kern County business names at the museum's popular Neon Plaza.
"We used to spend so much family time out here, because it was open 24/seven," said Cheryl Huggs Saike, one of Milt's two daughters. "My siblings and I all worked out here."
Mike McCoy, executive director of the Kern County Museum, was also present early Tuesday morning to witness the transformation of the old sign from a dynamic and useful part of the commerce of a community to a museum piece, a memory of what once was.
"Every one of them breaks my heart when I get them," McCoy said of the dozens of signs that now populate the outdoor plaza.
"None of it's good," he said.
"Like Sinaloa's, Noriega — that really hurt," he said, recalling two longtime family-owned restaurants in Bakersfield that closed their doors in recent years, although the latter has continued in a new location with new owners.
Indeed, the Milt's location on Knudsen Drive in northwest Bakersfield didn't skip a beat. It now has new ownership and new signs as one of four Old River Grill locations in Bakersfield.
"I would rather they stay where they're at," McCoy said of the retiring neons. "But I understand."
Before the museum began making a home for local neon signs that had been retired or removed, the community lost some landmark names to the scrap pile.
The Blackboard sign was lost when the now-legendary honky-tonk bar closed up around 1980.
"The big one was the Coca-Cola sign with the rooster" that shone for years atop the Sill building at Chester Avenue and 18th Street, McCoy said.
"That one went to scrap."
The "sun, fun, stay, play" signs that greeted motorists on 99 at the outskirts of Bakersfield suffered the same fate.