No listing of the great neon signs in Memphis — and boy, we have enjoyed some great ones — would be complete without a mention of the Hart’s Bakery sign, which stood like a beacon at Summer and Mendenhall in the 1950s and 1960s. Despite years and years — well, maybe a half hour here and there, tops — of searching, I have never been able to turn up a decent COLOR image of this masterpiece. But one day recently, while idly flipping through my old copies of Key magazine, I found an ad for the bakery that included the sign, so take a look at it:
Too bad it’s in black and white, so let me try to describe what I remember. This was a combination neon and mechanical marvel. First of all, you had a huge bright-red heart mounted on a fluted aluminum pedestal. On each side were neon-shaped hearts, arranged one inside the other, which got smaller and smaller as they reached the center. These, as I recall, were in yellow, and as the neon tubes flashed on and off, in and out, in sequence, the heart seem to PULSE or BEAT. At the exact moment when every tube of neon was illuminated, the giant cursive letters spelling out “Hart’s” flashed across the sign. Then they turned off, and the whole “heartbeat” started again.
