Dear Johnnie: After living in Longmont and wondering about this for 45 years(!), I am finally getting around to asking you about the marquee on the second floor of the building on the southwest corner of Third and Main. On it appear the words “and the people,” which have remained unchanged for many years. Was this once part of a longer message?
Why is it still there? – Better Late Than Never
Dear Better Late: I suspect that the thousands who have driven through that intersection have had those same questions. I’m one of them, so on behalf of all of us, thanks for asking.
I had a vague memory, from years ago, of a more complete message on that sign. I recalled that it had once said something about books and that the word “technical” was part of it, but I was going to need to find someone who could remember the rest.
Erik Mason, the curator of research at the Longmont Museum, helped me track it down. From our archives, he pulled a Times-Call article from July of 1986, featuring a bookstore at that corner, called United Techbook Co., which had opened in February of that year.
The owner, Tom Lopez, said the store was intended to serve the area’s growing population of engineers and technicians. At the time, Lopez said, the store might have been the only private technical bookstore in Colorado, and perhaps the nation.
He chose to open the store in Longmont, and not Boulder, primarily because he already owned the building.
When I looked up Tom Lopez, I discovered that he died in March of 2019. But in his obituary I found the phrase that you and I were looking for: “Technical books for science, industry and the people.” I also tracked down the owner of the building, Kristin Lopez, Tom’s widow.
“Tom was an engineer and an inventor and kind of an entrepreneur,” she said. “One of the many things he did was to have a bookstore. The purpose of the bookstore was to really bring technical know-how to the average person. People like him were educated but needed knowledge.”
According to his obituary, after studying aerospace engineering at the University of Colorado, Lopez “started Centerline Industries in his garage and helped build it into a successful company to support the growing printed circuit industry.”
Tom Lopez invented and patented products including one of the first pocket calculators on the market, his obituary said.
Kristin Lopez said that the bookstore closed in 2006. Over the years, “slowly the words (on the sign) started coming off, and ‘for the people’ remains.”
Kristin Lopez has a bit of an attachment to the sign. And, she said, “it has been a little bit of local lore.”
Looks like it. On bandcamp.com, I did find a musical group called “And The People,” which is described as “two very dark boys from Longmont.” Their page includes a photo of the iconic sign.
I had one last question for Kristin: Who put the letters up?
“It was probably Tom,” she said. “He was a do it yourself guy. Or it might have been his manager, who was a tall, skinny guy.”
Send questions to johnnie@times-call.com.
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April 19, 2021 at 08:11PM
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Johnnie St. Vrain: The story of that sign at Third and Main - Longmont Times-Call
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