HOLLYWOOD — Delbert Mackey, a sign painter who lettered shop windows, sale banners, delivery trucks and at least one church bus across Hollywood for fifty-seven years, and whose gold leaf still catches the afternoon light on a dozen doors along and off the Boulevard, died August 23 at his home in Los Feliz. He was 91.
His daughter, Ruth, said the cause was heart failure.
Mr. Mackey came to Los Angeles from Tulsa in 1953 at eighteen, intending, like a great many eighteen-year-olds arriving that year, to work in the movies. He got as close as the paint department of a studio that no longer exists, where a show-card writer named Fred took him on for two years and taught him the thing he would do for the rest of his life: a line, drawn by hand, with a brush, that does not wobble.
He opened his own shop in 1957 on a side street off Sunset, and for the next five decades a good part of what the neighborhood read on its way somewhere was in his hand. Dry cleaners, delicatessens, a bail bondsman, the old bowling alley, three generations of a family pharmacy, the twice-yearly clearance banners of a shoe store that closed in 1991. He worked in enamel on windows, in gold leaf on glass, in oil on the doors of trucks whose owners wanted the phone number to survive a car wash.
“He was fast, which people noticed, and he was right, which people didn’t notice, because that was the point,” said Ingrid Sczepanski, who has owned the costume shop off the Boulevard for twenty-three years and inherited, with the lease, a door Mr. Mackey lettered in gold leaf in 1986. “Every sign company that has ever walked in here has offered to replace that door with vinyl. I have thrown every one of them out. You cannot buy what is on that glass. You could only have hired him, and now you can’t.”
The gold-leaf work was the part he was proudest of and the part that paid least, his daughter said, because it took days and most owners wanted a sign by Friday. He did it anyway, at a price he set low enough to be chosen, on the theory that a neighborhood with gold on its glass was a neighborhood that expected to be there for a while.
He was known on the street for painting with the door open, so that people could stand and watch, and for never once, in his daughter’s memory, asking them not to. “He said the watching was the advertising,” she said. “He also said if you cannot letter with a stranger breathing on you, you cannot letter.”
Vinyl signage arrived in the 1980s and took most of his trade by the 1990s. He kept the shop open anyway, on repaints and truck doors and the loyalty of owners who liked the look of a hand. He closed it in 2014, at 79, when a tremor made the long strokes unreliable. He told his family he could still do the short ones and did not intend to be paid for a sign that was half right.
Delbert Wayne Mackey was born in 1935 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He married Gloria Fenn in 1961; she died in 2019. In addition to his daughter, Ruth, of Pasadena, he is survived by a son, Calvin, of Portland, Oregon; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Of his windows still standing, his daughter has counted twelve. She has photographs of forty more that are gone, and a shoebox of the paper patterns he pounced them from, each one folded into thirds and labeled in his own lettering, which did not wobble.