John English, a Los Angeles architectural historian who specializes in commercial buildings of the mid-20th century (a style also known as Googie), says the Great Sign was a great communicator.

"This was not just a sign; it was an icon known around the country," he says. "Its idea was simple: 'Welcome. Enter. Sleep Here Now.'"

America's travelers checked in, in droves. Holiday Inn expanded as freeway cloverleafs bloomed over the continent. The chain leapfrogged oceans. Today there are more than 1,000 Holiday Inns in the United States and in 70 countries around the globe, the most recent a resort in Tunisia. The Great Sign -- not Elvis Presley -- became Memphis' first global brand. American business hailed Wilson as "The Father of the Modern Innkeeping Industry." He is still alive at 89, although he no longer runs the company. His biography, "Half Luck and Half Brains," tells his story.

The company lit its time in other ways. As Holiday Inn imposed order on the American road, standardizing and sanitizing the motel room, Washington was attempting the same thing in Europe, by way of NATO and the Marshall Plan. The collective enemy: Dirt, immorality and communism. Is your bathroom breeding Bolsheviks? Not at Holiday Inn, which fought the Cold War with sanitized toilet seat covers and the Great Sign. Of course, the spires of Moscow and Stalingrad also twinkled. But their stars were red, not gold.

The sign and its symbolism -- prosperity and a worry-free road trip -- was widely imitated. Then a funny thing happened. Holiday Inn lost its nerve. As the '50s became the '60s and then the bittersweet bad-ass '70s, Holiday Inn began playing it safe. In 1975 executives came up with a new slogan to express its new conservatism: "The best surprise is no surprise."

In an era of earth tones, puka shells and shag haircuts, the old Holiday Inn sign seemed dated and loud, like Dean Martin or the bossa nova. Architect John Portman introduced soaring atrium lobbies and exterior elevators to the lodging industry. They called it the "Jesus Christ" school of architecture. Crane your neck to take in a hotel's 50-story lobby and that's what you said. Sign graphics calmed down; Helvetica and Geneva became the hot type fonts. All this was clean, correct and fashionable, but to English and other aficionados it was the death knell for bawdy mid-century modernism.

"Good taste is a very dangerous thing," says English. To the "Keep America Beautiful" crowd, he observes, the Great Sign "was considered garish, tacky crap that was destroying our cities."

In 1982, the Great Signs came down. In their place rose dinky, back-lit plastic ones. The new signs were tasteful, of course, but they weren't much fun.

"They remodeled a classic Mercedes and got a Geo Metro," says Dickson Keyser, a principal in Idee, a San Francisco design firm specializing in architectural signing and graphics for clients from Siebel Systems to Stanford University.

In 1990, Holiday Inn was sold, and became another cog in the giant British conglomerate Bass PLC, since renamed Six Continents PLC. Holiday Inn is now efficient and boring, its onetime entrepreneurial exuberance squeezed out by yield-management techniques and greater return on investment. Wood, of San Jose State, calls this perfected state "omnitopia," a place of "ubiquitous, ever-present environments."

"It's like downloading the same home page whereever you go," he says. In omnitopia, a guest doesn't check in to a room. She checks in to a node.

The irony, of course, is that the company's efforts to appear modern have only dated it. Today plastic, rough concrete and ficus trees are of scant interest to aging boomers.

"It's like, hello," English says, "1980s green awnings and brass fern bars are long over. Wake up."

Consumers hunger for nostalgic yesteryears and get them in products of faux-'50s and '60s design, like Johnny Rockets soda fountains and the Austin Mini. They pay top dollar, too. Parabolas and boomerang-shaped design elements are found in newly gentrified downtown entertainment districts, not out on the suburban business loop. Might the Great Sign, like Liza, stage a comeback?

Fat chance, say the experts. It's unlikely any original Greats remain intact.

"They were cut into pieces," laments English. "Demolished. Recycled. And gone."

He predicts Holiday Inn will cobble together various design elements from all eras. The result, he predicts, will be a Franken-sign, a symbol neither evocative of the old nor symbolic of something really new.

"They'll bring them back, but not in the right way," English says. "There's so much caution, and corporations are afraid of being perceived as too wild or associated with the past."

Meanwhile, we can hold out hope that some brave marketing VP or a lucky discovery behind an old barn will mean a resurrection. Then, perhaps, the American night will glow with exploding stars, dancing colors and neon letters blinking "NO VACANCY" once more.

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