Betty Willis, designer of iconic Las Vegas sign, was 91

Photo special to LA Observed: Ed Fuentes

The Neon Museum in Las Vegas on Monday announced the death of Betty Willis, the designer of the “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas Nevada" sign that has welcomed visitors driving into the city on the highway from Los Angeles for more than half a century. The sign was described by a New York Times writer as "a luminous diamond stretched like Silly Putty, each letter of 'Welcome' encircled by silver dollars." Willis was a "giant in the sign design history," the museum said on Facebook. "Betty attended art school in Pasadena...In 1952, she began working at Western Neon where she designed another landmark sign, the Moulin Rouge. Some of her famous signs are the Blue Angel Motel, the City Center Motel, the Normandie, Bow and Arrow Motel, Del Mar Motel and the Riviera pylon."

The Hollywood Reporter says the sign was installed on the Strip in Las Vegas in 1959. Willis was born in Southern Nevada and her father was the first assessor in Clark County, but it was on trips to Los Angeles where she came to appreciate neon. From a New York Times interview with Willis in 2005:

'We thought the town was fabulous, so we added the word,'' Mrs. Willis recalled recently, sitting in a blue velveteen rocker in her living room, a Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas bull figurine on the fireplace mantel. ''Everything you could flash or spin, we did it.''

In a city that has honored its history by blowing it up (may the Dunes, the Sands and the Aladdin rest in peace) Mrs. Willis's beacon to motorists beside the old highway from Los Angeles has defied the odds. A Las Vegas native, she fell in love with neon on girlhood trips to California, peering out of the family Studebaker at the theater marquees of downtown Los Angeles. What is now the Las Vegas Strip was then an empty highway into nothingness crisscrossed by dirt roads.

Her career spanned the glory days of neon, the Vegas night a gigantic tumbler carbonated with light. One of the city's first commercial artists, she started in the 1940's, designing newspaper ads for Vegas shows, perfecting showgirls kicking across the page. In the early 1950's she began designing neon motel signs. One was for the Blue Angel, its flittering neon bluebirds peeling back a bedroom curtain, a revolving angel pointing her wand at the motel. ''I got criticized for depicting a super-well-endowed angel,'' she recalled of her aptitude for the Vegas nude. ''I said, 'Well show me an angel, and I'll draw her.' ''

Also this: "She never copyrighted the design because she felt the town needed free publicity, and in recent years the sign has lent its jaunty retro image to snow globes, boxer shorts, potato chips, shot glasses, pork cracklings, centennial chocolates, T-shirt giveaways by Southwest Airlines for 'fabulous Rapid Reward Visa cards' and limited-edition commemorative Nevada license plates, surpassing fur dice in the iconographic pantheon."

The sign is located in the median at 5100 Las Vegas Boulevard South, in the town of Paradise, the actual site of most of the famous Las Vegas Strip.