Banner Striping & Sealcoating

Back in 1987, just after our third child was born, my husband Dale lost all of his overtime at work. He wondered what we were going to do. We had bills to pay and three kids to feed. I wasn’t working at the time. He knew how to stripe parking lots. He had worked for a striping company after he had come home from Vietnam. I asked him to teach me how to paint a parking lot. I took $600.00 out of our checking account and bought a 1964 Kelly paint machine. Boy it was heavy. We would lift it up and put it in the back of our 1986 Ford pick-up truck to go do little jobs that we got on the weekends. I learned from the best. At that time we didn’t have a name. One of the very first jobs that we did was just a little striping job down on Rt. 40. When we had completed the work, the gentleman that we did the job for walked outside and said, ” Boy, you guys did a banner job.” Well, that sounded like as good a name as any.

My husband Dale was working full time driving a fuel truck for a local contractor. I physically worked every job for the first 7 years. We went just about anywhere to make a dollar. Staten Island New York, New Jersey, Upper PA. We had just moved into our house that we live in now. The walls were covered with dark paneling. We didn’t have a whole lot of money, so we learned to improvise. Every time we needed a stencil, like a no parking or handicapped symbol or numbers, we’d tear a piece of paneling down and make the stencil that we needed. It was great. We would layout the design and cut it out with a jigsaw. Sometimes we would be out there painting with kids hanging off the paint machine. One sitting on the paint bucket, one on the handle bars , and the other following right behind, trying to help all he could. We’ve come a long way!