Overton Is Home To The ‘Birth Mother Of Fabulous’

For 86 year old Overton resident Betty Willis, fame has come late in life. Willis has been interviewed on national television news programs and has been featured in newspapers and magazines around the world. A New York Times writer even called her the “birth mother of fabulous”.

What is the cause of all of this media focus on a little old lady from Southern Nevada? Betty Willis is the designer of the famous “Welcome

While Betty Willis has lived most of her life in Las Vegas, she claims deep roots in the Moapa Valley.

Willis was actually born in a home on the northeast corner of Virginia and Jones near downtown Overton. The historic home, which still stands today, was built by Willis’ father, Stephen Whitehead in 1914. The Whitehead family moved away from Overton only two weeks after Betty was born in 1923. But last year she returned to her Overton birthplace to live in another historic home just across the street on Jones.

Willis’ mother was named Gertrude Meader. She was born in England but was converted by Mormon missionaries and moved to the U.S. around the turn of the century. She went first to Salt Lake City, Utah and later travelled to San Francisco to be with some relatives. While she was there she met Stephen Whitehead who was serving as an LDS Missionary in the area. The two were eventually married in 1905 and lived for a time in St. George, Utah.

Whitehead moved his family to the Moapa Valley after he got a job at the Wells Ranch in Logandale. The family lived in a tent on the ranch for the first couple of years, but eventually sought more permanent housing in Overton.

During part of the time he lived in Moapa Valley, Stephen Whitehead operated a general store in Overton, which was housed in the same building as is now the Pioneer Theatre.

Shortly before Betty’s birth, Whitehead was elected as the first Clark County Assessor. He commuted back and forth weekly to Las Vegas for some time in the family’s Studebaker. But he eventually decided to move the family closer to the county seat. The move was made when Betty was only two weeks old.

Betty grew up in a Las Vegas much different than it is today. She graduated from Las Vegas High School in 1941. The year before that, the census showed that the population of all of Clark County was only 10,000 people. This was obviously before the time of bright neon lights in Las Vegas, when the only thing that sparkled in the desert night sky were the stars.

But that was all about to change. During the 1950s, Las Vegas was swiftly tranformed into a city of glitz and glamour, the Entertainment Capital of the World. And Betty Willis was to play a part in that tranformation before it was done.

After high school, Willis went to Los Angeles to study commercial art. She attended the L.A. Art Center for a time but became impatient with the quality of instruction. “They weren’t teaching me what I needed to know for commercial art,” Willis said. “So I left and got a job.”

She went to work for Allied Advertising Artist designing newspaper ads for Fox West Coast movie theatres. “That is where I really learned the trade,” she said.

After three years in L.A., Willis decided to come back home to Las Vegas. She initially took a day job as a legal secretary. But at night she worked doing free-lance commercial art. She began with small jobs designing newspaper ads for local shoe retailers and, eventually, worked up to drawing ads for the big shows on the Las Vegas strip.

One morning in the early 1950s, Betty met up with an ad manager who was working for Young Electric Sign Company, now YESCO. He recruited her to come and begin designing neon signs for the company. This began a long career in which Betty participated in the design of some of Vegas’ most recognizable night lights.

“I never felt like a great artist in what I was doing,” Willis said. “But I had good ideas. And I was willing to take the time to learn all of the engineering and the technical elements involved with neon signs.”

One of Betty’s signs was for the Blue Angel Motel on Charleston and Fremont. The elaborate design features a huge revolving angel pointing a wand at the motel. Betty said that she took some criticism for the job because her angel design was particularly “well-endowed”.

“I was used to drawing showgirls, so I was just doing what I knew,” she said. “I finally just told them, ‘Look, you show me an angel and I will draw her.'”

Another recognizable Willis design was for the, now closed, Moulin Rouge night club on Bonanza Road. Willis said that she took a long time considering how to treat the sign for the only racially integrated casino in Las Vegas at the time. “I spent two weeks in the library studying French lettering to get that sign just right,” she said. The sophisticated 12-foot-high cursive script that so encapsulated what would become the cool, after-hours gathering spot, was what resulted. Since the Moulin Rouge building was burned down in 2003, the sign has found a place in the fabled neon graveyard museum of Las Vegas.

In 1952, Willis had left Young Electric Sign Co. to work for Western Neon, a smaller local business. There she met Ted Rogich who was a sharp salesman for the company. Rogich came up with the idea of a welcome sign on the highway into town from Los Angeles. He pitched the idea to Clark County and the Las Vegas Resort Association and they liked it. Willis accepted the task of designing the new welcome sign.

Willis recalls sensing that this sign needed to be special. “I thought hard about that sign,” she said. “I tried to make everything about it so that you would remember it.” Willis took trips up and down the highway from Las Vegas in all directions studying the existing signs along the way. “We were looking for a shape that was different than anything else that was out there,” she said. Finally she decided on the sign’s horizontal diamond shape. “It was a very unusual shape for signs,” she said. “Unusual is just what we wanted.”

The sign was unconventional in other ways as well. Rather than the support structure coming up through the center of the 25 foot tall sign, Willis opted to go with an off-center cantilever design. “I felt that it was more visually interesting that way,” she said.

Willis designed yellow bulbs around the edge of the sign to “give it warmth and make it inviting”. And she designed each of the seven letters of the word ‘Welcome’ to be placed on a background of seven silver dollars to “make it lucky”.

The sign came at a cost of $4,000 and was first lit up in 1959. Over the ensuing fifty years the sign has become an icon for all the glitz and glamour of Las Vegas.

Betty never copyrighted her design because she felt that the town needed free publicity at the time. As a result, in recent years it has found its way onto just about everything from snow globes and shot glasses to boxer shorts and potato chips.

Betty retired at the age of 77. She moved to Overton last summer with her daughter Marjorie Holland who works as an Investigator at the Las Vegas Hilton.

In recent years, Betty has enjoyed a large measure of celebrity for her work. She is called frequently to make public appearances and give interviews about her role in the famous sign’s creation. Asked what it is like to be so well renowned, she said, “Everyone should experience it. Sometimes it does drive you crazy, though.”

But Betty is pleased that her design has had such a long lasting appeal. “As they have imploded all of those big hotels and resorts that were once such a part of the Vegas landscape, who would have ever thought that my little sign would be the one still standing?” she said.