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Recessions come, go, come again - but Lake County boat sign remains

The neighborhood along this stretch of Rand Road in unincorporated Lake County has changed in the last generation. The "Gay Paree" strip club, with its outdated and sexually confusing name, is long gone. So are the Rand Motel, which caught fire and was torn down, and the Muddy Paws animal shelter, which was bulldozed after officials found 30 dead dogs and convicted the owner of felony animal cruelty charges.

But one portable roadside sign - the kind with removable letters designed so the message can be updated easily and often - has remained the same for more than a quarter-century. A sign of the times became a sign for the ages.

<I>If your boat is broke and you're not

see Ken 847 991 2440

</I>"That was my mother's idea," says 70-year-old Ken Dieball, owner of the sign and the accompanying Ken's Power & Sail boat motor repair shop at 20131 N. Rand Road near Palatine. She thought it made sense, given the economic climate, to put that blunt sales pitch on the sign.

"It wasn't this recession. It was some recession long ago," Dieball says, unsure of the exact year the sign went up. "My mother died in 1995 so it was before that, maybe 1985."

Dieball, who grew up in Arlington Heights and is a 1959 graduate of the now-defunct Arlington High School, was a victim of that earlier recession. Having studied electronics at DeVry University after high school, Dieball (pronounced "Dee Ball" in its German heritage) landed a good job with a Chicago company developing nuclear products, including medical applications.

"And then President Nixon got kicked out and Donald Rumsfeld came back," Dieball says.

When Jimmy Carter defeated Nixon's replacement Gerry Ford, Rumsfeld, who had been Ford's secretary of defense, returned to Chicago to be CEO of G.D. Searle and Co. and all its holdings. Rumsfeld cut a lot of jobs and laid off employees, including Dieball.

"I was unemployed and tried finding work," Dieball says. "I couldn't find work and I finally said, 'The heck with it.' As a kid I was always interested in fixing stuff and tinkering and building radios. The boating thing was a hobby so I tried it."

He opened his shop in 1979 and those first few years were rough.

"We were struggling. It was a recession and we were just trying to get somebody in," Dieball says, explaining how he acquired the sign from a nearby gas station. "ARCO went out of business and I bought the sign for 50 bucks or something."

Wilma Dieball, who helped with the bookkeeping for her son's business, thought up the "If your boat is broke and you're not, see Ken" slogan.

"It created a few problems," Dieball remembers. "There's a certain percentage of the population who doesn't like it."

When the sign first appeared, he'd get phone calls from critics who thought the sign made fun of people with serious financial problems.

"My mom would absolutely never do anything like that," Dieball says, adding that he finally decided the sign made good business sense because most people liked it. "If it (the percentage of people who are offended) is 1 percent, who cares?"

Dieball, who lives in Barrington, built the frame that holds the wheeled sign in place. He moved it when he bought the property just north of his old shop and relocated his business. And he moved it off the road a few more feet when a Rand Road widening project forced all the roadway signs to retreat.

Dieball's ad is a suburban icon. It's older than that vintage TV commercial for Victory Auto Wreckers in Bensenville and arrived on the suburban landscape shortly after the Empire Carpet guy made his debut. Even the medical personnel who treat his heart condition know about the sign.

"I was in Good Shepherd Hospital and the nurses are, 'Oh, this is the guy with the sign,'" Dieball says.

While it draws attention, Dieball says he doesn't know if the sign brings in business. But every once in a while a customer will say, "I'm not broke now and I want my boat fixed," Dieball says.

At an age when many people retire, Dieball, who draws Social Security and a very modest monthly pension from his first job, still makes pilgrimages to Wisconsin to get training from Mercury Marine on the latest, high-tech, computerized boat engines. As an exclusive Mercury service center, Dieball's workshop is filled with new parts and manuals.

He and his one employee don't make a lot of money, Dieball says.

But he isn't broke.

  Now 70 years old, Ken Dieball continues to get training from Mercury Marine so he can work on today’s computerized boat engines. Burt Constable/bconstable@dailyherald.com
  After he lost his electronics job in the late 1970s, Ken Dieball turned to his hobby of boat repair. His shop along Rand Road in Lake County boasts rows of vintage shelves filled with modern boat parts and manuals. Burt Constable/bconstable@dailyherald.com
  Put up a generation ago as a way to attract business during a recession, this sign and owner Ken Dieball have become institutions along Rand Road in Lake County. Burt Constable/bconstable@dailyherald.com
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