There are prominent Sunny Brook Whiskey signs on either side of the river at St. Louis, both of them quite dated and both painted on the sides of large red, brick buildings. The Old Sunny Brook Distillery Company, based in Louisville, Kentucky, produced Kentucky Straight Bourbon and Kentucky Blended Whiskey.

On the Missouri side is a decent example located on South Broadway near Interstate 55, on the north face of what is currently a computer repair business. The large letters are unevenly faded but still mostly legible, reading top-to-bottom:

FAMOUS

SUNNY BROOK

WHISKEY

KENTUCKY’S

BEST …

The other sign is found on the Exchange Club, 404 Sycamore, in Belleville, Illinois, and, like most west-facing wall signs, it is quite faded. Yet, with some study, it is still readable and overall in good condition. This advertisement has considerably more to say than its Missouri counterpart. It also contains a reference to the 1904 World’s Fair, held in St. Louis, which dates the sign, likely, to within five years after the Fair. It reads like this:

fleur de lis  [window]  AGE   [window]  PURITY  [window]  MAKE   fleur de lis

SUNNY BROOK

[window]      SOLD    [window]    A PERFECT WHISKEY    [window]

ONLY

IN

BOND

AWARDED BOTH

GRAND        &       GOLD

PRIZE     MEDAL

ST. LOUIS

WORLD’S FAIR

We see the layout is original and unchanged, because the lettering has been carefully planned around the windows. There are no other signs occupying the same space, painted before or after this ad, which is somewhat unusual for a highly visible brick building such as the Exchange Club. At the base of the wall, off to the side, is a flagpole and a World War One Memorial.

Company History

The brand name Sunny Brook Whiskey was first used in 1891 by the Old Sunny Brook Distillery Company. The 80 proof spirits were distilled and bottled in Louisville at 28th and Broadway from 1891 until sometime prior to 1975 when that distillery was razed. From the beginning on into the 1960s, the company seems to have stressed that their whiskey was always a wholesome product with a slogan in the early days “The Pure Food Whiskey.” Labels proudly displayed the medallion of its Grand Prize Award at the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904 on bottles well into the 1980s. Advertising and promotional giveaways for Sunny Brook Whiskey were abundant and much of it may still be seen for sale on e-Bay. In later decades, the company used imagery of cowboys, playboys, and a Great White Hunter on safari to sell their product, but the character most commonly seen is found in advertisements dating from the early 20th century—a spit-and-polish gent in a military uniform, looking like Lord Kitchener in the Boer War, the “Guardian of Quality for Generations.” In the 1980s, Old Sunny Brook Distillery was bought out by the National Distillers Products Company. The trademark is now owned by Jim Beam Brands Company.

Roos owns a number of aging structures in an area south of downtown known as Bohemian Hill. After the city condemned 24 of his buildings for private development, Roos decided to fight back. On the side of one of his un-condemned buildings he commissioned a painting with the words “End Eminent Domain Abuse” within a red circle with a red slash through it. At the bottom is the attribution “by K. Hart.” The mural, which measures more than 360 square feet, offers an unobstructed view from Interstates 44 / 55 where they merge near downtown.

At issue was whether the message was a sign or an art mural or something else. The city argued in the 8th Court of Appeals that the mural, which it deems a sign, is illegal because it violates two counts of the zoning code for a residential area: It exceeds the 30 square-foot maximum permitted for a sign, and it is on the side of the building rather than the front. As for the political message being broadcast, case law has upheld a municipality’s right to regulate “the time, place, and manner of speech” through the enforcement of sign codes. But the 8th Circuit Court justices did not address these restrictions. Instead, the court looked at the sign code and its exemptions and exceptions in the definition of “sign”— illustrative art, flags, crests, and the like—and said the content must be scrutinized to determine whether it is a sign. The zoning code’s definition of sign contained content-based exemptions and exceptions, the 8th Circuit found. Extrapolating from this, it seems that Jim Roos’ creation is not strictly a sign per se, in that it is not selling something. Instead, it may be seen as a work of art expressing a sentiment and therefore not subject to restrictions of a sign code.

Grand Avenue is one of the longest streets in St. Louis, a north-south thoroughfare with a median near Saint Louis University where the numbers start in the single digits and begin to climb in either direction. North Grand Circle, close to its terminus at Interstate 70, is a roundabout with a large, white Corinthian column in the middle. A landmark in what is now called College Hill. This area was once alive and bustling, but certainly not in the 34 years that I have lived here. In the late 1970s, when, as a public health officer, I first came upon College Hill, the once-vibrant commercial environment was already in a woeful state of dereliction and it has gone downhill ever since. The storefronts and businesses that once lined the traffic circle are now mostly gone—buildings shuttered or demolished altogether—and nothing has come along to replace them.

Amidst this forlorn setting, reading the walls as it were, we catch a glimpse of an earlier time when the Circle with its imposing monolithic tower was not merely a transit point, a place to pass through without much notice, but a destination where folks shopped for sundries, drank in saloons, ate in lunchrooms, or simply milled about waiting for something to happen. Yes, reading the walls, because there were two grand old advertisements visible on the periphery of North Grand Circle: Admiral The New Cigarette and W.B. Corsets, both windows to the past. In referring to these old signs I  use the past tense, for they are no longer with us.

For perhaps 20 years, Admiral Cigarettes was the largest and best preserved wall sign in St. Louis. This wall was exposed sometime in the 1970s when an adjacent building was torn down, evident by the large vacant lot between it and the street. The building bearing the old sign became more and more decrepit until it, too, was torn down in the mid-1990s. How many years Admiral had been protected from the fading effect of sun rays and elements no one can say with any certainty.

Yet there are clues. The disclaimer “Not Made By A Trust” seen at the bottom of the wall is of note. To the tobacco company who paid for the advertisement it was important enough to include as a selling point, as if to say “We are proudly independent, not accountable to anyone.” This reference may date the sign to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt [1901-09], who was known as the “Trust Buster.” This supposition is bolstered by period advertisements found online. One website with extensive archives, tobaccodocuments.org, features a whimsical ad, a painting dated 1900, of three showgirls standing beside or laying atop a huge pack of Admiral Cigarettes. A comical-looking, bespectacled gent pokes his bald head out of the pack, as tall as the cigarettes on either side of him. The lettering is highly-stylized with line scrolls surrounding the profile of an eagle’s head in the center. The product, we are informed, is “Manufactured by National Cigarette Tobacco Co. – New York, U.S.A.”

Far less prominently displayed was W.B. Exact Form Corsets, a smaller sign occupying a portion of a second-story of a building on the southern side of the Circle. The “W.B.” stands for Weingarten Bros., a national manufacturer of women’s under-apparel. According to circa 1920 ad copy, “For 25 years the letters W.B. have been the sign of the utmost value that human ingenuity and factory resources could put into this corset for the price. Why not have one of our corsetieres fit you to your right model tomorrow?”

Tomorrow came and went and 90 years later all the corsetieres have gone the way of patent medicine peddlers.

The aforementioned Corinthian column has presided over this scene a long, long time. It is actually a water tower, one of three remaining standpipe towers once maintained by the Water Department. When first put into service in 1871, it was considered, according to its Wikipedia entry, “to be the largest perfect Corinthian column in existence,” reaching a height of 154 feet [47 meters].    A second one, The Bissell Water Tower, also called the Red Tower, is located only  few blocks to the east, toward the river. The third is the Compton Hill Water Tower located on South Grand near I-44. What is a standpipe? Before modern pumping methods, steam-powered pumps were used to send water throughout the city. Water flow was uneven and pressure surges were common, causing the pipes to rattle and shake. Some residences could not get water to upper floors. Standpipes—large vertical pipes in which a column of water rose and fell—were built to equalize water pressure and prevent surges. Standpipes alone were not attractive and so eye-catching towers were built to house them; each of the towers here is architecturally distinct from the others. At one time, nearly 500 of of these towers dotted our cities and towns.  As hydro-technology improved standpipes became obsolete and most of them, along with their towers, were torn down. Today, only seven remain, and St. Louis has three of them. All three have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since the early 1970s.

Admiral The New Cigarette – St. Louis, MO 1979

Between its sudden exposure and subsequent demolition 20 years later, this sign stood prominently in North Grand Circle. It is thought to date from around 1900. The business owner’s identification or  “privilege” stripped in over the Admiral ad copy reads, in part, [something] Bakery & Confectionery

Next line down: [something-something-something Soda Water & Cigars. While this sign is black-and-white, other specimens were done  in color; signpainter Mark Oatis says he once saw a large blue-and-white version in Kansas City.

W.B. Exact Form Corsets – St. Louis, MO 1981

A well-faded sign that had been exposed to elements for probably 60 years when I came upon it. A  vertical, rectangular space situated to the left of the primary ad copy likely had an illustration of a woman wearing her new form-fitting corset. The privilege stripped in over the the main ad copy reads Tower Dry Goods. The object in the left foreground is the base of a 154-foot Corinthian column, a city landmark.

“That’s one lucky stiff,” uttered one fellow, none too original, as he went back to his tuck-pointing.

It was something out of a movie or a book, perhaps a fairy tale. For a while, every bystander was transported  to a time when Martin Luther King Drive was named Easton Avenue and all the conveyances were horse-drawn. Indeed, there were clues to augment this reverie, for there were signs,  viewable in the immediate environment, that hearkened back to the horse-and-buggy days. The funeral procession passed directly below one such anachronism. On the east wall of a large brick building located at 4234 MLK, approximately 16-feet above ground level on what would be the second-story, is a rectangular banner sign that reads “SADDLERY.” That’s all, no other reference. Black lettering on a red-orange field with a black outline; this sign was likely exposed through demolition of an adjacent building in the last five years or so. Had it been there for decades the colors would have washed away in the sunlight.

A similar artifact may be found less than a mile away on another east-west thoroughfare, Delmar Avenue. This west-facing sign is equally brief, having one word only, “HORSESHOERS.” The sign is positioned near the roofline of the three-story edifice, giving it prominent view to east-bound traffic on Delmar. Interestingly, someone has drawn the figure of an old man on some durable paper stock and affixed it to the building at ground level so that the figure appears to be looking up at the old sign.

It is nothing short of remarkable to be able to look through 21st century eyes at signs that were painte

d on buildings in the 19th century.

Likewise, over on the 2100-block of Cass Avenue on the city’s Northside, there was another similar dated wall sign, this one a well-preserved beauty advertising SCHACHT & COOK HORSE SHOERS. I photographed this sign in 1980; the building itself is long since gone and there is no reference to the named business on any available database.

Not far away, just north of downtown, may be found the text-rich sign painted on the south wall of the former Mound City Buggy and Auto Company, located at 1500 N. Broadway. This wall is actually hodgepodge of faded remnants of various signs, some painted over others. In places, the letters appear jumbled, text from disparate ads mixing together, giving the broad, brick face a sort of mishmash effect. How does this happen? The elements have washed away the primer used to cover up the previous ad copy.

What’s nice about this old wall is how the advertised products connect the horse-drawn era to the horseless carriage era. The top line advertising MOUND CITY BUGGY COMPANY is quite legible. Less so, the next line down reading HALLADAY AUTOMOBILE, which is partly obscured by another line of copy, likely painted at a later date, and reading “Mfrs Of Inland-1-Piece Piston Ring.” In terms of ad copy, it is loquacious by modern standards. The casual observer, with diligent study, may decipher the full message found on the lower levels: “Machine Tools, Jigs, and Dies” “1,600,000 In Use And Going Strong.” There is even more verbiage on this wall, but it remains a mystery—a good th

ing, as we don’t want every thing simple and straightforward.

By 1900, the Mound City Buggy and Auto Company had offices variously at 2007 Locust Street and on S. Broadway between Papin and Chouteau. The extant building on N. Broadway [pictured here] must have been the company’s manufacturing plant.

Because of all the Indian mounds found on both sides of the river, St. Louis was once known as Mound City and there were, and still are, numerous enterprises that carry the appellation or prefix Mound City. In St. Louis, by the 1880s, virtually all of the mounds were gone, sacrificed to urban development. Tod

ay, only one remains in the 4500-block of Ohio Street, alongside I-55. There is a house built on top of it.

St. Louis is and has been a beer-soaked town. In the city, on nearly every other block, the corner tavern may be found. It’s nothing new; beer has been flowing from local taps for 200 nears now. The  difference between beer served a century ago and what is served today is that today’s brew is colder, subject to having gone through more processes, and, in many cases, lighter on the alcohol content. Yes, beer came in bottles Way Back When; even today,  it is not uncommon to find discarded, mostly intact 19th century beer bottles, some beautifully embossed, in creek beds, home cellars, and at the bottom of old privies that once dotted every back yard.

The earliest known brewer here was John Coons, who was putting out the suds back in1809, only five years after the territory was purchased by the United States. A year later, Jacques St. Vrain, one of the city’s original French residents and a former military officer, opened the St. Vrain Brewery. In the following decades, St. Louis’ collective thirst became even more prodigious. By 1860, a landmark year for beer production, the city had 40 breweries in operation. After that, the industry scaled back a bit. In my book, Mound City Chronicles, I list 18 local breweries operating in the year 1887. Most of them had names which are German in origin—the Anton Griesedieck Brewing Company, H. Grone Brewing Company, the Wilhelm Stumpf Brewery, Schilling and Schneider Brewing Company, and, of course, the one that would become world-renown, Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association. In fact, beer-making and beer-quaffing in St. Louis took a quantum leap only when the waves of Germans who emigrated here in the years prior to the Civil War became the Beer Barons and the men who worked their breweries.

Of course, it all came to a crashing halt with the passage of the Volstead Act in1919. Prohibition caused the lay-off of hundreds, possibly thousands of brewery workers. Those breweries which did not close their doors for good tried to survive by making alternative products. Falstaff made brewer’s yeast, while other companies flirted with “near beer” in the form of malt beverages—The Louis Obert Brewery producing Trebo [Obert spelled backwards], and Anheuser-Busch bottling Bevo, actually, a fairly popular drink during the 14-year dry spell.

The party was over—or was it? In response to the now outlawed pastime of imbibing heady beverages, a black market sprung up. By and large, tippling was alive and kicking. It simply went underground—small batches of home brew fermenting in basements; larger batches of beer, wine and whiskey finding their way to speak-easies and private parties, organized crime overseeing the distribution. This bustling and clandestine trade ended with the repeal of Prohibition on April 7, 1933, a banner day for St. Louis watering holes, once again filled with working stiffs too long denied the opportunity for a cold one after work—or any time, for that matter. Appropriately, The Milton Ager / Jack Yellen classic “Happy Days Are Here Again” is associated with the repeal of Prohibition.

In 2011, as I write this, there are still signs of those once proud breweries around town. I speak of commercial signs, ads painted on the sides of brick buildings, faded yet legible after so many years of exposure. None of these beers are in production today, and, with the exception of Falstaff, they have not been seen on the shelves for over fifty years.

A large wall bearing an ad  for A.B.C. Bottled Bohemian Beer [American Brewing Company] was photographed in the early 1980s on the south face of the former Rose’s On The Hill, now Lorenzo’s Trattoria. Likewise, the very faded ad for Green Tree Beer [H. Grone Brewing Company] was found on a quiet side street of The Hill neighborhood. Hyde Park Beer—“Seldom Equaled, Never Excelled”—was brewed in St. Louis and I have located three existing wall signs for the product: Edwards and Shaw on The Hill; Itaska and Delor on the Southside; and another, featuring a wee walking man, in a Northside neighborhood, the location of which I can’t recall. Columbia Brewing’s flagship product, Alpen Brau—“It’s the Tops!”—has two known wall signs in St. Louis, a pretty faded one at 39th and McRee, and a spot-on re-do located in the gangway of Seamus McDaniel’s Saloon, in Dogtown. Falstaff Beer has two decent examples in the city limits, one on North Broadway and another at Arsenal and Macklind, exposed as recently as 2009. Piros Signs, still operating in Barnhart, Missouri, had the contract with Falstaff to paint and letter all their out outdoor advertising. The last fading beer sign is found across the river in Illinois. Oltimer Beer was brewed by the Star Brewery in Belleville, which ceased operations in 1957. This large and busy ad is still apparent on South Main in Belleville, above what is now a hair salon. Oltimer Beer’s quirky slogan—“10 cents worth of 15 cent beer.”

For a definitive history of St. Louis brewing check out the richly illustrated tome by Henry Herbst, Don Roussin and Kevin Kious titled St. Louis Brews: 200 Years Of Brewing In St. Louis, 1809 – 2009.

There are three known Hyde Park walls in St. Louis: Marconi at Shaw on The Hill; North City [cannot recall exact location], and Bates Avenue at the I-55 on-ramp.

Location: St. Louis Avenue and Garrison, North St. Louis. As so often happens, this wall sign for Dau Furniture was suddenly exposed a couple years ago, circa 2009, after an adjoining building was razed.  The west-facing sign on the side of what is now a hair salon is quite lengthy in copy and likely dates to the 1950s.  The first four lines reads:  “What Dau Promises / Dau Always Does / With A Promise of Satisfaction / Which Will Always Be Kept.” This is followed by a proclamation sure to please any thrift-conscious housewife of the period, namely that “We Give And Redeem / Eagle Stamps.” Note the tiny chair highlighted in the middle of the ad, a rather curious image to showcase their product line—almost as if they are saying “Doll Furniture.” Nevertheless, Dau Furniture still operates today, with stores in Grover, Ballwin and Wildwood, Missouri.  This is not the case for Eagle Stamps, which got their start in May Company department stores at the end of the 19th century. The trading stamps were given out with purchases and pasted into booklets which could be redeemed for merchandise. The Famous-Barr chain in St. Louis issued them for decades until the early 1980s, when they were canceled.

No wonder there are so many extant wall signs for Royal Patent Flour in the Mound City—the flour was the flagship product of the Stanard-Tilton Milling Company and the Stanards were Captains of Industry in St. Louis during the 19th and 20th centuries. William K. Stanard—son of Edwin O. Stanard, former governor of Missouri—was president of the company, while his son, Edwin T. Stanard, a 1906 Princeton graduate, was, at various times, vice-president, general manager and secretary of the mammoth business concern.  With principal offices in St. Louis, Stanard-Tilton owned mills, warehouses, and elevators in Dallas, St. Louis and, in Illinois—Rockford, Jerseyville, and Alton.  The company was eventually bought out by Pillsbury Flour Mills, which maintained a plant in North St. Louis until it, in turn, was bought out by Archer-Daniels Midland [ADM], which still operates the milling facility located at I-70 and Shreve Avenue.

The Painted Ad has located five different Royal Patent Flour walls in the St. Louis city limits, and there are likely a few more out there undiscovered.  One particularly faded specimen located at Virginia and Idaho, in far South St. Louis, asks “Why Experiment With Other Brands?”  In 2007, veteran walldog Lonnie Tettaon was commissioned by the Dogtown Historical Society to “redo” a seriously faded Royal Patent Flour ad on the west wall of the former Central Cash  Grocery & Market on the corner of Central and Wise.  Like other such ads, this one bore the image of a flour sack with plenty of [now] antiquated ad copy. Tettaton repainted the sign in green and yellow colors common to the original layout of Cash Markets, which were a small chain of stores. The restored sign is now a minor landmark in Dogtown.

Old Pattison Whisky has seen the light of day after 111 years. In yet another example of a beautiful old sign suddenly revealed, this west-facing brick wall on Folsom Avenue in near-South St. Louis was exposed in June, 2011, when the adjoining building collapsed. Don Bonnell, who owns both buildings plus a third connected structure that holds a machine company, explains that the sign had to be painted prior to 1900 because the building bearing the sign was built in 1895 while the adjoining tumble-down building dates to 1899. This four-year window coincides with the short-lived commercial history of Pattison’s Limited of Edinburgh, Scotland, a distillery which incorporated in 1896 and went bankrupt in 1898. The company spent a veritable fortune on advertising—60,000 pounds in1898 or what would today be 4.3 million pounds in the United Kingdom alone—and, indeed, that was a factor in their demise. Yet, a century later, here, across the Big Pond, in a Midwestern city, their legacy lives on.

For several months after the building collapsed, the damage had yet to be attended to, meaning that the building was still in a state of collapse—the facade folding in upon itself; the roof jutting earthward, giving in to gravity; the once-stalwart storefront now a gaping mouth vomiting bricks and mortar. Broad, yellow crime scene tape surrounded the condemned building, fastened to anything upright, hoping against hope to contain the rubble. This urban eyesore was not the fault of  Bonnell, who had paid a contractor to tear down the derelict structure and haul away the debris. The contractor was busy on another job and promised he would get to it when he can. He finally got to it … the following year.

During this interim period between partial exposure and complete unveiling of the old wall, what little there was to be seen of the original sign proved quite tantalizing. At far left, large letters start to spell out “Old Pa—” The line of copy below starts with the letter “W.” Letters are white on a field of dark green. With so little of the sign actually visible, how do we know it is an ad for Old Pattison Whisky? Because the other side, the east-facing wall, of this very building once bore the exact same sign. Bonnell says he admired that one, too; then he painted his own sign over it.

What is entirely legible at the top of this building, above the currently obscured whiskey sign, is the name of the business which once flourished here: Star Saloon & Cafe. It makes sense to paint a whiskey ad on the side of a saloon, especially when that saloon was across the street from the old Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company, one of several plants belonging to one the oldest and most successful tobacco companies in America. The factory, a sprawling complex occupying several blocks, shuttered after a major fire in the late 1970s. But while it operated, it’s a safe bet that the Star Saloon & Cafe was a busy place throughout the day and night, likely populated by hungry, thirsty factory workers coming off or going on their shifts. It certainly was convenient—have a little snort or a cup of joe and then head off to make tobacco products.

In fact, the name of the saloon is a nod to one of Liggett & Myers’ most popular products, Star Chewing Tobacco [not to be confused with Starr Chewing Tobacco]. And just up the street, one block to the west from the old Star Saloon & Cafe is a large, west-facing wall sign exhorting passersby to “Chew Star Tobacco.” The slogan beneath reads “Leading Brand Of The _____ .” Alas, the missing word at the bottom is covered by sheet metal and other large objects which have been set against the base of the wall, for the wall bounds private property, someone’s backyard.

However, it is virtually assured the boast is “Leading Brand Of The World.” Original advertising bears this out. A vintage Star Tobacco pouch features not only this proud slogan but also the cocksure caption “Men who Chew are Men who DO.” With a skyscraper poking up through Gotham’s metropolis as a backdrop, it goes on to say, “Look at Woolworth’s, New York, the world’s tallest building. Each of its fifty-one stories was a ‘job’ that required clear thinking, accurate action. And the majority of the men engaged in the work were tobacco chewers. STAR is the great American tobacco—made just right to suit the American taste.” From 1913 to 1930, the Woolworth Building was ranked the world’s tallest building.

These signs and the few scattered buildings that remain on this section of Folsom Avenue are the only noticeable reminders of a once-thriving city neighborhood

Finally, one day in February, 2012, Don Bonnell called to say the contractor and his crew were on site, removing the derelict building. At last, the wall sign would be revealed. Upon arrival, bricks, stacked squarely, had been palletized and lay in the street, ready to be loaded onto heavy-duty flatbed trucks. These bricks were about to depart for Louisiana, where they would form a new structure there or beyond, reincarnated for 21st century purposes.

We stand back and look at the long-hidden copy, now seeing the full of it. From Top to bottom it reads

DRINK

Old Pattison

WHISKIES

SMOOTH AS VELVET

The sign company that did the job gave itself a modest plug. Along the bottom, barely discernible, one makes out the attribution: American Advertising & Bill Posting.

Now that the wall is exposed    elements will have their way with it. Graffiti artists—vandals—will see it as something to be enhanced—violated. Birds will crap on it and Old Sol will bake it onto the surface. Despite all this, motorists, pedestrians and neighbors will take notice. When did that show up? they may wonder. Who’s behind it? Indeed, the answer would likely surprise them. The sign you see is the result of a marketing plan hatched in the mahogany-paneled office of Robert P. Pattison, president of a long-defunct distillery that operated in late-19th century Scotland.

While searching for a subject that would combine a design-oriented composition with his detailed drawing / painting technique, Dana Forrester developed the brick wall series that has become central to to his national reputation.  In addition to his brick wall paintings, Dana also explores other aspects of commercial advertising in his art — old signs, storefronts, and neon signs.  Dana refers to his work as photorealism. Though he uses photographs as a beginning for many of his watercolors, he frequently prefers to delete some items while adding others to enhance his paintings.  Thus, any given wall sign paintings may contain disparate elements from multiple wall signs in different locations.  “Photography, ” says Dana, “should serve as a reference for authenticity, and not as a crutch which limits … creativity.”

Dana has painted professionally since 1973,  and taught advanced art at the high school level until 1987, when he began to paint on a full-time basis. He has won many awards in regional and national exhibits and, in 1981, when he was elected as a member of the American Watercolor Society, he became one of the few painters to be a member of both the American and National Watercolor Societies. Dana Forrester lives in Independence, Missouri.