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Sorry that this is the second post about losing a friend or family member in as many weeks but the heading of my blog does have the word "Life" in it. And, both of these posts deal with losing people that played a significant role in my life. In this case it is someone I have known nearly my entire Professional career as a sign painter. Thursday night, Karen Coffman called to tell me…

…the sad news that her brother and my longtime friend and fellow sign painter, Wilbert G. Coffman had passed away.

From the time I first met Wilbert, somewhere around 1980-82 he was nothing but generous and kind to me both as a friend and as an aspiring sign painter of which I was at that time.

While it was my wife’s Uncle, who had initially encouraged me to consider the sign painting trade by introducing me to a lifelong sign painter from Uniontown, George Schlifitt, it was Wilbert that helped shaped my brush fundamentals and layouts for lettering signs and more that I still use today.

Many people have had the good fortune of having a mentor and I have had more than one, but Wilbert Coffman did more to show me the ins and outs of sign painting or the art of "hand-lettering" than anyone could ever hope to have had a journeyman show them.

His friendship went beyond just help and advice. He soon gave me plenty of opportunity to get paid while I was learning as I traveled with him, all over the tri-state area lettering and striping Trucks, Wreckers, Signs, Tractors and just about anything that was not moving. He would often just snatch a wax-free pencil form out of his chest pocket, scratch out a few top-n-bottom guidelines and some "quickie" lettering of what went where and away he would go.

I know this sounds a bit flattering or braggadocios but of this I do know….he was the fastest hand-letterer I ever saw. having now spent more than 30 years in this trade, traveling the country and attending shows and sign lettering events that featured sign mechanics both better and worse, I’ve never seen anyone who could do a layout, paint and stripe (with his signature "Qurly-Q’s") any faster than Wilbert could.

As sign painting goes, you could not go anywhere there where trucks and hand painted customers that have not hired or heard of Wilbert Coffman. In the trucking community I used to say that have a Coffman Graphics paint & Curly-Q job on your truck was as good as belonging to the AAA club. Everyone, knew and loved his work.

He also had a family and a multitude of friends outside of his career and all of whom seem to be made up of the same type of good old fashioned down home friendliness that you often only see in the old movies anymore.

I will be far from the only one who will miss this great artist, father, grandfather, friend and neighbor and can only hope that others he had met and knew can take away half as much as I did from knowing him while he was here.

May God Bless all of the Wilbert Coffman family and friends.