Some Handlan 2000 trivia:
Those super-tankers were in fact used by (in addition to others of course) the switching railroad serving and owned by Busch Brewing in Saint Louis, MO. Who knows for what.But another example of a railroad based traffic lantern used in railroad service. (The 2000 received patent number 1959128 in 1934 and appears to have been invented for railroad, not traffic, use.)
One 2000 recently surfaced marked "property of monsanto chemical company" and is suspected to have been used as a blue globe RR lantern.
The Chevrolet plant had the facilities to load new cars onto trucks on the opposite side of the street from the paint drying facility. When it was loading time they would close the street using Handlan 2000 lanterns with BLUE globes. Once a truck hauling trash busted though the lanterns and wrecked a brand new car. Chevy sold the remains for parts.
The tankers and super-tankers are known to exist in many tank varieties. The reason? When there was an order Handlan would contact a local company which at that time made cans designed for institutional foods (beans, soup, catsup, etc.). Handlan would then, after cutting the surplus cans they acquired to the "correct" height, attach the seamless bottom can to the lantern. Bingo. A very large tank long-burning lantern.
John B recently acquired a Handlan marked CITY OF APPLETON C O N O 2000. Appleton, WI? Was C O N O a miss-spaced C O NO for city ordinance number or city order number? In the city code is a rather extensive section relating to contractors' excavations in the streets, but it couldn't be tied to an original ordinance number. John called the city clerk and here is the story, "I had a nice conversation with her, and she referred me to a gentleman in the Highway Dept. He told me that the C O N O 2000 was a City Order No. 2000, and they had the lanterns stamped with the order number to keep track of the age of the lanterns and to keep track of them for warranty info. The fact that this one had 2000 is basically a coincidence. He said there was any combination of numbers used on different orders. He said they had orange for the highway dept. and blue for the water dept. He told me they had hundreds of them at one point in time. They used them up into the seventies, and an interesting point is that they sold them at auction by the lot, instead of tossing them."
Another note from John regarding Los Angeles: The yellow stickers, originally made of yellow Scotchlite, were applied by the LA County Road Dept. upon delivery. Another interesting thing to check with the LA County 100's is that many were originally painted blue, and then repainted green before shipping. You can often see traces of blue paint where the green missed. Some of them were painted in the Dietz metallic gray green also. When these lanterns were sold by the bunch at auction by the county, the yellow stickers were ground off. So if you have one ,or more, as I do, without the yellow stickers being removed, then it was not sold at auction. I will leave it to the imagination where those lanterns were obtained!! Before the green 100's, LA bought Little Giants. These were green with the bottom of the tank dipped in yellow paint, and LA COUNTY ROAD stamped in black print on both sides of the tank in yellow. There were also large tank Hy-Lo lanterns, with 8-Day tanks, in the same scheme. The rarest of this type lantern from LA County was the streamlined Embury painted in the yellow/green scheme. These were marked with a small white decal as Property of LA County on one side, and the black stamping on the other side of the tank. Both the Little Giant and the Embury were DIPPED in yellow paint, not sprayed with it! The only Embury streamlined LA County lanterns I know of belong to Steve Hillyer in Long Beach, he has two of them. Steve is the undisputed king of LA County and Long Beach lanterns. I have a few passed on to me from him. My information also comes from him. Also, LA County used earlier Embury 250 and 350 lanterns usually unpainted with red etched globes, and Traffic Gards, painted red, and Handlan 2000's painted yellow. These are scarce.
A Handlan supervisor once told me one of the employees had painted 2000s for Lone Star Gas "backwards". (They're red over black or the other way around.) The guy had to repaint them. Does this mean that Handlan lanterns were hand painted one-by-one? Or maybe only in the case of two-tone models?
This brings to mind another Handlan "exclusive". Look at this picture. Were the owner markings applied letter by letter, lantern by lantern?
This tidbit has nothing to do with lanterns but marks a 50th anniversary: "1950 - The first “Yield” sign was installed in Tulsa. Okla. It read “Yield Right-Of-Way". Clinton E. Riggs (d.1997 at 86), Tulsa police officer, developed the sign after a decade of experimentation." This sign may have been black on white similar to other regulatory signs. When they became "standardized" they were yellow.