Years ago, Vernon Guider painted the south-side storefront of Hank’s Rib House. “The best barbecue on earth,” read Guider’s neat lettering. In the bottom corner of one of the windows he put a little pink pig. “The pig is down on his knees,” says Guider. “The pig says, ‘Oh Lord, when I die, PLEASE send me to Hank’s Rib House where I can be barbecued right.’ People used to stop their cars when they saw that. Hank knew how to make barbecue, but when it came to signs, I had to help.”
Ford–the son of the late Bishop Louis Henry Ford, the Memphis minister after whom the south-side expressway is named–has commissioned Guider to do banners for his church and for sound trucks that advertise tent revivals. In 1996 Guider’s signs were used to lobby for the naming of the Bishop Ford Freeway. “It was critical to our success,” Ford says. “By the busload we went to Springfield, following signs made by Vernon.”
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His mother, Nannie Lomax, was a seamstress. His father, Will Guider, was a brick mason. The family came to Chicago in 1937 and settled in Washington Park, where the teenage Vernon found odd jobs. While working on a foundation dig, he was asked by another laborer to help paint a three-room house near 45th Place and Vincennes.
Meanwhile Guider was befriended by his landlord, Harry Englestein, who owned the building that housed the Regal, the Savoy, and the South Center Department Store on 47th Street. He helped Guider get a contract with the Regal. Soon Guider’s signs were promoting Cab Calloway, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, and Jay McShann. He teased audiences:
His early-50s cardboard lobby display for the King Cole Trio was a work of art, accented with a giant crown and a piano keyboard that almost looked three-dimensional. But Guider wasn’t a big music fan. “The King Cole Trio?” he asks. “I didn’t know much about them except that they played music and stomped their feet.”
Guider and his wife, Lillian, have lived in this home for 32 years. They met in 1942, while singing in the National Youth Association choir at the 38th and Wabash YMCA. “Vernon was in the bass section,” says Lillian. “I was in the soprano section. I really wasn’t attracted to him at first. He asked one of our mutual friends to introduce us.” Since then they’ve raised three successful sons: Melvin, principal of Booker T. Washington High School in Houston; Wayman, a pharmaceutical rep in Los Angeles; and Vincent, a youth minister in New Orleans.
