In the Chicago area, the Magikist Lips (in the form of huge signs on the Edens Expressway, Dan Ryan Expressway, Kennedy Expressway, and Eisenhower Expressway, which lit up and flashed) were well-known landmarks. The signs were 75 feet wide and 40 feet high at the lips pucker. Travelers from the early 1960s through the late 1990s tended to use them as landmarks to figure out how much longer it would take to arrive at their destination.
Kennedy Expressway, Chicago. |
In the mid-1940s, her husband, the late Bill Gage, owned Austin Rug Cleaners, a business he founded in a converted blacksmith's shop in 1929. In casting about for a promotional gimmick, Gage settled on the slogan "the kiss of beauty" and the company's new name, Magikist. He had Minnie apply extra lipstick and kiss a piece of paper; a commercial artist turned the imprint into a logo.
In Magikist's heyday, the lips appeared on hundreds of local billboards, over 1,000 buses, and three spectacular signs. Chicago musician/artist Wesley Willis frequently mentioned Magikist in his song lyrics, although he used the word as a high-praise term akin to "magician."
When the Gage family sold the Magikist business to a West Coast firm in 1985, it was the beginning of the end for the signs.
The demise of the Magikist signs:
Sign #1) The Magikist lips at 85th Street and the Dan Ryan Expressway were razed in 1992.
Sign #2) The lips at Cicero Avenue and the Eisenhower Expressway came down with no fanfare several years later.
Sign #3) The final lips rose 80 feet above a parking lot where Montrose Avenue met the Kennedy Expressway just south of the junction with the Edens Expressway, which was removed in late 2003.
All three signs, because of rust and rot, were destroyed.
There are just three surviving Magikist outlets: independent carpet-cleaning businesses in Milwaukee and Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and Oak Forest, Illinois. They all are still using the lips logo.
Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.
WBBM Channel 2 - "Magikist Wedding Proposal"
Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.