This is the House that John Built — Remember this House!

— Aretha Franklin, “The House That Jack Built”

You could never accuse the founder of our company, John Meyer, of being impractical. Nor was he one to waste a resource that could be re-purposed rather than discarded. This was as true for his personal possessions as it was for his business assets; take the home that he and his family lived in going back to 1970.

Meyer Sign & Advertising was originally situated in downtown Mount Vernon on 2nd Street. Tonnie Boer, John’s daughter and the wife of current Meyer Sign owner Martin Boer, remembers her childhood home having been a rental property that her father purchased, along with an old service station that he relocated next door and converted into his sign shop. (Considering that the company’s current building on Old Highway 99 South was formerly the Chevron exhibit at the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle, you quickly realize that John was as creative as he was frugal when it came to his shop facilities.)

When he moved Meyer Sign to its present location, John wanted to keep the same “commute” he’d enjoyed at its previous site — which is today a walk next door. The City of Mount Vernon, however, didn’t see things the same way.

As Tonnie recalls, “The city told him he could only put a mobile home on the site, not build — so he asked them, ‘What’s a mobile home?’. Having come here from Holland in 1952, my parents weren’t familiar with the concept of a mobile home — but they went looking for one, and eventually found one they liked, and placed it next to the business. From then on my father was always trying to make it look like a house. He changed a lot of things over the years, including adding siding and a roof, and changing out things like the kitchen cupboards.”

Living just a few steps from the company he founded suited John Meyer…even after retiring from active management of Meyer Sign & Advertising. “He would run errands for us, and he always acted as a goodwill ambassador in the community,” Tonnie recalls. “He was an outgoing person and knew a lot of people.”

When her father passed away in1999, Tonnie’s mother continued to live in the home she had shared with her husband for nearly 30 years. With her passing in February, the family decided to remove the home and use its site for storage purposes — which is how the Mount Vernon Police Department (MVPD) became aware of it. As it turns out, homes scheduled to be demolished are reported to the MVPD for potential training purposes.

“We have a ten person tactical team that is drawn from other duty areas within the department, and we like to conduct training exercises twice a year, including firearms training and warrant serving situations based on different scenarios,” says Detective Brandon Young, MVPD’s assistant leader of Police Tactical Operations (PTO). “In the course of a year we don’t have many real-life situations in which we’re breaking down doors, so we like to have empty or abandoned buildings to train in with our battering rams and glass breaking tools.”

Which is why on a gray Friday morning in April, a police tactical team outfitted in body armor and carrying automatic weapons loaded with wax tipped rounds (designed to mark rather than injure) rolled up on Meyer Sign & Advertising. The team had earlier assembled in a headquarters classroom to review the tactical scenarios they would be rehearsing that day, each of which involved varying degrees of “use of force” in a building they had never before set foot in.

By the end of the day, Detective Young and his fellow PTO team members were able to go from classroom theory to its application in realistic exercises that could some day save lives and preserve the peace in Meyer Sign’s hometown. Watching all this was a bittersweet experience for Tonnie Meyer, but it seemed in keeping with how her parents  had lived their lives. Even before the Mount Vernon Police had contacted Meyer Sign & Advertising, Tonnie’s family had begun removing everything from her parent’s home that could possibly be used by someone else, from the contents of kitchen cupboards to household appliances, including the water heater.

In the same spirit that motivates people to designate themselves as organ donors, the house that John built has found a way to continue its legacy as an asset to the community that he and his wife adopted when they left their native Holland. For some, this means a new refrigerator or dishwasher. For others, it’s an addition to their pantries that helps put a meal on the table. For the City of Mount Vernon, it means a safer and more effective police force that will hopefully never have to apply the experience they gained from it, but are better prepared to do so should the need arise. John Meyer would be proud of that. He was, after all, a practical guy with a big heart.