A man has fixed many of Sacramento’s neon signs. Now, his daughter is learning
When Melissa Uroff got in trouble during high school, she would have to go to work with her father Steve Uroff.
For nearly four decades, Steve Uroff, who is 70 and lives in Carmichael, has had one of the more distinctive jobs in Sacramento. Take a look at a landmark neon sign in the city and there’s around an 80% chance he’s worked on it, he estimated.
He’s worked on signs for businesses like Jim Denny’s, The Crest Theater and Gunther’s Ice Cream. The neon signs on display at Golden 1 Center? He repaired them all.
Now, Melissa Uroff, 45, a professional artist who uses mixed-media and is based in Sacramento, is part of the second generation of her family to work on neon signs. She learned how to do this from her father, partly from the time they spent together when high school wasn’t going well for her.
“It was either, ‘If you don’t want to go to school, then you can go to the shop,’” she said. “But I liked the shop, so it didn’t work out.”
Learning to work on neon
Steve Uroff wasn’t always a neon sign repair person. Originally from Southern California, he worked on oil fields and in a rendering plant before he decided it was time for a career change.
“Everybody I was working with was getting hurt,” he said. “I’d see the neon and liked it, so I said, ‘Oh, I’ll try that’ and went all out on it.”
He hadn’t known anyone who did neon work when he was growing up. His dad had been an upholsterer, his mother a stay-at-home mom.
So he visited neon shops asking where people had learned the trade. Several people said they’d learned from a person in the San Diego area named Dale, whose last name is unknown. Steve Uroff attended the last class that Dale, who was then around 60, ever gave.
Dale taught Steve Uroff the basics of the trade. “It’s like eye-hand coordination,” Steve Uroff said. “You just automatically do it after awhile.”
Neon sign work revolves in part around the ability to blow and bend glass. Dale encouraged Steve Uroff when the class was over to do jobs for many different people. He remembered advice Dale had offered: “Pick up the good from them and forget the bad. Everybody has a little different way of bending. So pick up the stuff that works, take it and use it for yourself.”
Steve Uroff moved to the Sacramento area in 1988 and went to work around the same time for Pacific Neon Company. The rest of the family moved about a year later.
When Melissa Uroff was growing up, she said there was always glass in the garage, with a full setup so that bending work could be done there. When her friends would come over, Steve Uroff would show them how to make Christmas ornaments or even just how to play with the glass a bit.
Melissa Uroff estimated that she was about 10 or 11 the first time she bent glass, adding with a laugh that it had only been in the past five years or so that she’d learned to do the work well enough “where it would not crack or break or and would hold gas.”
She continues to learn the art of glass bending. She lives near a creative space that she keeps in downtown Sacramento, which allows her to frequently come in to practice, even if it’s just for 30 minutes in a day. In recent weeks, she achieved a bend that she said had been repeatedly trying to achieve. Finally getting it left her “floored with excitement,” she said.
Glass bending is a tricky trade to learn, one that revolves around hand-eye coordination, muscle memory and practice and veterans like Steve Uroff willing to pass on what they know. He retired several years ago but still freelances with Pacific and is aware this work might go on sometime longer.
“Once you’ve done neon, you never retire,” he said. “You might think you’re retired, but there’s always somebody saying, ‘Hey, can you help me with this?’”
Making a name for herself
Melissa Uroff isn’t afraid to put herself or her work out there. She contacted The Sacramento Bee recently after seeing a video on social media related to a Bee article on the rebuilding of Iceland Ice Skating Rink, which had a historic neon marquee her father had worked on. She wanted to know if the people working on the rink needed help with sign repair.
She posts her neon work on Instagram, where she has more than 2,600 followers as of this writing. It’s only part of what she does, though. A full-time artist for close to 20 years now, she also enjoys photography and keeps a dark room at her creative space.
“I just am more of a process-based artist, I guess,” she said. “So I like dark rooms and experimenting and transferring.”
She described herself as an artist while her father is more a traditional sign repair person.
There is some connection between the different media that Melissa Uroff works in. Faith J. McKinnie worked with Melissa Uroff for a March 2022 activation, “Coordinates: Ice Pac,” where 35 artists were recruited to display work at a condemned building in the Ice Blocks District.
McKinnie will do another activation with Melissa Uroff starting in February at the Mansion Apartments at 15th and H, working in conjunction with SKK Developments.
What McKinnie said she loved about Melissa Uroff’s work was its flow.
“It doesn’t seem like a different artistic practice,” McKinnie said. “Her photography kind of blends into her public art and then that kind of builds into her installations and sculpture. So there’s this beautiful moment that not all artists can do seamlessly.”
In October, Melissa Uroff made a neon bed that appeared in a one-off event, “ArtMix: Spells and Spirits” at Crocker Art Museum. Eben Burgoon, public program coordinator for the museum said that another local artist, Franceska Gamez “recommended Melissa’s installation as part of the many activations that night” and that her contribution was “beautiful.”
Melissa Uroff isn’t the only one of her four siblings to work in neon. Her youngest brother, she said, is a sign installer who works for Pacific.
Whether the family trade goes beyond their generation remains to be seen. While Melissa Uroff and her father were interviewed for this story at her creative space, her 8-year-old daughter Madeleine Millner was also in the room, off school because of the Thanksgiving holiday.
Millner said she’s “not really” interested in eventually doing neon sign repair. Asked what she wanted to do when she grows up, Millner initially said she didn’t know before her mother spoke up.
“There is something you keep saying: You’re gonna move to LA and leave me,” Melissa Uroff said to her daughter. “Why is that?”
“So I can make movies,” Millner replied.
This story was originally published November 30, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
