Sign Man’s banners angered Eagles owners and Jason Kelce. Now he just tailgates in Lot P.
For 16 years, John Rodio spared (almost) no one in his blunt thoughts about his favorite team. Now he focuses his game-day energy on a tailgate menu for 40 people every Sunday.
It didn’t take long for the Veterans Stadium security guards to swarm Section 360, telling John Rodio during the first quarter of a 1991 preseason game that his banner had to come down.
By then Rodio, a South Jersey landscaper, was long established as “Sign Man,” the critic who hung witty banners every week to send messages during Eagles games.
Six Eagles — including key defensive players Wes Hopkins, Seth Joyner, Clyde Simmons, and Jerome Brown — were missing from the team amid contract disputes with Eagles owner Norman Braman. And Sign Man wasn’t happy. BRAMAN WAKE UP, Sign Man wrote.
The banner was being removed, the guards said. For what? Rodio said. The guards said it was blocking the view of other fans. Half the tickets in the section belonged to Rodio’s family. He turned to the crowd and asked who complained. No one moved.
The guards talked into their radios. It didn’t matter. Rodio’s banner had to come down. But this wasn’t Sign Man’s first rodeo. He hung his first banner four years earlier and always came prepared. He refused to be silenced.
“I brought another one just in case they made us take it down,” Rodio said. “We hung it right up. It said, ‘Now spend some money.’”
The one person off limits
Yes, Eagles fans have been known to boo and brawl. But they also follow the Birds with the type of passion that requires someone to empty their thoughts every week onto a 33-foot sheet of house wrap. For 16 years, that was Rodio. He painted his wisdom in his backyard in Hammonton, rolled up the banners, and lugged them to South Philly.
Before Swoop, the Eagles had Birdman, Sign Man, and other characters who helped the stadium come alive every Sunday.
There were people you met, knew, and became friends with and you only knew them because of where they sat. You saw them every week. It was like Christmas Day every Sunday to me. You looked forward to it all week. It’s sentimental.
“There was nothing better,” said Rodio, 60. “I grew up there. We made friends there. I went from when I was 7 or 8 years old to 2004. There were people you met, knew, and became friends with and you only knew them because of where they sat. You saw them every week. It was like Christmas Day every Sunday to me. You looked forward to it all week. It’s sentimental.”
Rodio’s banners were like the fans who filled the seats: honest. If things were going well, Rodio wrote rallying cries. If not, he piled on. He called out coaches, ownership, opposing players, and even his own guys. Sign Man didn’t pull any punches. Well, one person was off limits.
“Buddy Ryan,” Rodio said. “I never took a shot at him because I was close to him. At the end, I really wanted to because we were awful in the playoffs.”
Rodio met Ryan while the Eagles’ head coach was broadcasting his radio show at the old Rib-It on Market Street. Rodio ate at a table next to the coach and chatted during commercial breaks. In 1988, Sign Man flew to the season opener in Tampa and hung a banner saying BUDDY-BALL HAS ARRIVED. Ryan loved it.
The next night, Ryan slipped Rodio some cash at the Rib It. Take your wife to dinner, Ryan said. Sign Man was bought off.
“My brother said, ‘You’re a joke. You’re a fraud. You take all these shots and now because the guy goes to dinner,‘” Rodio said. “I said, ‘I can’t do it. I’m sorry. You can call me whatever you want.’”
Ryan offered Sign Man an open invitation to watch practice at Veterans Stadium, allowing Rodio in while the press waited outside. Ryan told Rodio to simply tell the guard that he was with Buddy.
“He waves me over,” Rodio said. “I’m talking to him and he’s blowing the whistle. I’m talking to Buddy Ryan and I’m a nobody. This is nuts. I’m like, ‘You don’t mind?’ He said, ‘What are you going to do? Call the Redskins? You don’t know what we’re doing out here. Who are you going to tell?’ He was the only guy I never ripped. I sure wanted to at the end.”
Becoming Sign Man
Rodio took his shots at Braman before praising Jeffrey Lurie after he became the owner. IN JEFF WE TRUST, Sign Man wrote. But Lurie’s love from Sign Man faded when the team struggled in the late ’90s. The Eagles won just three games in 1998 and Sign Man took aim at Lurie and president Joe Banner. NORM, HE’S WORSE THAN YOU, Sign Man wrote. The goodwill was gone.
“We had a few they didn’t like,” Rodio said. “But none of them were ever taken down.”
A team executive called and warned Rodio that season that his signs were becoming personal. Rodio thought his season tickets that traced back to Franklin Field were in danger of being revoked. But Rodio said Mayor Ed Rendell, who often joined Sign Man’s tailgate in the parking lot, said the banners were fine since the city owned the stadium. To prove he wasn’t always negative, Sign Man wrote, I’M POSITIVE … WE STINK.
As you get married or meet someone, they’re like ‘What are you, nuts?’ I say, ‘That’s just the way it is.’ The Eagles are our thing. It’s part of you. We can take shots at them among ourselves, but it’s our team. You’re going to defend them.
“He got [ticked] because he couldn’t do anything about it,” Rodio said of Lurie.
Rodio attended his first game in the 1970s and has rarely missed a Sunday since. Like many other diehard families, the Rodios seemed to base everything around the Birds.
“As you get married or meet someone, they’re like ‘What are you, nuts?’” Rodio said. “I say, ‘That’s just the way it is.' The Eagles are our thing. It’s part of you. We can take shots at them among ourselves, but it’s our team. You’re going to defend them.”
No weddings in the fall, no birthday parties on Sundays, and everyone keeps January open just in case.
“Johnny’s daughter is pregnant and having her baby shower and I have another friend who’s having a baby shower in the next couple weeks,” his sister Joann Daunoras said. “I already told them ‘I’m not coming to the shower. I’m going to the game if the Eagles go.’ I go to every game. My whole life depends on what game is on. Not just the Eagles. Any game that’s on TV, I want to watch.”
His first banner — THIS IS SAD — was during the first game of the 1987 strike when replacement players took the field. But Sign Man’s origin traces further. Each Rodio — John was too young to be there — held up a letter in 1968 at Franklin Field to spell out “Goodbye, Joe” during Joe Kuharich’s final season. A photo ran in The Inquirer’s sports section. Maybe it was in his blood to be Sign Man.
Rodio would think during the week about his Sunday message — “You’re trying to make a statement, but you only have seven or eight words,” Rodio said — before settling Friday night on the right tone. He workshopped ideas with family and heard suggestions from almost everyone as the lore of Sign Man grew.
“He got a lot of attention for his first one and he’s a person who loves attention,” Daunoras said. “He said ‘Well, I’m going to do it next week.’ It just blew up. Everyone was looking forward to what the sign was going to be next week. People would come up to me in the town we live in and say ‘Oh, your brother’s sign made the paper again.’ I was really proud of him. He’s so creative. We thought it was really cool.
Rodio’s work was shown on the TV broadcast and printed in newspapers and magazines. He became a regular on Angelo Cataldi’s WIP morning show and cars would pull over when they spotted the landscaper mowing lawns. Sign Man became a thing. He even heard about it when he was refereeing South Jersey basketball games.
“People would yell out,” Rodio said. “‘Hey ref, I have a sign for you. You [stink].’ I loved it.”
End of the run
Rodio’s run as Sign Man ended in 2004 when the Eagles moved across Pattison Avenue to Lincoln Financial Field. The team owned the stadium and prohibited fans from hanging signs. Sign Man was finally silenced. His final sign at the Vet simply said, THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES.
“I wish we were still at the Vet,” Daunoras said. “I was 4-11 and I shrunk. I’m like 4-9 and three quarters. At the Vet, we were the first row of the 300 Level and there was that walkway in front of us. So if the 200 Level stood up, I could still see the whole field. That doesn’t happen now. A big game, everyone stands up and I have to look around people. So I really liked The Vet better.”
But Sign Man wasn’t quite finished. He stood across the street from the Eagles’ practice facility in October 2011 and hung a banner imploring Andy Reid to quit. He hung his sign — just like the ones he used to bring into the Vet — between two trees as the players left the parking lot after practice. One truck drove past before turning around. It was Jason Kelce, then a rookie, and fellow lineman Evan Mathis.
“They were [ticked],” Rodio said. “Kelce pulled over and was like, ‘What the hell are you doing, man?’ I was like, ‘It’s a sign. Relax.’”
The incident — Sign Man’s only confrontation with a player — blossomed into a big story. The players explained that they didn’t appreciate seeing the sign — “Andy, the Time’s … to Go” — so close to their facility. It stayed in the news cycle for a week before eventually blowing over. It’s hard to find a player who meshed better with Philadelphia than Kelce. This was a rare disagreement.
“That’s the thing about Philly. Some of the players don’t get it,” Rodio said. “But the ones who get it are lifelong guys. Like Kelce. He could go anywhere right now and he’s a god. He understood it and embraced it. The ones who embrace the fans are legends. The ones who don’t, they’ll say, ‘The fans ran him out. The media ran him out.’ No, they ran themselves out.”
Eagles love endures
Rodio’s truck will be one of the first vehicles lined up on Sunday morning when the parking lots open outside the Linc. It’s a wild-card playoff game against the Packers, the kind of game that would force Sign Man to spend all week thinking about the right message. Instead, he’s finalizing the tailgate menu for the 40 people he feeds every Sunday in Lot P.
“We’ve been doing it forever,” said Rodio, whose family has 12 tickets in Section 119. “It’s awesome down there. On a Sunday morning, there’s nothing better. The music starts playing, the flags are flying. It’s crazy. I love it.”
The second sign Rodio hung about Braman lasted about as long as the first. Security guards yanked that, too. It became a story, providing good fodder for talk radio. The owner, whom Ryan referred to a year earlier as “The Guy in France,” was ripped for messing with a fan. Braman’s daughter reached out and apologized. She invited Rodio to be the team’s guest at the Meadowlands against the Giants.
“I said, ‘No problem. But I’m still putting signs up,‘” Rodio said. “The next week, the players still had not signed. So we wrote, ‘Norm, you’re not listening,’ but we spelled it in French.”
Braman couldn’t get rid of Rodio but did fire his buddy after that season. Thirteen years later, Sign Man was no more. First, it stung. Rodio thought about hanging a banner each week at his tailgate before deciding to move on. It was time for Sign Man to put down the paint brush.
“I got too busy,” said Rodio, who started his own catering company eight years ago. “It was too much thinking. I was like, ‘Ah, I can take a break now.’”