Arizona’s Been Good to Billboard King Karl Eller
Nine-year-old Karl Eller gazed out the car window, watching miles of Illinois cornfield roll by. Their mother was driving Karl and his 17-year-old sister, Elaine, away from the bustling, harried streets of 1937 Chicago toward a new life in the wide-open desert of a place called Arizona. It wasn’t easy for Karl to get a good view; the four-door car was packed with all the clothing and personal belongings the family could jam in. But he found himself enthralled by the billboards that broke up the long, empty stretches of highway.
Karl couldn’t have know that he was being captivated by the very thing that would one day help make him a multimillionaire. Or that, in the bigger picture, he would fall in love with one of the youngest states in the country, one that had joined the United States just 25 years before.
