Joel Losego enlightens the Lions

If you think this year’s light show at the Guernsey County courthouse was a delight, just wait until next year! “We plan to include more features for kids,” said Joel Losego, general manager of AVC Communications to the Cambridge Lions Club. “We may include Rudolf and other songs or characters that appeal to children.”

“It took over a year to design the light display,” Losego said. “Everything had to be made from scratch. None of this came out of a box. Actually, it came out of a lot of boxes. Integrating all the parts was a challenge.”

“Grant (Hafley) wanted to give something back to the community,” Losego said. “He wanted something the community could have fun with. Grant would sit down and start working on something and new ideas would come out. It was fun to make the lights dance.”

“It was a challenge getting wires to all of the lights. The courthouse is a really old building with thick walls and places that couldn’t be reached by ladders and lifts. You might have seen county employees hanging from ropes to reach some of the places.”

“All the windows in the courthouse are different sizes,” Losego said. “They look the same from the sidewalk, but they are all different. Each window display had to be custom built. We used re-bar frames and had to attach all of the lights to them.”

The light display uses over twenty-five thousand individual lights. There are three hundred sixty-four different circuits with a little electricity on each circuit. We used new LED lights. All of these new lights combined use less power than the old lights used at Christmas time.

“It took two guys working for two and a half month to install all of the frameworks for the lights,” Losego said. “It took three men a month to wire the lights. It took a week to get them all controlled from one location.”

“We took pictures of the courthouse and used them as a canvas to design the light displays. We programmed the music and lights in one-tenth-second intervals. It took six months to program the music and the light sequences before the lights went up. One of the songs was a saxophone number played by Gordon Hough.”

“A two minute song took eighteen hours of programming to coordinate the lights and the music. Every circuit had to be programmed. Some circuits include red, blue, and green lights so that we can combine them to get orange and purple and other colors.”

“The light show was tested on a laptop computer,” Losego said. “Grant was the one who got all of the lights to be controlled from one location. The whole thing is now run from a memory card no bigger than the one that goes into a digital camera. We monitor the light show from the radio station with a remote camera.”

Plan for next year’s light show include additional lights on the courthouse lawn and lights on all four sides of the upper levels of the courthouse. A low frequency radio may be installed so people can listen to the music on their car radios.

In other club business Dave Conrath reported that rehearsals for the March Lions Variety Show will begin on Sunday, January 26^th, at 1:30 P.M. Tickets for the show will go on sale on February 23rd. Patron ads can be purchased by contacting any Lion.

Funds raised by the Lions Club help the local diabetes support group and assist those in need with the costs of eye care and eye glasses. The Lions Club recycles eye glasses that are no longer needed.