The aluminum boxes are manufactured at 2245 Dean Ave. in Des Moines, the wiring, lights and paint are added at 1700 Delaware Ave., and the resulting products go out the shipping door en route to years of glory, destined to be the center of attention at countless athletic events.

Fair-Play Scoreboards got its start as Fairtron Corp. in 1934 in Ida Grove, Iowa, and moved to the Delaware Avenue site on the East Side of Des Moines in 1954. In 1965, Fair-Play produces the first animation and video-capable incandescent-lamp message center for the Houston Astrodome.

The company has picked up plenty of competitors over the decades. However, the maker of electronic scoreboards for basketball, football and other sports events continues to show strong growth – year-to-date sales are up 15 percent over this time in 2004 – and recently dove into a new sport by signing an agreement with International Sports Timing of Grand Rapids, Mich., which makes precision timing devices for swimming meets.

“A lot of our dealers bid new construction projects around county, and a lot of the schools being built have a pool; we didn’t have a good swim product,” said Fair-Play National Sales Manager Jeff Reeser. “(IST) has an excellent product that we can integrate with our products, but they didn’t have the marketing arm we have. They were marketing it themselves, doing one or two systems a month.”

The new venture comes at a time when Fair-Play is already on a roll.

“After 9/11, we saw kind of a dip in scoreboard sales; school funding went south,” Reeser said. “But we hung in there, and now we’re starting to see things pick up tremendously. We’re currently on a record pace.”

“We were at 100 employees for a long time,” said Marketing Communications Specialist Lisa Jacobs. “Now we have 130, and we added a second shift from 3:30 to 11:30 p.m.”

The road to this happy point wasn’t always brightly lighted.

Fair-Play was acquired by Trans-Lux Corp. of Norwalk, Conn., in 1997 after a couple of years of financial struggle for the Iowa company.

The newly formed Trans-Lux Midwest Corp. went to the city of Des Moines in and asked for help with a $3.65 million renovation plan. The City Council approved a $100,000 forgivable loan and a $100,000 repayment loan, tied to the company’s promise to retain its 67 employees and add 65 more by the end of 2000. Trans-Lux failed to meet its hiring goal by the agreed date.

In August 2003, the council approved Trans-Lux’s applications for a $75,000 Community Economic Betterment Account loan and a $75,000 City of Des Moines Action Loan Fund loan.

Now the local Fair-Play operation is buying an average of 25 tons of aluminum and using 88 miles of wire each month, and producing 3,500 scoreboards a year. Most of these are intended for outdoor installations and use light-emitting diode (LED) technology for easy-to-read numbers and letters. On average, each outdoor board is expected to last 10 years.

Since 2002, the Des Moines operation also has produced commercial signs, typically for banks, car dealerships and truck stops.

As well as joining up with IST this year, Fair-Play has recently begun partnering with Barco, a Belgium-based manufacturer of high-resolution video displays.

“In Des Moines, we focus on the high school sports market and work up to NCAA Division II schools,” Reeser said. “Barco has the Division I and professional markets; but we also build for them.”

The assembly area in the 53,000-square-foot Delaware Avenue building is nearly filled with scoreboards in various stages of completion on a typical day. The plain aluminum cabinets go through a wash bay to remove dirt and residues, then are spray-painted the desired color in another bay.

The standard scoreboard is wired for one color of LED display in each window, but the trend is toward matrix displays with clusters of red, green and blue diodes that can be used to produce any number or letter in a range of color blends.

Some signs are controlled with personal computers and can be installed with hard-wiring control or set for wireless remote changes.

On a recent morning, a big scoreboard – 32 feet long and 8 feet high – was destined for Blue Springs South High School near Kansas City. A much smaller unit, painted royal blue, was bound for Douglas MacArthur Elementary School in Waltham, Mass.

“Fair Play does quite a bit of business internationally,” Reeser said. “We’re trying to grow that market, and we’re seeing an increase in Canada and Latin America.

“Barco is a Belgian company; they’re going to take our scoreboard and message products to Europe for us, and potentially China.”

Flags on the wall represent Trans-Lux Fair-Play dealers in such far-off and unlikely places as Thailand, Fiji, New Zealand, Peru and Panama.

“We’re finding opportunities in South America,” Jacobs said.

Other opportunities are close at hand. Fair-Play will build the scoreboard for Drake Stadium, which is now being renovated, and plans to make a scoreboard for Principal Park that will mark a change for a company that started with electric lights and moved on to LEDs and computers. Like the classic scoreboard at Chicago’s Wrigley Field, this one will feature hand-changed numbers.