by Elizabeth Dinan
PORTSMOUTH — Blocking beautiful Bow Street views, with signs cheering the Red Sox, is worth the sacrifice “as long as the Red Sox win” the World Series, said Kate Leith.
Marketing coordinator for CMA Engineers, Leith filled five of the company’s second-story windows at 35 Bow St. with letters spelling out “GO SOX.” She blocked a third-story office window with a sign bearing the Red Sox logo and the company name. In three bay windows, jutting over Bow Street, Leith hung a sign picturing the iconic pair of red socks and is keeping the World Series score with large signs in adjacent windows.
The Red Sox have a two-game lead in the World Series and Leith is using her workplace windows to advertise her hope that they go all the way to a ninth championship win. Because CMA is an engineering firm, there’s a wide-format printer in the office she used to print the window-sized posters.
“There’s a lot of love here for the Red Sox,” Leith explained. Company president “Craig (Musselman) really loves them too.”
Leith said she and her colleagues decided if the Red Sox made it to the World Series, they would honor the team in some way and decided the downtown signs were the way to do it. She measured the windows and had professional help from members of the civil engineering firm with design and implementation, she said.
She said the signs will stay in the windows until the series is over and at night the lights are left on to illuminate them. Since they went up, she said, she’s heard people yelling, “Go Sox” from the street.
“I can’t see them though,” she said, because the signs are blocking the street views.
Leith said the signs took some time to design and she started the process before the Sox made it to the World Series. She was warned by some to refrain from doing that because she was “going to jinx it.”
A devoted Red Sox fan, Leith forged ahead anyway, explaining, “I’m not superstitious.”
