Peter Barber and Brian McCaskey founded the local icon Two Dudes Painting Co.

Gone are their VW buses but their dedication remains as the company turns 20.

The name rolls off the tongue like latex off a brush. Dudes Painting Co. Peter Barber and Brian McCaskey started coating it on a couple of decades ago. They were just a pair of 19-year-old college kids out to make a few bucks.

“Here come the dudes!” called out one of their suppliers when they walked through the door.

The paint stuck. So did the name, which also recalls a favorite David Bowie track. Much has changed in the years leading up to the company’s 20th anniversary.

The partners have not actually shouldered ladders for a long time. Their signature orange Volkswagens are lined up in a “Microbus graveyard” in the warehouse, McCaskey said. “We can’t part with them.”

Fast-drying, environmentally palatable water-and oil-based paints have mostly succeeded the fuming, smelly oils of old.

The Cabbage Hill company has grown greatly, too, with 25 employees and a diversification plan that includes on-site spray-painting of cabinetry plan that includes on-site spray-painting of cabinetry and pre-assembled trim.

What Barber and McCaskey dub their “dude culture” includes a Web site with namesake sale items. T-shirt sightings have come in from distant lands, such as New Zealand.

“There’s dudes everywhere,” McCaskey said. But that doesn’t cheapen the value of the brand. House painting is still the mainstay, the pair said. Service remains the keystone.

“We’ve been able to build a phenomenal customer base,” said Barber, who noted that the painters literally become part of the household on many jobs.

“We let the dogs out. We feed the cat. We pick the paper up.”

Accidental dudes

Barber and McCaskey were, admittedly, accidental dudes. Both men graduated from Lancaster Catholic in 1986. McCaskey briefly studied business at Millersville University. Barber graduated from Franklin & Marshall College in 1990 and taught school for a year before going into painting full-time.

The Dudes learned to paint exteriors as they went. When the weather got cold, they worked inside. When they needed to lug more equipment, they sprang for a dottering 1964 Microbus.

The bus happened to be the color of a naval orange. It proved to be a brilliant, if unwitting, marketing stroke.

More than half a dozen VWs later, Barber says, “People know us.”

The partners have since switched to more practical transportation, though they still wring mileage from the minibuses by depicting them in murals and logos.

(People continue to send hot tips on the vehicles but a re-Vival is unlikely Volkswagen stopped manufacturing the Microbus in 1979, Barber laments. “What can you do?”)

The dudes specialized in painting historic houses and later branched out into wallpapering, specialty finishes and outdoor signage.

Today, said longtime customer and friend Barney Mc- Grann of Pennsylvania Stone Cement and Supply Co., the dudes hire carefully to maintain their reputation for good manners, good humor and good work from the surface prep on up.

“We just love them.”

“They’re nice guys,” said Olde

Towne Interiors partner Ralph Myers. “They’re not just painters. They’re artists. They’re reliable. They’re very generous to the community.”

They’re also increasingly visible in it.

In 2001, the partners tapped two of their employees to paint a mural commemorating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The tradition intensified this summer with the painting of “a flurry” of seven murals around the city, said Barber, a 1997 graduate of Leadership Lancaster.

Two Dudes muralists collaborated on the paintings with four Pennsylvania College of Art & Design interns, said President Mary Colleen Heil.

The interns’ experience was profound, according to Heil, who invited Barber to help with the college Mural Resource Project.

Civic involvement sets the painting company apart, she said.

While the dudes have toiled as far away as England — a 1992 chapel — painting gig lined up through a relative – McCaskey and Barber say they live in and invest in the city by choice.

Two Dudes formerly worked out of 470 Infayette St. The company upsized to its 750 Poplar St. headquarters four years ago.

Barber has applied for a state environmental grant to put green plants on the rubberized roof of the former beer distributorship, a strategy that would reduce heat radiation and global warming.

The partners say the spraypainting initiative will employ five of their painters in-house and use their 13,000-square-foot headquarters more efficiently.

Success has allowed Two Dudes to indulge in projects such as the murals, Barber says.

But success has its costs. “You guys are expensive for what you do,” is how people sometimes phrase it, Barber said.

He is unapologetic.

“Good people need to be paid well,” he says of Two Dudes employees. And managed well.

The partners, who between them have five kids ranging in age from 7 to 21, are on the move 12 or 13 hours a day. That’s if you include extracurriculars.

McCaskey has coached the boys’ basketball team at St. Leo the Great Catholic School for 15 years; he also drums for The Pillars of Society, a rhythm-and-blues band.

“Are you kidding?” Barber exclaimed in mock amazement, “We’re home all the time!”

Recently, added Barber, a longtime marathoner who competed in his first Ironman triathlon this summer. He and McCaskey have been getting out at dawn to ride their bikes before work.

“They just think we’re nuts,” says McCaskey of his wife, Chris, and Barber’s wife, Kara.

It sounds nuts, Barber agrees.

“We work together all day long. But we socialize. We’re still good friends.”