I still have lots of work to do, but at least now I can make buffered outlines of the 1967-vintage Hershey character glyphs into Fontforge-friendly vectors.
My goal is to release these as OTF fonts, rendered as it they’d been drawn by a constant line width pen plotter or film recorder, as was used in Dr Hershey’s day. Frank at Kiosk Fonts has loftier goals, and may actually release pretty fonts one day …