We Tried to Save the Murals |
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Historic
According to Harold “Whitey” Whitehouse, Jr. a
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“We were upset, but there was no way we could save them,” Whitehouse says about the murals today. “We had to do something. The building was bulging at the seams.” John Sullivan, who was on the school board for 20 years, says that the pictures by Gladys Brannigan were painted on the wall, not on canvas as her WPA commission states. Although neither Sullivan nor Whitehouse actually witnessed the demolition, they remain certain that the murals could not have been salvaged. Readers who believe they have seen the murals in recent years, they say, must be mistaken. “I assure you that, being on the school board, if there was any way of storing or preserving those murals, we would have done it,” Sullivan says. Both men attended the Middle School in the 1930s and remember the murals vividly. Whitehouse was a boy scout at the time as shown in the Depression-era photo above. The second photo shows Whitehouse as a baby with his mother and grandmother. These photos appear in his 2008 memoir of growing up in