A Texas/Arizona Road Trip 1.2

Just 10 miles down the road from Ranger, the sad little town featured in yesterday's post, is Eastland, which is a complete turnaround from Ranger.  It's amazing that two towns so close together were both chosen for murals by the Fine Arts section of the U.S. Treasury Department for post office murals commissioned under the WPA after the Great Depression.  Both towns are about the same size but Eastland seems to be bustling with activity, and unlike Ranger, the local people know and care about their historic mural.  The post office even has postcards printed which they readily hand out to anyone who asks about the mural.  The gentleman at the window, while helping a customer, handed me two, along with another card which I'll mention later.

Suzanne Scheuer, the artist, titled this work "Buffalo Hunt."  A native of San Francisco, she was an outspoken critic of the unjust way Native Americans were treated historically.  She chose the Comanche Indians, the noted horsemen of the Great Plains and the first residents of Texas, as her subjects for this mural.  She also shows us that she had a great sense of humor because if you will notice in the very lower right corner of the painting she has included a horny toad signifying Old Rip, the famous lizard who was buried in a time capsule in 1896 in the courthouse cornerstone along with a Bible and a bottle of whiskey.  When the capsule was opened 31 years later in 1927 when the building was torn down, Rip was discovered to still be alive and became the talk of the nation, even making a trip to Washington to visit President Calvin Coolidge.  But alas, in 1929 Old Rip died, and an autopsy (on a lizard???) showed he had been suffering from pneumonia.  He remains on permanent display in a glass, velvet-lined box at the courthouse (but I didn't go take a picture of him) to this day.  He has been kidnapped and returned, picked up by John Connally when he was running as a candidate for the governorship and one of his legs fell off, and has a rich history as Eastland's most famous resident.  If you want to read his biography, a short one can be found here, or you can call the Eastland Visitor Center at 1-800-2-OLD-RIP.

Scheuer, who also painted a post office mural in Caldwell, Texas, produced her mural on a canvas, transported it to Texas in 1938 where it was hung by a local paperhanger under her supervision.  It measures 5 by 12 feet and she was paid $650.

The second postcard handed out by the Eastland Post Office is of a stamp window created by Marene Johnson Johnson (that is NOT a typo) who was postmaster at Eastland from August 6, 1957, through July 11, 1968.  At her own expense and working on her own time away from her postal duties, over a seven-year period Mrs. Johnson used 11,217 stamps to create the window as her gift to those interested in history and geography through philately.

I apologize for the poor quality of the photographs but the glass frame caused reflection problems and the window is in a small area which made it very difficult to photograph the complete design in one photo.

The window consists of six separate panels and I find the design simply amazing.  It appears that some of the stamps have cancellation marks so I suppose she didn't have to actually purchase a few of the stamps but I'm sure the cost was still staggering on the wages of a small town postmistress.

The window was dedicated on Flag Day, June 14, 1963, about two weeks after I graduated from high school!