The Willow Glen Resident

Letters

Beautiful murals should be preserved

I appreciate Jeannette Cook's commentary on the hanging of banners in front of the Millard Sheets mosaics on the Home Savings branch in Willow Glen (The Resident, April 8). They are a nuisance, but as a longtime friend of Millard's, I have an even larger concern.

What would happen if Home Savings were absorbed by another financial institution? Mergers are usually accompanied by closing of branches and reduction of staffs, and we can pause to wonder whether the beautiful building Millard designed for the corner of Lincoln and Minnesota avenues would be trashed in the process. I hope the preservationists will be on the alert for any moves in that direction.

Millard designed the famous mosaic on the library at Notre Dame University, which is often televised at home games there. He laid out the design for the rainbow tower at one of the hotels on Waikiki in a football stadium and designed the mosaic for the dome over the main altar of the National Shrine in Washington, D.C., with some tricky calculating that involved compound curves.

I went painting with him in Tahiti and New Zealand in 1973, and to Cabo San Lucas in 1975. When Fred Dickey, the Sunday editor (with whom I shared an office), suggested to the publisher of the San Jose Mercury News that it sponsor a historical mural at the San Jose airport as a bicentennial project, I recommended that Millard do the job. (I was also a member of the San Jose Bicentennial Commission.)

The management didn't know him but invited Millard to come in and show samples of his work. Later, Tony Ridder asked me, "Dick, how did you get to know him?" I said Millard was one of my teachers. He got the job. The design presented a special problem because of the lunettes at the top, but the mural was hung successfully in 1977, the year of the city's bicentennial.

It was a difficult job, and Millard told me afterward, "We almost lost it." I provided him with a copy of Thompson & West's 1876 historical atlas of Santa Clara County, where he found many of the old-time images he used, including the Normal School and Tillie Brohaska's Band. I think the Mercury News kept a string on it, maintaining first rights to the mural, so that there will be a chance to save it if the airport management ever decides to knock out that wall.

The story about how he got the job at Notre Dame is a good one, too. Millard was a great man, and I hope his work is not allowed to be callously trashed. I have written about all the above in an unpublished memoir, Eighty-Seven Damn Years and Counting.

Dick Barrett
Santa Maria Avenue

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