San Antonio Fire 1970s

Rachel Edwards Ridder

Last week's column recapped the one that ran Jan. 31, 2010: The murals painted by Eugene A. Montgomery were removed during a 1984 remodeling and stored at least for a time in the store manager's office. Titled “The San Antonio Story,” they chronicled major events in San Antonio and Texas history from American Indian settlements to the present, as it was when the murals were completed in 1954.

After the Sears, Roebuck & Co. store at the Military Plaza shopping center closed in 1993, the murals' fate remains a blank. Last year's column established that there is no record of their having been received by the city for use in the Convention Center or at San Antonio International Airport , nor does Sears' parent corporation know what happened to them. Last week's column polled staff at the Witte and McNay museums and the Institute of Texan Cultures ; none of these institutions has the murals nor any record of having been offered them.

After sending this query, letter-writer Ridder remembered hearing that Sears area manager Jerry Erler “paid a lot” to have the murals removed carefully. The work was done by art conservator Richard White , who later relocated to New Orleans and is now semi-retired in Columbia, Miss. In a telephone interview, White recalled working on an elevated platform to remove the oil-on-canvas murals, which were placed 6 or 7 feet off the floor to protect them from being touched or brushed up against by passing shoppers.

As White remembers, the murals were being taken down because the north and south walls to which they were attached were to be knocked down in a reconfiguration of the store. As the canvases came off the walls, they were rolled into cardboard tubes of about 12 inches in diameter, with plastic sheeting between each layer of canvas and the next. The completed rolls — three or four of them in White's memory — were then wrapped with heavy-duty plastic.

The murals at that time were in good shape, says the conservator, without any need of restoration. While the paintings may not have been top-drawer fine art, says White, “They were quite presentable, and their importance was that they presented a pictorial history of the city.” Although he has not kept business records from that period, he remembers being able to remove all the panels without causing any tears in the canvas or losing any paint. At the time, he says, “They were in condition to be reattached in a new space.