The Pittsburgh Press (February 13, 1942)
Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
PORTLAND, Oregon – Since the WPA always has captivated me as a phenomenon, a social force, a doer of good deeds, and a possible haven for myself in some future private storm, I dropped around today to see what the WPA was doing for its country now.
Or more specifically, to see what the Art Project under WPA was doing, I have been curious about how sculpture and handweaving and murals could help save America from the Japs.
Well, they’re helping all right. The Art Project of Oregon’s WPA is hard at work on defense. In fact it’s doing nothing else. It isn’t making shells or planes – but it’s making the men happy who shoot the shells and pilot the planes.
The Art Project, you might say, has gone into the business of making life bearable for some of our armed forces. At the moment it is head over heels furnishing and decorating the new Tongue Point Naval Air Station.
That’s all said in a few words, and yet it’s a colossal job. The Art Project has made the furniture (and boy you should see it!) for all the public and many of the private rooms – 280 pieces, chairs, tables, beds, lamps, ash trays, even a crap table.
It has made all the drapes. It has furnished the pictures and murals and the pretty pottery that sits around on tables – 76 separate pieces, from oil paintings to huge glass mosaics.
You know, if you’ve ever been around one, how nicely the quarters at a Naval Air Station are fixed up. Well, I imagine Tongue Point will be the envy of the whole Navy.
$20,000 job done for $7000
You might ask why the Navy, in a time of urgency like this, has to help keep WPA going by having it do this work. Why not just go to a store and buy the stuff?
The answer is simple – the Oregon Art Projects can do this job more artistically, and far more cheaply, than it could be done any other way right now. Why, for $7000 the Government is getting at Tongue Point what would cost $20,000 anywhere else. That’s the answer.
Oregon’s Art Project is unique. No other state has put its art craftsmanship to such practical use. They’ve really created a renaissance out here.
The Art Project didn’t just sew a little and hold water-color classes and model a few urns for exhibits around the country. For at least five years it has been actually creating things – unusual, tasteful and practical things – for people to use.
The Art Project fished out carpenters from the WPA rolls, and made delicate cabinetmakers out of them. It took foundry workers and trained them into ironwork-Cellinis. It took guys like me whose fingers were all thumbs, and made fine upholsterers of them. It took ordinary housewives and set them to weaving unusual drapes and upholstering material.
Then with all this newly developed talent fit started making things that were both useful and beautiful. What it did was the opposite of leaf-raking.
Decorated medical school
It built and furnished Timberline Lodge. It decorated the University of Oregon’s medical school. It furnished – in Oregon’s native myrtlewood – the lodge at Siver Creek Falls state park. It did the Bend County courthouse, and dozens of libraries and schools.
It furnished and decorated the quarters of an Army Engineers outfit here in Portland, and did some decorative work at the Air Base. It is just winding up a beautiful job of refurnishing the governor’s mansion at Juneau, Alaska.
Yes, what it has done is practical, and it has made a name for itself. Five years ago it had to beg for projects. Today it is so flooded with requests that it has a hard time choosing which to do, for it can do only a few.
For now, it’s getting shorthanded, and of course that’s the way it should be. The majority of the skilled workers have left to take jobs in defense industry.
The number of people employed on the Art Project has dropped by one-third – and the two-thirds remaining are not the same people who were working a year ago, but are green hands pulled off the regular WPA rolls and trained to this specialized work.
If the war goes long enough, the Project visualizes the day when it will fold up altogether because there’ll no longer be anybody to do the work – everybody will be in actual defense work. That would be a fitting climax to a job spectacularly well done.