(The following story by John Pitcher appeared on the Omaha World-Herald website on January 10.)
OMAHA, Neb. — As Deborah Uhl draws her handheld vacuum cleaner across canvas, she is opening a window to the past.
The 35-year-old painting conservator and her assistants are giving a facelift to the oil-on-canvas murals in the Durham Museum’s Swanson Gallery.
They’re removing more than 70 years of soot, grime, dust and dirt from six paintings in the art deco style, which depict the evolution of transportation in Omaha: Native Americans on horseback. Mormon pioneers in covered wagons. Powerful steam engines chugging through the modern metropolis.
“The colors are beginning to pop off the canvas,” said Uhl, who started the project Monday and plans to finish by Jan. 20. “We’re starting to see what these paintings actually looked like in the 1930s.”
Uhl takes the Durham project seriously, especially since she has a personal connection to the building.
Her maternal grandmother, Mae Brogan, was one of the first registered nurses to work aboard Union Pacific’s legendary Challenger. That passenger train ran between Omaha Union Station — now the Durham Museum — and San Francisco.
For years, Uhl had thought her grandmother worked as a stewardess. At first blush, the 1930s black-and-white publicity photos of Brogan appear to show a young woman in a stewardess uniform.
But Uhl recently learned from her mother that Brogan was nurse.
“I was blown away,” she said.
Union Pacific employed nurses on its passenger trains to reassure families that cross-country travel was safe, said Durham Museum spokeswoman Shawna Forsberg. The railroad also ran a clinic inside Union Station.
“People traveling from Omaha to the higher elevations of Colorado would sometimes suffer altitude sickness,” Forsberg said. “Nurses would have been needed on those trains.”
The presence of nurses also proclaimed to Depression-era Omaha that Union Station was an upscale, glamorous place.
Indeed, when it opened in January 1931, Union Station was widely regarded as one of the world’s most elegant and modern train stations.
Union Pacific Railroad gave Gilbert Stanley Underwood, the Los Angeles-based architect, free rein to design the building. He chose to construct it in the cutting-edge art deco style of the day, said Durham curator Carrie Wieners.
“The station was intended to be an international art deco showcase,” Wieners said. “When people got off the trains and looked at the building, they were supposed to think, ‘Wow!'”
Uhl, an Omaha native who now runs a freelance conservator business in Bailey, Colo., first worked at the Durham last summer. The museum hired her to restore the murals in the building’s Suzanne and Walter Scott Great Hall.
The murals feature decorative shapes, patterns and Native American corn motifs.
“They were in pretty bad shape,” Uhl said. “There was water damage to the plaster behind the paintings, which caused the canvas to puff out.”
The transportation murals she’s now working on were done by Los Angeles artist Joseph Keller and were part of the building’s original design. They went up in the station’s Hayden House Restaurant, where thousands of travelers a day saw them while paying $1.25 for a sirloin steak, salad and baked potato in the early 1930s.
Uhl suspects her grandmother probably spent many off-hours at the Hayden, eating steak dinners and admiring Keller’s murals. Soon they should look the same as they did in those days.
The paintings have endured a lot.
Forty-five steam locomotives went in and out of Union Station every day in 1931. By 1946, after World War II, 64 steam locomotives were bringing 10,000 passengers a day through the place.
The murals gathered soot from the trains, grime from cigarette smoke and grease from the restaurant’s kitchen.
Uhl uses a couple of detergents to remove the pollutants. She also wields special dry-cleaning sponges and a vacuum cleaner.
As she works, vibrant colors lost to time begin to emerge. The paintings seemingly come alive.
“We’re beginning to see the artist’s original intent,” she said. “He created incredibly dynamic, three-dimensional paintings.”