Swinging a hammer, Stacey Houk knew exactly what she was doing as she smashed unwanted saucers and dinner plates into thousands of unimaginable bits and pieces. One is a broken hunk of bright blue pottery that came from Poland; another is a navy cup handle.

The bits and pieces become the Mississippi River in a jaw-dropper of a mural. Twenty-five kids from McKinley Elementary School, Davenport, have been working on it after school for nine months.

 

Students and teachers everywhere pull off magic things, but this mural is knockout, a panorama of East Davenport, never before portrayed. Not dry history, but life today in such dimension that makes you think it’s a 3-D movie on a landing of the school’s grand staircase.

It’s there, Eleventh Street Tap,  the old fire house, Rudy’s Tacos and Lagomarcino’s. Sailboats stick out to be touched. Their white sails flap on a broken-cup-and-saucer river. A train is inches off the background, ready to hoot for the Mound Street crossing. A cutout towboat heads for Lock and Dam 15.

The panorama-diorama has been built for the ages. The school is 70 years old this year; 70 years from now, McKinley students will be able to see what this neck of the woods was like.

Kay Hall, creative arts curriculum specialist for the Davenport school district, says, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” Steve Schalk, whose dad, John, was principal of McKinley for light years, keeps admiring the mural. “Dad would be so proud,” he says.

 

It will be dedicated at 3 p.m. today. The students and the teachers who helped create it will be bug-eyed and all smiles. They’ve been smooshing their hands in grout, molding fish and tree limbs, taking bus rides around historic East Davenport, sketching and studying the buildings, the hills and trees.  The foliage is important, because the scene is portrayed in autumn.

“We chose the most colorful bits of broken pottery to make the fall trees,” says Houk and her son, David, art teachers in the Davenport schools, who have been up to their elbows as artists-in-residence for the McKinley mural.

Kids molded dimensional fish for the river, painted the grass, buildings and the orange-ish trees in the hills of McClellan Heights and Pierce School in the far background. It’s all completed, except for a few houses along East Eleventh Street, among them the former home of Isabel and John Bloom, our noted artists.  This was their neighborhood, and the Blooms would be proud because the panorama has been financed by the Isabel Bloom Art Education Fund, Stepping Stones and Davenport Community Schools.

 

Add-cetera

JERRY GRIMM of happy Morrison, Ill., backs up my Tuesday plea for summer sartorial splendor: “Playboy says that bucks are back in style again.  I bought the ‘dirty bucks’ as they were called in my high school days 42 years ago. My wife, Joan, was glad to hear I hadn’t ordered the white ones! Remember Pat Boone wearing those?”

FROM out of nowhere, someone sends a statement for a 1925 funeral at John B. Turner & Son, morticians of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Professional services, casket: $20.

Cemetery lot: $14.

Opening grave: $5.

Total: $39.

A discount of 40 cents would be deducted if account was paid within 30 days.

It was.

 

Contact Bill Wundram at (563) 383-2249 or bwundram@qctimes.com.