Oceanside Murals Are No Strangers to Hard Times

In a time of despair and humiliation, a gregarious sign painter named Emanuel Osuna brought Oceanside some beauty and serenity. The question now is whether that gift will survive.

Today, the murals Osuna painted during the Great Depression are slowly rotting in storage while the city searches for money to repair some or all of the 16 panels that old-timers remember with a certain bittersweetness.

After all, Osuna’s 1938 scenic oils harken to the dark days when the local bank collapsed, businesses abruptly folded and about the only people with steady work were ranch hands.

“People were working for $2 a day, and they’d get maybe three days’ work a week,” said Ernie Taylor, who was then a city engineer and remembers Osuna. “The city didn’t have any money. Nobody had any money.”

Osuna, the grandson of San Diego’s first mayor, Juan Maria Osuna, was struggling as a commercial sign painter when Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal created the Work Progress Administration that, among other things, put artists to work.

The Oceanside City Council commissioned Osuna to paint 8-by-4-foot murals depicting mostly local scenes. The panels were placed inside the Oceanside Pier Dining Room, where “they attracted a lot of attention. They were kind of uplifting pictures,” recalled Taylor.

But, over time, the placid scenes of the then-pastoral San Luis Rey Valley, snowy Palomar Observatory, Torrey Pines, the eastern desert and other subjects became tortured by the sea climate. Several have holes so big they look like they were kicked by a mule.

The panels were put into storage five years ago, when the dining room was converted into a lifeguard headquarters, and the city has scrounged in vain for the $96,000 needed to repair them.

“They’re very sentimental to Oceanside,” said Betty Harding, a City Council aide in charge of the restoration project. “Everybody needs some heritage. Moms and dads and grandparents can say, ‘Do you remember when you were a child and we took you to the pier dining room?’ ”

More than nostalgia, the paintings show a vanished age, when Oceanside numbered only 3,000 folks (contrasted with 125,000 today) and the once-tiny tourist town had rolling open spaces and an original breezy California dreaminess.

“It reminds me of how it used to be,” said John Steiger, who, as a teen-ager, knew Osuna. In one panel, “you could look out at the San Luis Rey Valley and see the hills. You look out now and people are growing there.”

Betty Engel, a Del Mar art conservator whom Oceanside consulted about saving Osuna’s work, said much of the WPA art depicted “socialist themes” from the perspective of workers and labor unions.

Yet Osuna’s pieces took a strictly regional view, venerating natural beauty and symbols of the past, such as San Luis Rey Mission, while saying nothing about politics or the social condition.

“They’re quite charming and competently painted and important to Oceanside because they show the area in 1938,” Engel said. She praised Osuna’s composition, use of light and “atmospheric quality.”

Osuna wasn’t and isn’t famous. The Oceanside Library contains only a brief reference to him. In the 1940s, he moved to Los Angeles and, for a number of years, worked as a salesman for a paint company. Other than that, little is known about him. Even his cousin, Barbara Osuna Lange, lost touch.

However, he is remembered.

“He was, how would you say it, a gentleman and he was proud of his work,” said Steiger. “He was also proud of his Spanish heritage.” Steiger and others describe Osuna as friendly and outgoing.

His cousin remembers him as a kindly man, lanky, with glasses and a thin mustache. She saw him painting one of the panels but doesn’t know whether he ever again undertook a major work. For the most part, she said, he “painted little scenes on gourds and on pottery dishes and sold them.”

Osuna’s murals, even the ones best preserved, are in sorry condition.

“They have a lot of flaking paint,” Engel said. “They’re very dirty and grimy. They could be stabilized and made to look much better.”

That brings the topic back to money. The council, spurred on by Councilwoman Lucy Chavez, applied but failed to win a federal grant for restoration.

A plan to recruit the local historical society to launch what Harding called an “adopt-a-panel” program is being discussed. The council will soon decide whether to restore all 16 panels or only 12, abandoning the most damaged among them.

Osuna, who is buried in Oceanside, died the year before efforts began in 1983 to save and display his works.