COLUMN ONE : Towns Try to Paint Way to Prosperity : Twentynine Palms is among the out-of-the-way places that hope to become tourist spots by covering their walls with murals.

At 8 o’clock on a Tuesday morning the desert has already begun to burn, and important business is afoot at the 29 Palms Inn. The Chamber of Commerce has gathered to hear the latest report from the Promised Land.

“This lady right here,” merchants committee Chairwoman Mary Jane Binge says with a flourish, “went to Chemainus.”

And so Lee Wookey, an unlikely pilgrim, told of her recent journey to the self-styled “Mural Capital of North America and the World,” a former logging town in British Columbia that lost its sawmill in 1983, painted 32 murals on its storefronts and now greets 400,000 tourists a year.

“We were quite impressed,” said Wookey, describing a paradise of buttered scones, English gardens and very, very good manners. “The murals are wonderful. And do they attract the tourists. There are seven or eight in front of each mural. Click, click ,” and she pantomimes the shutterbugs in action.

The question here is what’s more improbable: That a dying coast town in western Canada could find prosperity in a paint can? Or that an increasing number of scrappy little California communities aspire to be Chemainus--chief among them Twentynine Palms, which sports four brand-new murals costing as much as $14,000 each and a five-year plan for painting more.

With 22 bed-and-breakfast inns and 3,900 residents, Chemainus is an unusual model of rejuvenation for single-industry California cities such as Lompoc and Susanville, communities with high hopes that tourism can augment their stumbling (circle one): military base, lumber mill, agriculture, prison, gold mine, manufacturing plant.

“We just decided that we were slowly dying on the vine, and we took a look at the options,” said Larry Briggs, head of the Twentynine Palms Public Arts Committee and the arbiter of artistic taste in this High Desert crossroads. “And the murals were the best one.”

In the process of painting their towns profitable, local officials such as Briggs are changing the mural movement itself--and not everyone is happy about it. This most urban of art forms has its greatest growth these days in rural outposts, where its modern edge of social protest is being dulled into pretty scenes from mainstream history.

Twentynine Palms has “within their reach Los Angeles, the largest collection of murals in the world. Why would they look to British Columbia?” asks an incredulous Judith F. Baca, mother of the Los Angeles mural movement. “It’s remarkable to me that this place becomes a model. It’s an incredible bastardization of the arts.”

Maybe so, but here’s the problem in Twentynine Palms, where nearly 15,000 residents share the desert with the largest Marine base in the world:

Thousands of cars and hundreds of tour buses pass through on the way to Joshua Tree National Park and the Colorado River along California 62.

But too few stop here.

Twentynine Palms had the bad luck of cropping up on the highway 15 miles past the national park’s first entrance for tourists inbound from Los Angeles. And right now there is not much reason for the park’s 1.5-million annual visitors to go the extra distance to get here.

“We’re trying to develop the concept of ‘Get in the loop’,” said an optimistic Briggs. “Go in [to the park] at Joshua Tree and come out at Twentynine Palms. But we’ve got to give [tourists] something to entice them to town.”

On the southern edge of the Mojave Desert, where two-story buildings are as rare as shade, there is small business, big military and little else. Local history is as sparse as the scenery; lawns are xeriscaped by God, paychecks provided by Uncle Sam.

Adobe Road starts in town, ends at the Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base and in between is home to the Regulation Barber, Combat Barber II and the Custom Tattoo Art Gallery, where a curvaceous plastic Betty Boop in camouflage fatigues beckons customers. Twentynine Palms Liquor and Video sells uniforms and military supplies; Casa de Java peddles coffee curbside to a steady stream of groggy Marines (“Just drive up to the curb, honk your horn, place your order and off you go to morning formation.”)

“The town,” said Laurie Stewart, co-owner of the coffeehouse, “has been kind of stuck in a rut.”

Twentynine Palms’ early history is populated by a thin stream of Native Americans, miners and ranchers, drawn to the so-called Oasis of Mara--a grandiose name for an underground spring and the 29 eponymous palms it nourishes.

Modern history--very modern indeed--began after World War I when Pasadena physician James B. Luckie urged veterans who had been exposed to mustard gas to file for homesteads in the arid valley between the Bullion Mountains and the Pinto range.

Luckie’s bald pate, done in tasteful apricot and sepia tones, looms over Adobe Road in mural No. 3, dedicated May 6 and telling the story of the “Father of Twentynine Palms”: “His compassion led him to search the desert for an ideal climate where clean, dry air could promote healing.”

Veterans stayed, and the government joined them. During World War II the region served as a military glider training facility, and, in 1952, construction on the Marine base began. Now a testing ground for aircraft, missiles and other airborne weapons, the facility has managed to survive federal base closures.

But defense budgets are not what they used to be, and “we have to have something other than the Marine Corps as our economic base,” said Beth Wiederhold, president of the Action Council of 29 Palms and owner of the Book Worm and the Gift Horse. “When the Marine base leaves, the town dies.”

Even with the base here, life could be better.

Early in 1994, Wiederhold said, local merchants had noticed a real “dip in spirit.” Neighborhoods were looking shoddy, the streets were dirty, business owners “weren’t taking pride.” Discouragement coated the town like dust.

So a handful of merchants started meeting to try to figure out what to do. A retired Marine dubbed “Mr. Clean” launched regular community cleanups. A Neighborhood Watch program was started.

That spring, Wiederhold picked up a copy of Smithsonian magazine with a spread on Chemainus. By September, the first of a long string of local business owners was on a plane heading north to plot the future of Twentynine Palms.

“Oh, we loved it,” Wiederhold said of Chemainus and its history murals. “We saw pictures of what their main street had looked like and said, ‘Oh, that’s just what Twentynine Palms looks like without the palm trees.’ ”

Briggs said of his first visit: “I spotted these two ladies standing on a porch, and I turned to say hello to them and realized it was a mural.”

So taken was the Twentynine Palms delegation with trim little Chemainus--antique stores, crafts shops, jingling cash registers and all--that a month after their return home they flew the master himself down to tell them how it’s done.

“The Visionary Karl Schutz” as he is called in Chemainus’ promotional literature, came to Canada from Heidelberg. During a trip to Romania, he and his wife saw the murals that would change their town: frescoes that decorated small-town monasteries with colorful scenes depicting local history.

With Schutz’s prodding, Chemainus turned itself into an open-air art gallery. The town made the switch from logging to tourism, and Schutz became a local hero.

“We started out with about 40 businesses, and we had five empty stores in town,” Schutz said of the early 1980s. “Now we have over 300 new businesses.”

One of those is Schutz’s own, a consulting enterprise that takes him around the world, telling places from Queensland, Australia, to Quincy, Calif., how to paint themselves out of a corner.

Lompoc called him in 1988, but his $2,000 price tag was too steep. So they did it on their own, with a little help from Los Angeles muralist Baca. Twenty-three murals later, “there is a whole new sense of vitality downtown,” said Gene Stevens, coordinator of the Lompoc mural society. “We have a new restaurant and a new coffee shop and people are walking around with cameras.

Up the coast from Lompoc in Cayucos, Muriel Wright and her mural society have engineered the painting of 10 murals and are trying to produce a map of other mural cities on the Central Coast. Farther north, Susanville and Eureka are also jumping on the mural bandwagon.

In Twentynine Palms, Schutz was the star attraction in October at a fund-raising dinner and a string of potlucks. A month later, the town’s first mural was completed: a portrait of local pioneers Bill and Frances Keys, decorating the side wall of Plaza Furniture.

Another mural was dedicated in March, two more were completed in May, and “The Great Desert Storm Victory Parade” is slated for completion in time for the annual Pioneer Days celebration in October. The five-month hiatus between Nos. 4 and 5 doesn’t signify any slowdown, Briggs said. “The artists said, ‘No way are we gonna do it in the summer here .’ ”

Now, Chemainus has murals; Twentynine Palms has murals. Chemainus has life-size bronze statues; Twentynine Palms just hired the same artist, who last month made plaster casts of five of the oldest people in town for a future series of similar statues. Chemainus has a video, a book, a map and postcards; Twentynine Palms has similar plans.

This desert city, said Schutz in an interview from Chemainus, has learned his lessons “with a zest and a vigor that nobody else has matched. It amazed me. We thought we were just the ultimate in doing things in Chemainus. But I think that Twentynine Palms has surpassed us.”

Local artist Jocko Johnson said: “I came to Twentynine Palms in 1969, and the town wasn’t opened up to art. But in the last year, bang! Everyone agreed to art.”

So enthusiastic are the locals here that a string of unsanctioned, “spontaneous” murals has threatened the careful plans of the powers that be--plans for what Briggs, as head of the mural selection committee, calls “first-class quality.” So what qualifies him to be Taste Tzar of Twentynine Palms? “I was a Marine,” he said simply.

One enthusiast wanted to paint his own wall with a mural of Lt. Gen. Chesty Puller, the most decorated Marine in military history, a man who once offered his solution to the Vietnam War: “I’d destroy Hanoi and everything in it.”

“Every Marine knows who Chesty Puller is,” Wiederhold said. “The problem is none of the tourists do.”

So the renegade art lover was successfully warned off with a subtle threat: Do it if you like, but you certainly won’t make it into the official postcard collection, map, video and book.

But Carla MacNeill, owner of Head to Tail Dog Grooming, is another story entirely. Her mural is a garland of fanciful trees and animals bordering the front of her cool little shop. She didn’t need any hotshot artist. She had no use for a committee’s formal OK.

And the official response? “The Action Committee came here and looked at it and says it’s ‘cute.’ . . . But I caught heck for [the trees] because they weren’t palm trees. I says: ‘There’s other trees in this town than palms, ladies.’ ”

Carla MacNeill may not agree, but the art Establishment of Twentynine Palms pretty much concurs with Schutz when it comes to answering the thorny questions: What is art? What is history?

“When you see a bird, you see a bird,” said Schutz, who advises cities to hire the best artists they can find and stick to accessible images. “Ninety-nine percent of the people are very comfortable with this kind of art--very realistic and true to history. . . . I am criticized for that, but this is what works in Chemainus. This is what works around the world.”

And this is what annoys urban muralists, those longtime artists who came up through the streets and use their paintings to tell the world how the disenfranchised live.

Baca scorns the Chemainus model of public art as “mere illustration.” Robin Dunitz, who runs a Los Angeles mural tour business and is writing a book on California wall art, contends that the rural mural renaissance depicts “history, but a very sanitized history. It’s all very upbeat.”

Exactly, say the people of Twentynine Palms. And that’s the way they like it. Besides, as more small towns take out their paintbrushes, Briggs and Wiederhold have more important things to think about--such as saturation of the mural idea in nearby communities.

“How many mural cities can an area take?” asked worried Wiederhold. “I don’t know. My biggest fear would be to have Thousand Palms start a mural project.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Prosperity in a Paint Can

A growing number of California towns, hoping that art will help boost commerce, are decorating with murals to attract tourists. They take their cue from tiny Chemainus, British Columbia.

1. CHEMAINUS, British Columbia

Population: 3,900

Industry: Lumber

Murals: 32 and one to come

2. TWENTYNINE PALMS

Population: 14,850

Industry: Marine Corps Training Center

Murals: Four and 21 to come

3. LOMPOC

Population: 41,000

Industry: Agriculture, Vandenberg Air Force Base

Murals: 23

4. CAYUCOS

Population: 3,000

Industry: Tourism

Murals: 10