<Begin Segment 19>

KL: I wondered what... this may be an obvious answer since you're so involved with the film museum, but do you have a particularly deep connection with any of the historic sites here? Do you feel like there's one that speaks to you more strongly than the others?

KP: You mean in the...

KL: In the Owens Valley.

KP: Oh, in the Owens Valley?

KL: Just more broadly. I don't know if you've involved in the Eastern California Museum or anything.

KP: I have been involved with the Eastern California Museum off and on over the years. I worked there for a little while as a, just helping in there. I don't know, it's hard for me to get away from Mt. Whitney because I'm an artist and that's what I think of a lot.

KL: You said there was an art group that was involved in the film festival. Do they have a name?

KP: It was the Southern Inyo Artisans Guild at the time.

KL: Tell us about your work with the murals. How did that get started?

KP: Well, because I'm interested in painting, I had a friend in Anaheim, had a restaurant, and he was doing a Western restaurant, a spaghetti house in Anaheim. And he wanted a mural of Sitting Bull eating spaghetti, and I offered to do it for him. So that got me started, I did this four foot by ten foot mural of Sitting Bull, standing up, eating a plate of spaghetti of all things. [Laughs] That got me started on murals. And then when we, Dave and I put a little mural in the Chamber of Commerce section there, which used to be a motel, you knew that?

KL: I didn't.

KP: Across from Joseph's, that little enclave in there with all the little rooms. It was a motel.

KL: I wish it still was, it would be perfect.

KP: It was kind of the original motel in Lone Pine, yeah, before the Dow (Hotel/Motel) went in even. But we put a mural in there about where the movies were and with the plaques and all that, so that was kind of the second one that I did. I cut out the outline of the mountains and the hills, painted that, it's about fourteen feet long by three feet night. And then I got into helping with the mural on the Film History Museum on the outside, I helped (John) design that and pick out which pictures we wanted in it. And that was the... oh boy, you're gonna ask me his name. [Laughs] John Knowlton, John Knowlton. He designed that and painted most, he painted the beginning of it and the mountains and the end of it, and different artists did the other sections. I did the part with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, which is about four feet by six feet, so that was pretty big. We painted those down at (Art and) Jackie Hickman's workshop, we actually painted them in the workshop in the building in the back there (at Boulder Creek RV Resort).

KL: Where is that?

KP: At Boulder Creek (south of Lone Pine). And then Marlene came along, Marlene Chernick came along, and she wanted to do a mural on the El Dorado bank, and she and Margaret Warner wanted to know if I could design something to go on there. They didn't really ask anybody else, and I had the idea to make the mural look like a bunch of postcards thrown out on a table to do the story of the Wedding of the Waters on the bank. So I painted the stagecoach section of that, where the stagecoach goes to the train. And we did those on metal panels also. The mural on the Film History Museum is also on metal panels which we did somewhere else and then brought in and installed, which is the same idea.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.