(rshsdepot) Omaha, NE

["Bernie Wagenblast" <brwagenblast_@_comcast.net>]

From the Omaha World-Herald.

Original article and photos at:
http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_page=1219&u_sid=10533930

Bernie Wagenblast

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Under the grime lies a past as Union Station

BY JOHN PITCHER
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

As Deborah Uhl draws her handheld vacuum cleaner across canvas, she is
opening a window to the past.

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." 

. Contact the writer: 444-1076, john.pitcher_@_owh.com 

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