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Little did anyone suspect that that wouldn't happen for nearly 20 years. "That shed was part of the scene for as long as I can remember," says Jim Keenan, 60, whose father worked at the college and who remembers playing next to it as a child. Keenan is now the college's buildings and grounds superintendent. "We used to throw baseballs against it. There was never any thought about what might be inside."
If not for Timothy Pflueger's architect brother, Milton, who in 1957 was commissioned to design the City College performing arts theater, the mural might have never seen the light of day. That December, a month after Rivera's death, Milton Pflueger presented the Board of Education, which governed the college, with a bold idea to rescue the mural from the shed. He sought permission to reconfigure the theater lobby, making it a few feet taller, wider, and deeper to accommodate the artwork. It wasn't an easy sell.
A conservative board member railed against Rivera as a communist. A spokeswoman for the teachers' union warned of the mural's bad influence on impressionable young minds. But calmer heads prevailed after board President Bert Levit suggested that if all artwork was judged by the artist's political and moral standards, the nation's galleries might be empty.
Although there were news stories in 1961 when the mural was unveiled in its new home, the buzz from the "rediscovery" of one of Rivera's monumental works didn't last long. Emmy Lou Packard was brought in to repair the ax damage of two decades earlier. (In one of her letters, she notes with pleasure inviting Mona Hofmann, another of Rivera's assistants on murals in San Francisco and at the Detroit Art Institute, to view the restoration; Hofmann was unable to determine that the panel had been damaged.)
Packard, a noted painter whose credits include the student union parapet at UC Berkeley, went on a campaign to promote the mural, with little success. She wanted a tour bus company to include the mural as a regular stop, but it wasn't interested. Having weathered McCarthy-era opposition to providing the mural a home, college officials also weren't keen on promoting it.
Despite a flurry of publicity about the mural's installation, before long remarkably few people seemed aware of its existence. Even Bertram Wolfe, Rivera's biographer, didn't know where it was. In 1962, while preparing to update Rivera: His Life and Times, Wolfe wrote to Milton Pflueger for help in finding the mural. "[It] was supposed to be put up in some building at San Francisco State College," he stated, erroneously. "Has that been done?"
Of all the people who've rooted for the mural to emerge from obscurity, Donald Kairns may have the most personal motive. The son of the late Emmy Lou Packard, Kairns, 68, a retired insurance broker from Philadelphia, is the last known living person among the many real people whose portraits Rivera included in Pan American Unity. He was 5 at the time.
Kairns occupies a prominent spot in a middle panel, kneeling at the foot of a ceiba tree, the Mayan Tree of Life. "I remember hating the fact that I had to wear shorts that day," he says. To his left a few feet away is one of several Rivera self-portraits in the mural. He is holding Paulette Goddard's hand. Near them stands Frida Kahlo, depicted in traditional native dress and wearing handmade earrings that were a gift from Pablo Picasso. To the right of Kairns is Timothy Pflueger. In his hands are the plans for the library that he would never build.
Although her interest in the mural never waned, Packard, who died in a San Francisco nursing home in 1998 when she was 84, never talked much with her son about the work or Rivera later in life, he says. But letters she left behind are insightful of the special relationship she shared with both Rivera and Kahlo, with whom she lived for a year after the couple returned to Mexico from the fair. "I am so happy he is near you," Kahlo wrote to her from New York in October 1940, not long before coming to San Francisco to marry Rivera for a second time. "I can't tell you how much I love you for being so good to him and being so kind to me."
Bari Miller, 56, of Santa Cruz, is someone else for whom the mural holds great personal interest. Her mother is depicted on each side of the piece as a swimsuited diver, Rivera's way of harmonizing time and space. Helen Crlenkovich, a national diving champion in 1939, went on to be a dive double for Esther Williams in the movies before dying tragically of cancer at age 34 in 1955. "Klinky," as she was known, was 19 and in training for the (later canceled) 1940 Olympics when Timothy Pflueger introduced her to Rivera at the Fairmont Hotel's pool, where she trained.
Miller lost track of the mural until three years ago when her daughter ran across a college Web site devoted to it. "I'd remembered my grandmother showing me pictures of it in Life magazine when I was a kid," says Miller, whose father, the late stuntman Robert Morgan, married actress Yvonne DeCarlo after her mother died.
She's made the pilgrimage to see the mural twice since then.
The last time, with her husband, she encountered a class researching the artwork. "This one student was having trouble making up her mind which figure [from the mural] to focus on for a presentation, and a docent says, 'Why don't you pick the diver?'" recalls Miller. "It was a wonderful little moment. I spoke up and said, 'I think I could help you with that.'"
