World War II battle mural hidden for decades in Oak Harbor
Feb 16, 2022, 9:15 AM | Updated: 11:01 am
More than 60 years ago, a business owner on Whidbey Island took extraordinary steps to save a one-of-a-kind artifact from World War II. Now, his granddaughter is working to preserve the artifact and make it more accessible, and perhaps even visible.
Sarah Schacht owns and manages a small complex of commercial properties in Oak Harbor that she calls the “Allgire Project,” after her grandparents John and Myrtle Allgire. Schacht lives in Seattle, but she grew up in Oak Harbor, and her roots there run deep.
“I started as a third-generation building owner,” Schacht told KIRO Newsradio, describing steps she’s taken to put her mark on the family business. “We’ve created the largest collection of murals between the two buildings in Washington state. … The idea was to create a space where small businesses thrive, and we have outdoor events and are drawing more people into downtown Oak Harbor, which their small business community was struggling even before the pandemic.”
Oak Harbor, Schacht says, doesn’t always get the same amount of love – along with the Whidbey Island tourist visits to its charming waterfront and tourist purchases of goods and services – that nearby Coupeville and, farther south, Langley often get. She’s working to change that for her own benefit, for her tenants, and for the greater Oak Harbor community, too. That’s why she’s commissioned contemporary artists to create so many outdoor murals.
As it turns out, murals on Schacht’s property are nothing new.
One of the retail storefront buildings comprising Schacht’s Allgire Project is currently vacant. It dates back to 1905, and Schacht says it previously housed one of the first auto shops on Whidbey Island. In 1942, not long after the U.S. Navy first established Naval Air Station Whidbey nearby, the old auto shop building became a USO Club, a place for sailors to relax and socialize.
Sometime in 1944, one of the sailors from the Navy base – a 19-year-old radio operator from Swanton, Ohio, named Frank D. Griffin – painted a dramatic aerial and naval battle scene on the concrete back wall of the club.
“There’s a historic World War II mural depicting the U.S. Navy based out of NAS Whidbey downing Nazi planes and Nazi subs [in what] looks like around the Puget Sound,” Schacht told KIRO Newsradio as she stood near the building’s back wall. “There are mountains and water, and smoking and sinking Nazi subs, and it’s a pretty vibrant mural.”
The only thing is, Sarah Schacht has never actually seen the mural, and it’s not clear if anyone still alive has, either. All Schacht has is an old photograph from a nearly 80-year-old newspaper clipping.
“My grandfather put this drywall up,” Schacht said, pointing to the rear of a back hallway. “I think [it was] gapped, to protect the mural from getting scraped up as this building transitioned from a USO Club to a series of retail spaces.”
Schacht believes her grandfather John Allgire intentionally built the wall in front of the mural about 60 years ago when he converted the building into a clothing store run by his wife Myrtle Allgire called The Casual House, and created a back hallway in what had been a large open space. The Casual House was one of those one-off local apparel retailers that nearly every community had in the age before malls and big box stores. What’s remarkable is that The Casual House is still in operation – just a few doors down from its original location in a larger building; some years ago, the Allgires sold the business to a longtime employee.
Sarah Schact says that the hidden mural wasn’t exactly a secret; John Allgire taped an old newspaper clipping of the mural – with that sole photo of it – along with a note alerting anyone who read it about what was behind the drywall.
“My grandfather, when he was still alive about 10 years ago, made sure that there was a printed copy of the mural taped to the wall,” Schacht said. “And around the printed copy it said, ‘Do not destroy wall, historic mural behind.’ And so there are all these notes that my grandparents left all over the buildings for me and my mom.”
That same image of the mural and artist is also featured on a page from the Sept. 15, 1944, edition of “Prop Wash,” the newsletter at NAS Whidbey – helpfully unearthed late Tuesday night by a good friend of Seattle’s Morning News — the ace researcher Lee Corbin.
“Swift bold lines, done in brilliant color, highlight the original action mural just completed by Frank D. Griffin, ARM3/c [Aviation Radioman, Petty Officer, Third Class], of NAS Whidbey, shown above,” reads the brief story under the photo. “The picture, eight by fourteen feet, tells the story of three Corsair Navy Fighters downing a Heinkel Bomber, while in the sea below two PT boats roar in to finish off an enemy submarine.”
Why a Nazi bomber and submarine would be depicted on a mural at a USO Club near the Pacific Ocean and Japan – and not Japanese aircraft or vessels – is, perhaps, a bit of a mystery, and will likely remain so, because artist Frank Griffin passed away in 2015. What’s not a mystery is why the mural – and the old USO Club – mean something to Sarah Schacht.
“Probably a better piece of information related to the mural is that at the USO Club on Valentine’s Day in 1943 [my grandfather] met my grandmother at a dance in this building,” Schacht said. “He proposed three months later, … they spent 67 years together, starting their business in this building. So I’m sure he had knowledge and appreciation and a sense of the significance of the mural.”
John Allgire was originally a “poor farm kid from Brawley, California,” says granddaughter Sarah Schacht. He had joined the Navy in the 1930s and eventually became Chief Commissary Steward at NAS Whidbey; Myrtle Peterson grew up in Bow in Skagit County, and was a civilian Purchase Clerk in the Supply Department there, after first having worked at the Naval Air Station at Sandpoint in Seattle. The two married in 1944.
It’s unclear if John and Myrtle danced to it the night they met, but the number one song that week of February 1943 – exactly 79 years ago – was “I Had The Craziest Dream,” by the Harry James Orchestra and singer Helen Forrest, from the hit 1942 movie, “Springtime in the Rockies.”
Sarah’s grandparents passed away more than a decade ago, and she lost her mother recently, too. So, she says, it’s up to her to address some long-standing maintenance issues with the old family building – which means it’s a good time to think about the future of the mural, too.
“I know that I have to remodel this back part of the building to make sure that the heavy rains we get every year aren’t causing a problem,” Schacht said. “I cannot keep mopping up water every winter. So, sometime in the next year, I’ve got to pop the end of this building off and put a fresh one on.”
As far as revealing and then preserving the mural, Sarah Schacht is looking for any help she can get – from art historians, engineers, from someone with access to technology that would allow a peek inside the wall, and from public agencies or private funders that might help support the preservation work.
The remodeling “is the ideal time to explore what state the mural is in, and how we could preserve it and maybe even move it,” Schacht said, “because I’ve heard from engineers that I could remove this wall and still have a structurally sound building. If I need to make those repairs and improvements to the building, now would be the time.”
The mural is clearly important to Sarah Schacht. Her grandparents loom large in the approach she’s taken to managing her properties, her interest in boosting Oak Harbor, and helping strengthen the local community. Though they’ve been gone for many years now, Schacht says John and Myrtle Allgire made a long-lasting and positive impact in Oak Harbor for decades.
For Sarah Schacht, the mural and the work to preserve it is about more than just sentimentality or family history.
“It’s such an interesting piece of Pacific Northwest and World War II history,” Schacht said. “And it also has this this resonance right now, in our world, where I think folks are thinking about the fight between democracy and freedom [versus] authoritarianism.”
“It’s useful to be reminded of what our grandparents’ or great grandparents’ generation literally were inspired by,” she added.
Standing in front of that wall her grandfather built decades ago, Schacht promises this is not an “Al Capone’s vault” situation. She’d be grateful, she says, to hear from anyone willing to help figure out how best to proceed with an effort to preserve and honor the history behind the drywall, and can be reached via her website.
One more thing that Lee Corbin discovered late Tuesday are more stories and photos from 1944 issues of “Prop Wash” that show a second mural, and perhaps a third, on display in the old Oak Harbor USO Club, and refer to a “series” of paintings there. Maybe that explains the Nazis depicted in Frank Griffin’s mural – if it was one of many battle images in the old club.
This new information is a lot to process for Sarah Schacht.
“What. This is wild,” she wrote in an email late Tuesday.
And who knows what else might turn up behind walls built decades ago by Schacht’s grandfather?
Better cue up Harry James and Helen Forrest.
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