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(Courtesy of Nina Olsson)

Because he has a sense of history, and a passion for preservation,

was on the banks of the Clackamas River four years ago, a few miles upstream from Estacada, taking the measure of the North Fork fish ladder.

Because serendipity is still at play in the world, he was asked if he wanted to descend into the fish-viewing station.

The gray metal bunker, shuttered since Sept. 11, was none too inviting: sullen and dark, trimmed with barbed wire. When Kramer entered the cramped room, the pale green light seeping through the glass panels on the river illuminated cobwebs, puddles and abandoned junk.

The interior of the North Fork fish-viewing station, where the Alex Schomburg mural hung quietly for 47 years.

"Nothing special," Kramer said. Nothing out of the ordinary.

"Then I turned around.

My first reaction? 'Wow! What's that?'"

A 4-foot by 8-foot mural. A triptych, actually, illustrating the salmon and trout that navigate the river.

Visual aids aren't uncommon in the viewing areas, once all-star destinations for 5th-grade field trips. "Usually, it's just a bad photograph," Kramer said. But this? This was something else. Beneath the grime and the mud-wasp nests was an intriguing piece of history.

The artist's signature was parked at the bottom of the main panel. Kramer didn't recognize the name -- Alex Schomburg -- but he snapped a picture with his Casio point-and-shoot.

Then he filed it all away, in the mental folder Kramer maintains for mitigation projects. As part of its federal licensing agreement for the

, PGE must provide mitigation whenever new construction impacts the fish or the environment.

When PGE needed such a project to offset the new North Fork adult sorting facility in early 2011, Kramer remembered the mural. Why not restore the painting, he suggested, and set it on public display somewhere in Clackamas County?

PGE was game. That's when Kramer, who lives in Ashland, finally submitted Schomburg's name to Google. Within the hour, he'd fired off an email to PGE.

The subject line? "Are you sitting down?"

*



In the 1940s,

in the Golden Age of comics, best know for his iconic illustrations of

and the

. He also had a long and glorious career illustrating pulps, children's books and science-fiction magazines.

One of Alex Schomburg's memorable 1940s snapshots of Captain America.

By the 1960s, however, Schomburg had retired to the edge of the

, vanishing from the radar screen of those who cherished his hyperactive, visionary style.

"People thought Schomburg had died," he told me for a 1991

Northwest Magazine

cover story.

Work was often hard to come by. Schomburg drew architectural renderings and color-by-number sketches for the Venus pencil company. He painted real-estate signs and endpapers for the Winston juvenile science-fiction series.

And somewhere along the line, his work caught the eye of someone who thought a mural would light up the viewing station by the North Fork Dam fish ladder.

Schomburg painted "Principal Fishes of the Clackamas River" on plywood, though, painting conservator Nina Olsson notes, she wouldn't be surprised if the plywood is old-growth fir: "He was looking for something that would be relatively strong and durable in that environment."

The winter damp. The summer swelter.

Alex Schomburg used his Venus color pencils to strengthen the lines of the fish in the mural.

Schomburg applied those Venus pencils atop his oils to strength the lines. He used a compass -- the small pinholes are still visible -- to craft the perfect red circles that guide viewers to the side panels that describe the fish. In a gallant stab at preservation, he applied a final glaze.

And in 1963 -- according to a story in the PGE Bullseye, the employee newsletter -- the mural was set on the wall of the viewing station. Where it remained until Kramer stumbled into that locked room in 2010, a dozen years after Schomburg died.

"Whoever painted it knew what he was doing," Kramer said. "I was surprised it was there. I was surprised it was

still

there."

Enshrined, Olsson adds, "in the opposite of museum conditions. It lived its 50-year life in a crazy place."

*



The restoration effort was launched last January, and it began by moving the mural, and the 40-inch by 48-inch side panels, into Olsson's Portland garage.

"Wood remains very sensitive to humidity," Olsson said. "It needed a transitional location, with a dehumidifier, so the wood would dry out slowly rather than quickly. Otherwise it would have provoked a rapid contraction of the wood fibers."

Time was especially cruel to the fish in the triptych's side panels.

After three months, Olsson set to work on the conservation effort, cleaning off the grime, the mud-wasp nests and a half century of insect excrement. The photographs in the side panels were especially compromised, she said: "Old gelatin prints stuck to the inside of the glass. Those required quite a bit of time.

"I thought of it as not only an interesting piece of artwork, but an historical artifact. I wanted to conserve every part of it, including the defects and signs of age."

While Olsson completed the restoration, Kramer sought a new house for the mural, unaware, obviously, that my bedroom wall was available.

He was turned down, surprisingly, by several public locations in Estacada

But Roxandra Pennington at

in Oregon City stepped up, and the mural -- which will be available for public viewing on Feb. 1 -- is now showcased in a second-floor gallery near the window that overlooks Willamette Falls.

Kramer remains curious as the original connection between Schomburg and PGE. He's been told the Schomburgs once had a woodland cabin adjacent to Duke Wieden's,

, but that's only conjecture.

"If PGE reaiized in 1963 who they had commissioned, other than a guy who could paint, that information was lost," Kramer said. "No one I talked to knew anything other than it was the mural in the fish ladder."

Which is why both Kramer and I appreciate PGE's commitment to the mural and the serendipity in its survival.

"Not only were they clever enough to ask Schomburg to paint the mural to begin with, and then take reasonably good care of it for 50 years," Kramer said, "but when the mural no longer functioned in its original location, they stepped up to the plate, restored it and put it where people could see it again."

-- Steve Duin