Newsgathering

Suzanne Scheuer; assisted by Hebe Daum

While the San Francisco Chronicle complained bitterly that it was left out of "City Scenes" by Arnautoff, a few feet away they have an entire mural. Suzanne Scheuer's work depicts the "story of a story" and how it makes its way from writer to editor to composing room to press and finally, the street. It also is presented in an unusual flow that begins with a man providing a "tip" to an editor at lower right and flows counterclockwise to the newsboy at lower left. At the top of the frame, working on a "case" of type, is a cigar-chewing Diego Rivera. The gun-slit window is used ingeniously here, to show the four-color printing process that produces the Sunday comics (in this case, Frank Willard's popular strip "Moon Mullins"). The newsboy himself is of some note - he is Peter Stackpole (June 15, 1913-May 11, 1997), son of Ralph Stackpole, whose mural is on the next wall (and who appears seemingly perpetually in the Coit Tower murals in his trademark plaid shirt). In 1930, Peter had appeared, as a somewhat younger boy holding a toy airplane, in Rivera's "Allegory of California" at the Stock Exchange Tower. Peter Stackpole became a well-known and respected photographer whose shots of the Bay Bridge under construction are as admired as are his 26 celebrity covers for Life magazine, for which he was one of the four original photographers. (He also married Scheuer's assistant, Hebe Daum (1912-1993), in Oakland on July 17, 1937).