DeGrazia's 'Power of the Press' mural lives on in hearts of many alums

Bottles of paint, turpentine and tequila surround an artist lying on his back atop scaffolding.

It is spring of 1944 and American GIs are overseas fighting the axis powers.

The artist strokes his brush on a wall about two stories tall and 15 feet wide until a mural begins to emerge.

Night after night, the painter pieces together his puzzle.

The colors are dark, as are the images. Skeletons, mortarboards, books and the apocalypse fill the cinder block canvas.

The mural: "Power of the Press."

The artist: Ted DeGrazia.

Then Ettore "Ted" DeGrazia painted the 14-by-35-foot impressionistic mural in the office of the Arizona Wildcat as a masters student at the University of Arizona, studying the relation of color and sound.

The Wildcat editor and chief in 1944, Lou Witzeman, hired DeGrazia for the project in exchange for the cost of supplies to paint.

DeGrazia was free to express himself on the south wall of the Wildcat, then in the bowels of a utility building north of Old Main.

Witzeman recalls checking on DeGrazia's work late at night and finding him busily painting and surrounded by brushes, paint trays and several bottles including one of tequila.

Skulls topped with mortarboards peer at an open hand holding the flame of knowledge reaching out of a pile of books.

The skulls represent people searching for knowledge.

A figure-half machine, half skeleton-resides atop the four horses of the apocalypse, trampling over the mask of happiness. The mask of tragedy remains untouched.

The figure holds the world in its right hand; from its shoulder hangs a long sheet simply titled "News."

In the far-left corner stand six skeletons donning graduation robes.

Witzeman did not have permission from the school for the mural, but he liked DeGrazia's work and asked the struggling painter to do the mural.

"I was the one that caught the main hell," Witzeman says. He says he and DeGrazia were rebellious individuals who made a point of going against the grain.

He was reprimanded by school officials for the mural's content and not getting authorization from the school for the project.

"It wasn't really 'Power of the Press'," Witzeman says. "It was a personal statement of what he thought of education."

Ron Butler, a friend of DeGrazia, says DeGrazia criticized the influence of businesses on education. He believed that the university was becoming too political, too corporate and too greedy.

DeGrazia thought business interests controlled the education system, not by educators.

Although DeGrazia earned three degrees from the University over 13 years, his widow Marion says he was resentful of higher education.

She says he wanted to sell the degrees back to the university because he did not need them and only got them because it seemed like the right thing to do.

"You don't become an artist by going to school," DeGrazia was quoted in Son of Lightening, a book his widow wrote. "You become an artist because when you begin to work it is between you and your maker."

In the mural, starving professors hang by their necks from the fingertips of a skeletal hand as the four horsemen gallop over snakes slithering through books.

"He was very pessimistic," Witzeman says. "It was a very dismal picture."

Butler said the arts department did not accept DeGrazia until after he was famous.

"They all thought he was some old bum," Butler says.

DeGrazia dressed like a "hillbilly," Witzeman and Butler recalled.

His clothes were a mixture of cowboy and urban. Witzeman says he looked like a pachuco, a predecessor to modern cholos or gang members.

Baggy clothes adorned his body; cowboy hats and boots were fixtures on his head and feet.

"He came from a little mining town," DeGrazia's widow says. "All raw materials, none of this fancy stuff."

DeGrazia was born in the town of Morenci, Ariz. He was 16 when he went to the first grade and graduated from high school seven years later.

In 1967, the university honored DeGrazia with an achievement award.

He wore a graduation gown, but went sans mortarboard. Instead he wore a battered cowboy hat and battered boots.

"I greatly appreciate an award but I don't deserve one," DeGrazia once said. "I am no better than the pick and shovel man; he works hard at what he does as I do."

Today both the mural and DeGrazia are gone.

The juxtaposition of skeletons, books, tortured souls and mortarboards has disappeared.

"That summer while the rest of us were in blissful ignorance," Witzeman says, "someone came in with 5 gallons of white-wash and covered it up. It was terrible."

The only remnants of the infamous Wildcat mural are pictures owned by his widow and the memories of a few.