Post Office Mural – Lake Worth FL

Description

The “Settler Fighting Alligator in Rowboat” mural was installed at the Lake Worth Post Office Mural. According to the Palm Beach Post:
“It was painted by Tampa artist Joseph D. Myers under a different program that the Federal Works Agency’s Public Buildings Administration commissioned in 1941. Artists submitted designs anonymously to an advisory panel, comprising a University of Florida architecture teacher and two Florida mural artists. The panel selected Tampa artist Joseph D. Myers, giving him a first prize of $1,000.
According to materials supplied by Myers’ family, Myers and the federal bureaucrat in charge of the program squabbled for months over the design, with the administrator calling a revised sketch ‘disappointing’ and complaining, among other things, that ‘the dog is in no way convincing.’ Myers replied that ‘to question the ability of any artist to get two pair of feet and a hound dog into a rowboat is a little short of insulting.’

Final display of the mural was delayed some six years by condensation problems, and Myers got his commission just in time to pay for his son Dan’s birth in April 1947. Joseph Myers went on to establish a stained-glass art studio in Tampa and did windows at numerous buildings across Florida. He died at 76 in 1989.”