Notes for Ina about Ann’s prep for the Oregon Trail Mural
Written by Bruce Murray June 2025

Ann’s mural focus began with a tragedy. On the Ides of March (15 March) 1984, she was driving home at night from a drawing class. A car made a left turn right in front of her and she smashed it. She was hardly injured so she got out of the car to check the others. What she didn’t realize was that the crash severed the wire of our car battery, so now there were no lights on our black car. Another car came zooming up the highway and didn’t see the crash until too late. This second car crashed into Ann’s car.
Ann was standing on the other side of the car when it hit. She went flying about 10 meters, barely going over some metal fencing and landing a couple of feet short of a pond at the bottom of a hill. I got a phone call and immediately drove to the hospital. Her right leg was broken in a few places and she had certainly suffered a concussion, but amazingly, that was the extent of her injuries! She was in a cast for the next several months, performing motherly duties for her children, aged 11, 9, 5 and 4.

During her recovery, she told me, “I dunno what this means, but I wanna start working ‘big,’ and not just painting on little canvases.” We took our first no-kids trip to San Francisco. An art studio had works with holograms. We’d never seen these before and they we very cool. A few months later, Ann received a settlement from the other driver’s insurance company. She decided to open an art shop in Eugene to feature her work and some holograms. This is where she met your dear Bob Joll.

The shop just wasn’t working so she closed it several months later. Meanwhile, her art work was focusing more on physics and that kind of stuff. She did, however, continue to tell me about wanting to ‘work big’ in her paintings.

To this point, Ann never liked talking to people about how she was planning her painting designs. While she was okay with having people look at her half-done paintings, Ann never liked having people watch her paint. These were very busy times for me, too. Besides raising the kids and coaching their sports teams, I was now managing an entire company. Long hours, lots of responsibilities, and blah, blah, blah. I can’t justify it, just gotta admit: Ann was very competent with her work and I loved it. 

If she wanted to talk about it, I’m in. But I wasn’t going to be too prying or inquisitive. I don’t know how it happened but around 1989 she was hired to design, build and paint stage sets for theater and ballet productions. She liked working on the big sets and then, in 1991, she was hired to work on a film. 

David Twohy had been a successful screenwriter whose first directing job was “Grand Tour.” She liked working with Jeff Daniels, Ariana Richards, and her boss, Ken Wheatley. It was a funny set. Shelton-McMurphey House was an iconic figure in Eugene. The city had just refurbished the rundown place when it was chosen as the primary scene of the movie. Ann’s job was to re-establish its worn-out, trashy appearance. After the movie, of course, she had to then restore its ‘oh boy, all fixed up and looking great’ condition. A year or so after its release “Grand Tour” was renamed “Disaster In Time.”