West Bridgewater mural is a blast from the past

WEST BRIDGEWATER, Mass. (AP) - Marilyn Monroe. Martin Luther King. The Beatles. Pasted on a basement wall in a West Bridgewater home is a massive mural created decades ago. It’s brimming with iconic photos from the 1960s and 1970s.

But the unique collage created to preserve the past may not survive the future.

“All of us in the family contributed to this,” said Mike Van Dyke, 70, who now lives in Milford. He and his four brothers grew up in the Cape-style home on Woodland Road in West Bridgewater that his father, Thurston Van Dyke, built in 1945.

“The photos on the walls are from the magazines that were popular in the ’60s,” Van Dyke said. Photos of Janice Joplin, Twiggy, The Doors and Charles de Gaulle are just some of the legendary figures on the wall that is roughly 18 feet long and 7 feet high. “My favorite photo is the one of Raquel Welch,” he said.

The images came out of Time, Life, National Geographic, Newsweek, Look and other popular magazines from that era.

But the house that Van Dyke grew up in is now being sold for a second time. And that means the mural will need to be moved if it is to survive. That’s a possibility via an agreement the Van Dyke family had struck with the people who now own the home.

“We are trying to decide what we want to do with it,” Van Dyke said. “If we do decide to take the mural, we will replace it with a plain wall.” He has contacted the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, but was told they receive hundreds of donation offers every month.

“I just love all those pictures,” said Patty Tripp, 46, who has spent many hours studying them.

One of Tripp’s favorite things about the collage are three pennies glued on it.

“You can see the dates on them. They are from 1965, 1966 and 1967, when me and my siblings were born.”

The house hasn’t been sold yet. But Tripp said one prospective couple loved the mural.

For now, Mike Van Dyke and the rest of his family are still trying to decide what to do with the unusual wall.

“My nieces and nephews all love it and they want to save it. We just don’t know where we’d put it,” he said. “Probably in my garage where it would stay until the end of time.”