EDITORIAL: Worthy project just waiting for creator

Coeur d’Alene and statues go together.

Not always calmly or quietly.

Remember back in 2011, when a city-sponsored statue downtown of Hindu god Ganesh brought seemingly equal measures of bravos and brimstone from the public?

How about the 2019 firestorm over Marker #11 in Riverstone, another publicly funded project that led not just to controversy but death threats to Coeur d’Alene Arts Commission members? The piece contained a symbol of communism which went unnoticed for some time — but then the red roof caved in.

Marker #11 was eventually replaced, thanks to the Pinkerton family, by a 10-foot high, 1,800-pound bronze statue of a grizzly bear. That inspirational piece is called “Unconquered.”

Among the statues near the banks of Lake Coeur d’Alene are The Suffragist, The Valentines, Acrobat Kids, Gaia, The Working Man, The Miner and more. But it is one statue you don’t see that’s the subject of this editorial.

In case you missed it, Press columnist Dave Oliveria highlighted last Sunday the abandoned project to honor the late, great Fred Murphy with a statue. 

A beloved tugboat captain chronicled by Tom Emerson in the book “Fred Murphy: A Legend of Coeur d’Alene Lake,” Murphy died in 1986. A fundraising drive to create a statue was launched. Unlike Murphy’s tugboats, though, it went nowhere.

Three years after Murphy’s death, a North Idaho College art instructor crafted a 2-foot model of Fred at the wheel of his tugboat and said the full 8 ½-foot high statue could be done in a year.

But it’s been 35 years and, as Oliveria notes, “Crickets.”

“The absence of a statue honoring Fred Murphy is a glaring oversight," Oliveria writes.

“Murphy represents a bygone era when an armada of boats transported men to and from Silver Valley mines, tugged logs to waterfront mills and transported sightseers around the lake. In his own right, he built docks, drove pilings, rescued boaters, pulled vehicles from the lake, doused fires and assisted with hydroplane races and the Fourth of July fireworks.”

And Oliveria concludes with this: “It’s time to find it and finish the job.”

Arts Commission, a home run launched across the lake is just waiting to be hit.