The artist as a young man

He is depicted as a young man, picking at his shoe with an umbrella alongside his faithful dog, a German Shepherd named Odin, after the king of the Norse gods.

“You look at it and think you tend to be immortal in a sense," he says, "but realistically, you're not.”

He painted the mural, which is 23-feet-long, on the sheetrock walls of the city bar. It includes more than 200 faces of the characters who lived and played here; men with straw hats walk among vintage automobiles and horse-drawn carriages, and mingle with ladies in petticoats. A horse trailer ambles down the road. A clock tower and a widow's walk rise above the Victorian sloops of the old train station filled with long-ago characters who were known only by their nicknames: Smitty and Rock, Scooter and Skip, Donkey, and Sage, and Crazy George.

THE COMPLETE STORY