Presentation by Andy Tuetken.
2:00 pm, Sunday, April 21, Blackstone Valley Historical Society, 1873 Old Louisquisset Pike, Lincoln, RI .
Andy Tuetken, author of the Murals of McCoy will give a presentation on the murals and his book on Sunday, April 21 at BVHS.
Andy Tuetken loved to attend games in McCoy Stadium when he was growing up, and part of the experience was seeing the murals of famous baseball players on the walls of the stadium. The 95 murals of McCoy featured players who played in the PawSox, and made it to major league baseball, like Carlton Fisk, Jim Rice, and Wade Boggs.
The murals were commissioned in 1977 by Ben Mondor, the former owner of the Pawtucket Red Sox. Former RISD student Carol “Teyo” Heuser painted the original murals directly on the concourse walls. They were replaced by 4-foot by 8-foot hand-painted murals in 1990. The murals were removed in 1999 during renovations to the stadium, but were eventually put back at popular request with 45 digital replicas. An additional 41 digital photographs were added to the concourse walls. Many of these were taken by Pawtucket Red Sox team photographer Louriann Mardo-Zayat. The total would eventually grow to 95 murals. .
When it was announced that the Pawtucket Red Sox were officially moving, Tuetken wanted to know what was going to happen to the murals when the stadium closed. He began researching the murals and the Sox, and after nearly three years of work, wrote the Murals of McCoy with the assistance of Carolyn Couto, who designed this beautiful coffee table book.
Some of the murals were recently auctioned off. See this Valley Breeze article by Ethan Shorey.
Tuetken, a lifelong Pawtucket Red Sox fan and public school history teacher, also sees the book as a way to give back to the City of Pawtucket for all it has done for the baseball community in the state of Rhode Island. All profits from the book are donated to Pawtucket Youth baseball.