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There’s a mountain lion atop the soft drink case,
a herd of bison trailing down toward the cash register. Over in the corner
the North West Mounted Police is leading a caravan of wagons into Fort
Walsh. When you dine in Jack’s Café, Eastend, Saskatchewan,
you don’t just sit in a booth. You inhabit a world of history created
by Angela Doulias.
Wherever you live on these Great Plains of North America, it’s likely
your community has some work of public art intended to present its history.
Many of these are official works commissioned by some public body to fill
prominent space. These tend to be sort of stuffy. Others are the individual
creations of inspired or eccentric individuals. These tend to be idiosyncratic,
to express an odd view of the world that flows from the mind of the individual.
Angela’s murals not only are visually striking, they also represent
something wonderful and almost unique. They are the product of individual
vision, with all the artistic power of individual inspiration. Angela
Doulias envisioned the world that sprawls the walls of the dining room
at Jack’s. Her vision, though, became a community vision, incorporating
a view of life given her by the people of the community.
Jack’s Café goes back to the 1910s, the earliest days of Eastend,
when Jack Shourounis, a Greek immigrant, opened his first business there.
In time he changed his name to Jack Carderas, but he was commonly known
as Jack West, because he kept moving west with the frontier of opportunity.
The business has operated in one form or another in its present location
and under Greek immigrant management since about 1920.
In 1953, when the author Wallace Stegner returned incognito to Eastend
to refresh his memories for the book, Wolf Willow, he began his walk about
the village here, at Jack’s.
In 1975 Angela came here from Greece as the teenage bride of George Doulias,
who had gone to the old country to fetch her. They established a reputation
at Jack’s for a fabulous café known across Canada for food
and hospitality and hands-on management. Here convene coffee klatches
of farmers and ranchers and Mounties, observing the tourist trickle lured
by the provincial dinosaur research station.
George is an enthusiastic hunter of, as Angela puts it, “anything
that is moving out there,” and until the early 1990s he had the dining
room filled with trophy heads. Angela was tired of this. She also realized
the décor was out of sync with the tastes of the new visitors to
town.
She had painted as a child. In 1994 she took a few lessons from a teacher
in Shaunavon to see if it was still in her. “I have this desire to
do a mural,” she recalls. “I have the picture in my head, but
I don’t know how to get it out of there.”
George just said, “Do something the people will like.”
Library research did not produce the story she needed. So she asked people
what to paint, asked them what their story was. Then, after closing at
night, Angela scrubbed the smoke from the old paint, primed the wall,
and painted acrylic story images. What talk there must have been over
morning coffee as each new scene appeared!
The scenes move through history from the northeast corner of the room
clockwise to the northwest corner. Natives drive bison over a buffalo
jump, and later pursue them horseback. Red-coated Mounties appear in the
southeast corner. Homesteads and village extend across the south, back
wall. Along the west wall tin lizzies give way to modern sedans, tractors
and blooded cattle appear. A modern, mechanized farm concludes the narrative,
with a great city rising in the distance. For the present, look out the
window.
Greece, Angela says, is her mother. Canada is her lover. “The mural,”
she says, “it was my present to the town. It was my way of giving
something back to Canada. It is a reminder we were here.”
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