Mural Article Makes Family Connection- Endnotes Spring 2021
By Tom Reigstad
In December 2020, I received a surprise e-mail from Kathy de Witt, a photographer in Wales, United Kingdom. She was excited to have discovered my Western New York Heritage story, “The Buffalo Courier-Express Mural: A 90-Year Journey,” in the summer 2020 issue. According to family lore, her father, Avery, had posed for the mural artists as a 20-year-old in 1930. “He is the man wearing the sailor hat standing reading the newspaper,” Kathy said.
The hat is actually a traditional pressman’s paper hat. And, yes, Avery DeWitt’s likeness appears as the figure representing a newspaper pressman reading the Buffalo Courier-Express, standing next to a crowned queen who symbolizes Buffalo as the Queen City of the Lakes. She rests her hand on the pressman’s shoulder.
In subsequent e-mail exchanges continuing into 2021, Kathy de Witt provided clippings and information about her father, who came of age in Buffalo but eventually moved to Ft. Erie, Ontario, where he raised his family and worked as an export manager for Fleet Aircraft.
Avery DeWitt, who was used as the model for the pressman figure in the mural.
Credit: From the Muncie Star Press, October 30, 1931
Avery Franz De Witt, an only child, moved to Buffalo from Rochester as a child. He grew up on Buffalo’s West Side, living with his parents in a flat on Herkimer St., then in homes at 350 Hampshire St. and 447 Richmond Avenue. He attended Lafayette High School. “He loved it there,” Kathy said. At the time that artists Charles Bigelow and Ernest Davenport asked him to pose for the mural that was installed in the Buffalo Courier-Express lobby, De Witt was 20 and had recently enlisted in the New York National Guard. He was fluent in 25 languages, “a self-taught polyglot” who served as an interpreter for the U.S. Immigration Department and continued to study languages his entire life. He died in 1993, in his early 80s.
Over the years, the de Witt family had been under the impression that the mural was in the lobby of a Buffalo bank. That part of the story was partly correct—it was painted in a vacant downtown Buffalo bank early in 1930 because Bigelow and Davenport needed a large space to create their massive 20-by 10.5-foot canvas. So, Avery de Witt posed at a former bank site, but the mural was mounted in the Courier-Express lobby later in 1930 for the grand opening of the new building at Main and Goodell, where it greeted employees and visitors for well over 50 years.
As for how Avery DeWitt was selected to model, his daughter Kathy has “a feeling that he was simply approached on the street for his good looks.”
