Boulder Dam to Vermont

Fitted like a giant picture puzzle, the world's largest photomural was pasted last week on the east wall of the vast, high-vaulted rotunda of Manhattan's Grand Central Station. When the crew of workmen climbed down from their gargantuan paperhanging job, Grand Central's milling crowds saw a 96-by-118-foot symbolic picture of three things the U.S. is fighting for: the fertile U.S. land, the productiveness of U.S. industry, the future welfare of U.S. children. Its purpose: to encourage travelers and commuters* to buy more U.S. defense bonds and stamps.

To build Grand Central's record-breaking photomural the Treasury Department turned to Washington's Farm Security Administration, whose energetic photography head, onetime Economics Instructor Roy Stryker, has spent eight years getting every aspect of U.S. rural life photographed for FSA's mountainous camera files. Department Chief Stryker and his assistants looked at 15,000 prints before they found the perfect 20. Then they took a face from one photograph, a sky or a piece of building from another, joined them together like pieces of a mosaic, and enlarged the results until they were several times life size. The photographs came from U.S. scenes as far apart as Boulder Dam and Vermont. The battleship at the top came from the picture files of LIFE; airplanes came from the Paramount picture I Wanted Wings. The California farm worker at left glances back at a caterpillar tractor from Washington which has just passed over a Montana wheat field nestling at the foot of Glacier National Park's Going to the Sun Mountain. The mother in central panel is an Idaho farmer's wife. The sky above her is from Montana. The moppets below are migrants in a California camp.

To design, enlarge and print their photomural, the FSA photographic unit took three months. California moppets were so greatly enlarged that the iris of a single child's eye is now larger than the original photograph of the entire group.

* New York Central officials estimate that in one year the mural will be seen some 240 million times.

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