Wrangell lost more than a restaurant and bar when the Marine Bar and Hungry Beaver burned down on Sept. 15.

It lost an art gallery several feet above the tables, in the dozens of ceiling tiles painted by artists, most of which were created by Kitty Angerman.

“I guess their smiles were pretty much payment on a lot of them,” she said of the art she created of people, their boats, their favorite pastimes, even their dogs.

“My work was all on the adult side,” she said of her 2-by-4-foot painted tiles. “The side over by the pizza was for children and other people to do.”

Angerman said she painted her first panel in 1984 and can’t remember the last one.

Her first was for a man from Point Baker and the requests grew from there. Her work included George Larsen riding a halibut “like it was a surfboard on the high seas,” Wayne Larson’s Harley motorcycle — “that took up the whole tile” — and Bob Nore’s black lab Sheeba.

She painted “Keep on Trucking” for Union Oil, soaring eagles and people on their fishing boats.

There was a Lil’ Abner, leather and lace painting, and one for Troy Winchester titled “Summer Logger, Winter Logger.” The summer logger showed him in the woods, and the winter scene had him in the bar telling stories.

She painted one titled: “Fisherman by Day, Lover by Night and Drunkard by Choice.” And there was the poker game titled: “Someone’s Not Playing with a Full Deck.”

She certainly remembered the one she painted of Pixie Stevens and Patty (Dunbar) Kautz, playing basketball with NBA legend Dennis Rodman. It was titled: “Bad as We Want to Be.” The two women loved basketball and loved Rodman, Angerman said.

Another painting of Kautz showed her riding her favorite horse in Arizona, while casting a fishing line. 

Kautz owned the Marine for 41 years. She died in 2024.

One of Angerman’s pieces was in memory of Gary Stevens, with him in the clouds and keeping an eye on his boat and crew below. He died in 2017.

“It was always something tourists and locals appreciated,” looking up for their favorite tiles and taking pictures, said Rolland Wimberley, owner of the Marine Bar. 

He said the ceiling art was “classier” than people writing their names on dollar bills and pinning them to the wall.

Some of the panels took weeks to paint as Angerman researched to get all the details and personalities into her art.

“Lots of times I’d go to the bar and I’d drink a 7UP and I’d talk to people or let them talk. And they didn’t even know it, but I was secretly looking at how their faces were to get their personality into the picture. And then I’d come home and I’d paint it.”

If the ceiling tile was someone’s boat, she would go to the harbor and look over the boat from all sides to get it right, taking photos to help with her painting.

She would ask herself: “Which way should I put it? Going this way, going that way, put it in rough seas or should I have it in calm waters?”

She painted almost all of her work with acrylics. “And then when it was done, I would cover it with a poly spray covering.” Her intent was that the spray coating would allow people to gently wash the art.

“Some of them did get kind of dingy after a while. … I went by with a soapy rag myself.” She sometimes would clean the teeth to make them white, “like they were really smiling.”

Locals and visitors alike would come into the bar or restaurant and point and take photos of their favorites, she said.

“All of these were paintings to me, not just ceiling tiles,” Angerman said. “A lot of them … I chose to cut out plywood instead of using ceiling tile, thinking … it’s going to be a really nice and I want it to last for a long time in case they want to take it down, frame it, put it in their house.”

She didn’t charge a fee for her work. “I don’t have any prices or anything on any work that I do, but some people would give me a big chunk halibut … (or) invite me out to dinner or meet their family.”

She said she painted her last tile about three or four years ago.

“It’s just hard to imagine that they’re not still there.” Thinking back to her idea to use studier plywood instead of ceiling tile that could crumble, she commented: “I thought that that was going to make them last for a lot longer.”

In addition to Angerman, other Wrangell artists also contributed ceiling art to the gallery.

Kirk Garbisch, who was an art teacher at the schools for 30 years before he retired in 2012, said he did a couple of pieces.

Andrea Wilbon, daughter of Chuck and Yvonne Traylor, said her mother “painted several of the older panels and taught painting to many future panel painters.”

Her mom, who worked mostly in oil and acrylics, died in 1992. Wilborn moved to Wrangell in 1967, left in the 1970s and moved back in 2000, when she found one panel with her mom’s name still on the ceiling.

New ones would replace old panels, people would take them home or they would become too old and faded or stained, Wilbon said. “The smoke in there was horrendous all the time. The panels were porous and just soaked that stuff up.”

She moved to Arizona in 2022.

The Marine’s history extended beyond ceiling tiles. Tammy Davidson, who in 1980 bartended her first shift at the Marine at age 19, said her family, who owned the business before selling it to Kautz in 1984, all signed their names into concrete steps in front of the bar.

And Angerman, who did not return to the Marine until a couple weeks after the fire, saw that the carved cedar sign she had made for the pizza restaurant, Lodge of the Hungry Beaver, had survived in its location just inside the front door.

“I went, ‘Oh my God.’”