Mayor Mike Foreman is no stranger to ribbon-cutting events in Friendswood and the mural unveiling on April 1st was fairly routine, apart from the fact that it was 1100 miles away from home in Wadsworth, Ohio.
Commissioned by Main Street Wadsworth and painted by artist Tim Carmany, the mural features the Friendswood Mayor on a spacewalk in orbit around Earth. Foreman grew up in Wadsworth before leaving to attend the Naval Academy in 1975. Eventually his career brought him to Friendswood where he trained to become an astronaut, but he still has family and fond memories in Wadsworth.
The Main Street Wadsworth Art Mural Subcommittee oversees all downtown mural projects. Committee Chair Randy Toddy said, “The Art Mural Project is a continuing effort to highlight Wadsworth’s history through artistic interpretations of our past and present.” The event also featured NASA Glenn Research Center’s Chief of Communications, David DeFelice who spoke on behalf of the space agency.
You don’t have to look far to see some parallels between Wadsworth and Friendswood. Located just north of Wadsworth is the Glenn Research Center which hosts roughly 3,000 NASA employees and contractors. Johnson Space Center, by comparison, hosts a workforce of about 14,000. Both suburban cities are home to less than 50,000 people with Wadsworth sitting at around 28,000 and Friendswood tipping the scale at roughly 40,000.
The most striking similarity between the two cities, however, is the shared interest in public art and the organizations that fund them. Both Wadsworth and Friendswood have invested in downtown murals in recent years. And in both cases, the initiative came from a non-profit lead by volunteers. Like Main Street Wadsworth, the Friends of Downtown Friendswood Association (FDFA) is a non-profit that was formed for the purpose of breathing new life into the city’s main street. The two Friendswood murals on either side of HomeTown Center were commissioned and funded by FDFA.
Perhaps these grassroots efforts of economic revitalization are becoming increasingly common across the country. Or perhaps the two cities have much more in common than the man Friendswood has come to know as Mayor Mike.
