Students and faculty may not have known it, but as he stood gallantly in front of the Duke Chapel last spring, James B. Duke was in grave danger.
"He had started corroding from the inside out," said Mercene Karkadoulias, whose company-Karkadoulias Bronze Art, Inc. of Cincinnati, Ohio-was commissioned to restore the statue of James B. Duke that stands in front of the Chapel.
Shipped from campus at the end of last May, the statue of the University founder finally finished a nearly four-month journey-during which it was cleaned, recolored and refinished-this week.
"It was a strange day when I came to work one day and found the pedestal empty; no one had told me they were taking him away to be cleaned," President Richard Brodhead said as he opened the statue's rededication ceremony Thursday evening.
Incorporated into the Founders' Day festivities, the ceremony was attended by a group of students and faculty, who listened to brief speeches by Brodhead and Chair of the Duke Endowment Russell Robinson.
The ceremony ended as the cord on a veil covering the statue was pulled by Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans, great niece of James B. Duke. Her mother, Mary Duke Biddle, unveiled the statue in 1935.
There was a slight difficulty removing the blue veil, as it got stuck on James B. Duke's newly-restored head-but the cloth eventually came off after a slightly tense minute.
When Karkadoulias received the statue last May for the approximately $14,000 restoration project, she said it was in poor condition. In previous years, the original bronze had turned green.
"We look at each statue independently; we look for missing parts, foundry defects, and how it was cast," said Karkadoulias of her craft.
She noted that Duke previously hired a company to restore the statue to its natural color. But something went wrong.
"They got someone-I don't know who-he just coated it with some black substance," Karkadoulias said. "It was horrible; he didn't take the corrosion off and sealed it in from the outside, accelerating the deterioration."
For months, Karkadoulias worked with her daughter Kathy Ann Axiotes to slowly skim off the layers of metal and corrosion that was on top of the original bronze.
When they finished the removal, a Duke administrator told the company to make the statue a darker color than the golden-brown bronze of the original.
"It's like when you go to the doctor and they assess you, your treatment has to be your own," said Axiotes, commenting on the specifications of each restoration job.
After they had cleaned and tinted the statue, the restorers applied a protective coating that keeps it safe from damage because of the elements.
"It never has to come down from that pedestal again, if it is properly maintained," Karkadoulias said.
But even if standing on campus, upkeep of the statue still requires that the protective coating be applied every 15 years.
After the ceremony Thursday, students and faculty milled around a nearby tent and mused over the return of the cane-bearing, cigar-smoking founder.
"He looks nice and clean," sophomore Katie Brehm said.
The statue was cast 70 years ago by Charles Keck, the same sculptor who crafted the three sarcophagi of James, Benjamin and Washington Duke. The three tombs are located inside the Chapel.
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