SAN ANTONIO – After decades of towering over Loop 410 traffic on the Northwest side, the statue of an American Indian at Red McCombs Superior Hyundai will be coming down at the end of the month.
McCombs Enterprises Vice-President of Marketing Peter Brodnitz told KSAT via text message that “with the ongoing renovation and construction at Red McCombs Hyundai, it is time to move the historic statue elsewhere. We are still in the process of determining where that will be.”
The statue will come down on July 31, he said.
Though the longtime marketing gimmick will be missing from the roadside near Callaghan Road, it depends on whom you talk with on whether it will be missed.
Master Refinishers refurbished the statue in 2017. Workers say it came in with peeling paint and “well over” 100 holes from buckshot, bullets and arrows.
“They’d sit across the highway and fling arrows at it. Sometimes you would have 50 sticking out of it at a time. And then, you know, we found them all when we took it apart,” said Malcolm Dieckow, one of the refinishers who worked on the statue.
The statue had also had a controversial paint job at some point beforehand.
The red paint had faded under the sun into a pink color that Dieckow said made the statue look more like a white man.
After two months of work and what they say was a careful selection of paint colors, the statue was back up. Dieckow and Shop Manager Ernie Amador agree it still looks good.
Not everyone is a fan, though.
Ramon Vasquez, the executive director of the American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions, says his group approached the McCombs family several years ago when the statue was still in rough shape.
Vasquez said they asked about taking the statue down or at least changing it to look more like the indigenous people who lived in the San Antonio area. The statue, he believes, is an attempt to depict Chief Pontiac of the Ottawa tribe, who fought against British power in the Great Lakes region and was the namesake for the Pontiac car brand.
“We don’t have statues. We don’t have buildings, streets named after any of the American Indians that built the missions of San Antonio,” Vasquez said.
Although the statue stayed put at that time, Vasquez said he doesn’t harbor any bad feelings toward the McCombs family, whom he noted have American Indian relatives.
“It was a distraction,” he said. “You know, we can put it behind us. I mean, there are many, many more issues in San Antonio when it comes to American Indians that we need to deal with.”