As 2025 concludes, it wraps up the 80th anniversary of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s passing. In recent memory, Roosevelt was the subject of mutual interest for President Donald J. Trump and New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani during their Nov. 21 Oval Office meeting, who took a picture together in front of Frank O. Salisbury’s oil painting of the country’s 32nd — and longest-serving — president.
Trump claimed to have found the portrait “in the vaults” and that it had been “missing for years.” However, the portrait was seemingly moved from its original location over the Oval Office’s fireplace, from when the painting had been installed during the redecoration for Oval Office after President Joe Biden had been sworn in. A convenient lapse in memory.
At Delta, it seems history repeats itself — for there is a diorite granite bust sculpted after Roosevelt on Delta’s campus that the collective news staff of the Collegian had forgotten about while pursuing the story at a source’s request.
“I think this is one of those cases where we walk by things every single day and we don’t realize that they’re there … I remember there was a head somewhere on campus … I remember the head specifically from an old Delta College video that the library posted … but I didn’t remember the fact that I walk by that statue quite a bit during my regular workday,” said Tara Cuslidge-Staiano, advisor of the Collegian. “I don’t think that things like that should fade into the background as easily, but I think that in the collective history of the 16 years I’ve been here … Maybe that’s why it fades into the background, ’cause there’s so much stuff that I see and do everyday that I’m just kind of like ‘oh, that was here at one point.'”
Located in the Goleman East lawn across from the Holt Center, the Roosevelt sculpture, titled “We Have Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” might be easy to miss by the wayside during the commute in, across and out of campus. Measuring 48 inches high by 30 inches wide and 22 inches deep, and sitting on a 40 inch diameter base, it is not the most physically imposing statue Delta has to offer.
Phoebe Mendiola, a first-year music major at Delta, frequently walks past the Goleman lawn, yet did not know of the sculpture’s existence until Collegian inquiry. Pricila Miranda, a Student Service Officer at Delta, passes by the Roosevelt sculpture daily without ever realizing it’s there.
“I’ve actually never noticed it though, passing by here,” Miranda said.
According to an art collection filed provided by the Horton Gallery, the Roosevelt sculpture was originally produced in 1957 by the late Switzerland-born artist, Edgar Paul Surdez, who later passed away the same year of the sculpture’s creation at age 55.
Edgar was survived by his wife, the late Ruth Surdez, who sold the sculpture to Delta in 1999 after a failed effort to raise $15,000. Previously, Ruth had produced the sculpture “Blythe Spirit,” which was acquired by Delta in 1990 and is located on campus near the Atherton Theater.
The costs for acquiring and transporting the Roosevelt sculpture to campus amounted to $10,000, with the sculpture costing $5,000 worth of District funds and the base costing $3859.80 in funds sourced from a special service contract between the District and Jesse Grijalva of Stockton. The later Dr. L.H. “Bernie” Horton, who served as president of Delta from 1987 to 1999, approved of the funding for both the sculpture and the base.
After the sculpture’s acquisition, it appeared to have been a point of attraction in the early 2000s. The sculpture featured prominently in a promotional video produced around the time by Delta’s Marketing and Communications department, then Public Information, which was later digitized and uploaded to YouTube at SJDC Library Videos.
The video is one in a series of videos titled “Delta College Presents: Impact.” Lena Zaghmouri, a Delta librarian who archived the videos, suspects that Collegian had been involved in their production. The Collegian was renamed Impact for a period of time from the 1980s until Fall 2007.
“To me, it seemed like it would be hand in hand with the newspaper. There wasn’t much information on that but I assumed, because they had the same name that they were connected — the TV show and the school newspaper,” Zaghmouri said.
During a section of the video titled “A Tribute to Delta College’s Employees, people can be seen gathered around the Roosevelt head and waving. The video also shows the Roosevelt head edited with text bubbles and a smile to chant “Hello Delta” to a parody of Alabama’s “40 Hour Week (For A Livin’),” which the video credits to “Part Time.”
