History Adventuring

Let's go to LA in the 1940s, and stand on the corner of Western Avenue and Venice Boulevard in the 1940s. I found this photo at the Duke University site, which is wonderful, and is all about advertising, but my interest isn't so much what's on the billboard, it's what's in the background. I, and a friend of mine, just love to do the kind of detective work to figure exactly where, and when a particular photo is. This one is so easy that I could do it myself, because you can actually see the street signs. That's not always the case in old photos, and sometimes the street signs are too blurry to read. But this is crystal clear. And as for the date, it's gotta be between 1942 and 1945, because the billboard is advertising Defense Bonds and Stamps. These photos, by the way, were taken simply to give photographic evidence that a particular billboard, that was being paid for, was actually there. A photographer would be given the assignment, and it saved the adverti...

If you've ever driven from Hollywood to the Valley, you've gone through the Cahuenga Pass. Of course, if you're like most people you took the 101, which is the Hollywood Freeway, and never really give a thought to the fact that you're actually going through a mountain pass. And that's a good thing, because you really should be paying attention to your driving, not looking at the scenery. When I lived there, in the 1980s, I would often wonder what Los Angeles was like "back in the day". I would often take Cahuenga, which runs parallel to the Hollywood Freeway, and noodle through, looking at the scenery. It's really not that difficult to do that on surface streets, the going is very slow, and you have to stop at red lights. And from what I've read about Los Angeles in the 1940s, the traffic was already jammed, and the going was miserably slow. Everyone was looking forward to the freeways, which meant smooth flowing traffic, no cross-traffic, no stop ...

When I first started writing in this blog, my intention was to explore history before I was born, and that's what I usually do here. But as the years have gone by I've found that my own life seems to cover the type of history that many people don't know about, so today we're going back to 1973, when I was fifteen years old. I was watching a video this morning of a comedian talking about how much his son knew at 15, which was everything. And, as someone who is no longer fifteen, I know that that level of confidence peaks at 18, and then tends to fall off quickly, as you find out that the world is a much more complicated place than you ever imagined. I grew up with three brothers, and we were all monkey boys. My dad hung ropes, and swings, and just about anything that a group of orangutans would want, in the backyard. At fifteen I had just started on the gymnastics team, which my brother got me on, even though I was still a year away from high school. I guess they weren...

I found this picture on the Duke University site, which is a collection of advertising, and especially billboards, and thought that it would be fairly easy to identify the location, but it wasn't. Sure, I found the address for the Barker Hotel, which is 2000 Miramar Street, but I could tell by looking at the pic that this street was much too big to be Miramar, so I set it aside, and asked a friend of mine, who is an awesome detective on this kind of stuff, to help out. He found a matchbook on eBay, and the mystery was solved. You're looking west-northwest on 3rd Street, which is where the entrance to the Barker Hotel was, in spite of its having an address on Miramar. I suppose Miramar sounded better, but 3rd Street was, and is, a major street in downtown LA. Here's the sign for the entrance. I love those old LA street lights! Can't see the hotel in the photo, it's either just beyond the frame, or behind those houses. Hey, let's go to the c...

I found the picture at the top of this post on the Duke University website. It's a collection of advertising, specifically billboards, so I find it fun to just page through the images and look at the locations. The billboard, obviously, is for War Bonds, and the year would be during World War II, between 1942 and 1945. I showed this to a friend of mine to figure out the exact location, which he did. There are a lot of Los Angeles images on the Duke site, and my best guess is that this was LA. It was. It is indeed Figueroa and 2nd Street, looking northeast towards 1st Street. That bridge is still there, although everything else has changed. To be fair to Duke University, the image did have a description: On back: "Dec. 3, 1942. Location: Figrueroa & W. 2nd St., Los Angeles", but I've become skeptical about that kind of stuff over the years (this one is correct, in spite of the misspelling, but I've often seen things on the internet that aren't even c...

One thing that everyone has always said about Phoenix, and has always been true, is how crowded it got over the years. And the crowding brought along a lot of confusing rules and regulations, which must have been frustrating for people who really never saw any reason for it. And as someone who's lived in crowded cities, like Los Angeles, it's been difficult for me to be sympathetic to people who can't seem to understand what seems to be basic rules of living in a crowded city. That is, until very recently. I grew up in a very congested and crowded neighborhood in Minneapolis, with such tiny streets that you really had to watch very carefully what you were doing. If you just stopped on, for example, Bloomington Avenue, there would be no way for anyone to get around you, it was a two-way street, with traffic that was always coming the other way, and there were big snowbanks (most of the time) on the other side of the street. Oh, yeah, and there were always lots of comp...

If you've ever wondered why I invest so much time in this history adventuring stuff that I do, I have to admit that I wonder, too. There are of course people who imagine that I'm doing it to get rich, or famous, and I guess I understand. I'm an old Marketing guy, and I've always been suspicious of things that, for whatever reason, don't seem to have an obvious motivation, like money, power, or prestige. And I'll admit that it's hard to tell sincerity from chicanery on the internet, and the internet is a place that I've spent a lot of time on in the past twenty years. I was designing web pages by about the turn of the century (2001), and I learned all of the things that needed to be done for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). I never went in for dirty tricks, I was what was known as a "White Hat", and I would just plain get the word out, creating content, sharing on social media. I think you can officially say that I started doing this in ...

It's July of 2020, during the COVID-19 Pandemic (which means Coronavirus Disease 2019, when it was discovered, and a pandemic is a worldwide epidemic). As of this writing, there is no vaccine, and people all over the world, including in Arizona, are being asked to do social distancing, and wear face coverings in public in order to slow the spread. As a retired person, who mostly worked from home before that anyway (doing computer graphics), it really hasn't impacted my life severely. I have found the lack of traffic in the past few months has made my pedaling around easier, and since I don't have any difficulty following basic directions, I've not had any problem getting the necessities of life, like bananas, or dog food. The sign in the pic up there is from the Walmart Neighborhood Market on Thunderbird and 75th Avenue, and, speaking for myself, I've found following their rules to be simple. I have a nice cloth mask that the Woman in My Life gave me, and wh...

According to this ad in the Phoenix newspaper in 1900, Coffee Al's was the oldest restaurant in the city. At that point it had been for nine years, which meant that it started in 1891, twenty-one years after the city of Phoenix was created. And my only question to that is "why did it take so long?" I have several cups of coffee every morning. When I wake up, before I feed the dogs, I make a cup. Then I go out for my morning coffee (usually a senior coffee at McDonald's). And I will often make myself another cup of coffee when I get back home, an hour or so later. I like coffee. And as a corporate guy back when I worked for Valley Bank/Bank One I would get up from my desk several times a day to go get coffee in the break room. I've always given myself a 3pm curfew on caffeine, but up to that time it doesn't bother my nighttime sleep patterns. And besides, it has helped me to socialize with people, which has been good for my career, and my life. But tod...

As someone who has a fascination with old expressions, I was thinking recently about the lyric from the 1964 Beach Boys song "I Get Around", which is a wonderful and cheerful tune, and includes the words: "I'm makin' real good bread." And it occurred to me that it probably makes no sense to people who weren't alive back then. I was, but just barely, and the term "bread" for money continued in common use, as I recall, through the 1970s. I wouldn't want to try to use it today! Even the old-timers would probably wonder what I was talking about, because nowadays bread means, well, bread. You know, the stuff you get a bakery, and make sandwiches out of. When Brian Wilson and Mike Love wrote those lyrics, making good money, bread was a modern version of an older term for money, which was "dough". My casual research shows that using the word dough for money goes back at least until the 1940s. You can hear Ichabod Slipp asking La...

It's July 12th as I write this, and I can feel the monsoons gathering. If you're new to the Phoenix area, this may seem puzzling, this humidity, and then the thunderstorms that follow, but if you're an old-timer, like me, you know that it's just what the Sonoran Desert does, every summer. When it rains, it pours. And as near as I can tell, it's been doing that for the past ten thousand years (when the last Ice Age ended, and this area became a desert). Of course, I'm not quite old enough to remember the last Ice Age, but back then this area was considerably cooler. And the more I think about it, the more I would guess that it rained a lot back then, too. But probably a more consistent rain, spread out over the year, not the gully-washers of the past 10,000 years. I was out pedaling around Peoria (a suburb of Phoenix) this morning, and while there's no rain in the forecast, I could feel the monsoons gathering. Phoenix usually has a dry heat, but it get...

Every morning I either walk, or pedal to get my morning coffee, usually at McDonald's, sometimes at Burger King, and even at Jack in the Box. I don't care for the taste of Starbucks (sorry) so I pass them by. And this morning my mind was dwelling on coffee, and its price. As a senior citizen, I get a discount, and it's always under a dollar, which seems like a very reasonable price to me for a cup of coffee. Of course, you may be paying four dollars or more for a cup of coffee, which means that for both of us the phrase "That, and a nickel, will get you a cup of coffee!" is puzzling. What it really means is that whatever is referred to, whether an idea, or whatever, is absolutely worthless. And the reason is that coffee was a nickel for a very long time. Let's time-travel back to the 1940s and go to the Colonial Coffee Shop, which was at 37 E. Monroe in Phoenix. Sit down and let's have some coffee. How much? A nickel, of course! Prices had gone up sin...

Everyone loves getting a bargain, and I'm no exception. I got a senior coffee discount this morning at Jack in the Box, and it makes me happy. You do have to ask for it, because it wouldn't be very polite for some teenager at the counter to just judge you as being old enough, and besides, when I was a teenager, old people all looked the same to me, from 50 to 100. You gotta be at least 55 to get the discount. I've been over 55 for quite some time now, and all I gotta do is to remember to ask for the discount. Ah, and there's the rub - getting this bargain requires something that I've never been very good at - memory. Nowadays with a thousand things on my mind, like wondering if I've fed the dogs, or have turned out the porch light, it's easy for me to forget. And then I wouldn't get the bargain price. I would say that I've never been very good at getting bargains, and poor memory is part of it, but definitely my biggest drawback is lack of the...

I've had the same bank account now for thirty years, beginning with Valley National Bank, where I started working in 1990. VNB was bought out by Bank One in 1992, but nothing much changed other than the name, and I spent most of my professional career with them, up until 1996. When I moved on to greener pastures that year, I kept the account, both because it just made sense, and also because I had, and still have, a genuine affection for that bank, which is now Chase. The names have changed, but the branches are all still in the same place, and I know where they are. My mortgage on the house I'm in was also with Valley Bank, then moved to Bank One, then Chase. I signed up for automatic payment when I got the loan, and if I hadn't refinanced, the loan would be paid off by now. As it is, I guess I just gotta go on living, and Chase will automatically debit the amount at the first of every month. I will have spent thirty years here in 2023. I know a lot of people who...

As I was watching a movie recently that had been filmed in the 1940s, I heard someone's uncle being described as an "old skinflint". I looked up where the word supposedly originated, but I'm not convinced, but suffice to say that it's been around for a long time, although you really don't hear it much. It means an old person who is very cheap, very miserly, refuses to spend money. Speaking for myself, I wouldn't consider myself an old skinflint, not that I don't have the grey hair for it, but mostly because a true skinflint has plenty of money and is just too cheap to part with it. When he does have to spend money, it's a painful thing. The old skinflints that I've known in my life tend to use graphic terms when they've had to spend money, some of which has made me wonder if it really hurts them that much? Seems a shame. Spending money can be wonderful, especially if you're buying some ice cream! I posted that pic up there of old...

Yesterday I decided, on impulse, to post a photo of my MG Midget in 1978 on a Facebook group page called "Arizona Memories". And it is a fond memory of mine, as I had just driven it there the year before, from Minneapolis, where I grew up, and I was totally amazed by Phoenix. The Facebook comments were wonderful, and cheerful, with only a few people actually touching on the fact that the car was so unreliable. I was twenty years old when I took this pic, and as I recall the unreliability of the car was a source of constant worry for me. It would break down for no apparent reason, and in those days I didn't have Triple A, and I was all alone in Phoenix. So while I enjoyed driving it, I was always glad to get home safely. I wrecked it the next year, and since it's been gone for so long it's become a pleasant memory for me. But the reality is that it really was a piece of junk. I bought it in Minneapolis, when the car was eleven years old, and the bottom sheet...

One of the things that I love is reading documents from the period, especially in my favorite city, Phoenix, Arizona. And by that I mean newspapers, periodicals, even ads that were created at the particular time that I'm interested in. Before the internet, I would page through old Yellow Pages at the Burton Barr, and now I spend a lot of time looking at newspapers at the Library of Congress website. But I gotta warn ya, sometimes it's just awful. Times have changed, and what might have been acceptable, both in language and behavior "back in the day" are things that nowadays are unacceptable, if not unthinkable. So if you look at original documents, be prepared for some harsh stuff, especially on the subject of race. I've found a lot of original documents online, and I look through them on my computer the same way that I used to look at old magazines, slowly going page by page, stopping to read something, making a mental note to go back to learn more,...

As the city of Phoenix began to ease the quarantine restrictions on the flu epidemic of 1918 (which killed about 500 million people worldwide), the process began to convince as many people as possible to take the vaccine. And like convincing people to wear masks, that wasn't going to be easy. Unlike the vaccine for typhoid, the flu vaccine wasn't mandatory, but it struck a lot of people as a good idea. Of course there were concerns, as there should always be in situations like this, and misconceptions that had to be overcome. The vaccination station was conveniently located at 134 N. Central, and it looks like they were having some difficulty convincing enough people to get vaccinated. Here's a link to the Library of Congress page if you want to read the entire article:  https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/data/batches/az_jojoba_ver01/data/sn84020558/00202195507/1918112501/0301.pdf If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please consider subscribing to...

I remember hearing the comedian Chris Rock say several years ago, "Whatever happened to crazy?" And as he and I fall into roughly the same age category (old), he was talking about how the word crazy was used to describe people who were, well, crazy. Of course that's not a very nice word to use, and I can't imagine that it ever was, even in old-time Phoenix. Nowadays it's more polite to use a more clinical term like "mentally challenged". I may cheerfully call my friends crazy, but I'd never it to describe someone who was walking along the street, shouting, and randomly running out in front of cars. So I think that I can answer Chris Rock's question - crazy has never left, it's always been around, and as long as there are people with brains that, ahem, go off the rails sometimes, it always will be around. As someone who genuinely enjoys people with quirky personalities, I believe in wide range of interpretation. As a creative person mys...

I remember back when I was a kid reading about why newspapers only seem to focus on bad news, not good news. The example, as I recall, was a big headline that said, "Man drives safely to work, then safely home, and has a good dinner!" or something like that. And since so much good news happens all of the time, it really would be ridiculous to try to report on it. I might say something like that I haven't tripped over my wiener dogs, and that my air conditioning is working just fine. I might also say that I don't have COVID-19, because I'm writing this in Arizona in July of 2020. And yes, I do write good news, on my Facebook page, every day. It's just the kind of nonsense that people like me like to hear, that life goes on, that friends and family are doing well. I've done this kind of thing for years, and I know that it genuinely puzzles people. I once posted a link to an Internet Movie Database (IMDB) for a friend of mine who had just visited, who was ...