History Adventuring

As I was exploring the wonderful Duke University site, I found a great photo of downtown Los Angeles. I was able to identify the location because of the Monarch Hotel, which used to be there, on Bunker Hill. You're looking northwest on 5th Street towards Flower, and of course Figueroa. If your eye is caught by the gigantic ad for Ginger Ale, that makes sense. It must have cost the Canada Dry people a lot of money, and since the Duke site is dedicated to advertising, that's why the image is there. But I see so much more. Let's take a look. This is a Los Angeles that has been completely erased. Yes, 5th Street and Flower are still there, but other than the street names, or the GPS position, it might as well be an entirely different city. I'm going to place this in the 1930s, based on the cars. If you see a car from the 1940s, please let me know and I'll update my file name. The intersection directly ahead of us is Flower. Take a closer look right where the sign says ...

It's August 19th, 2020, and I just got home from pedaling around Peoria, which is a suburb of Phoenix. The whole world is living through an interesting time, and as I recall that's a famous curse. And speaking for myself, it feels as if the whole world is holding its breath, and waiting. Ride along with me. Got your bicycle helmet? Your sunscreen? Your bottle of water? Your hand sanitizer? Your eye protection? Your mask? Good, then let's go. I stumble out every morning and travel north by northwest. Since it's morning I like to have my back to the sun, and generally speaking in the Phoenix area, the sun is to the south. So the ride out is more enjoyable than the ride back, especially as the temperature goes from the high eighties to the 100s within the first couple hours of the day. I've been pedaling around this area for several years now, and I gotta tell ya, it's quiet. The side streets in the Phoenix area have always been quiet, but since about April sometim...

Actually, I don't remember the exact day that I came home to Phoenix. It was 1989, and it must have been July or August because it was ridiculously hot. I had been living in California for many years and I had forgotten that the temperature can be in the nineties, in the middle of the night. Now hold on there, I grew up in Minneapolis, and moved to Phoenix when I was 19, so "coming home" should have been Minneapolis, right? But Phoenix was, and is, my home, and in this post I'll see if I can explain my feelings. I moved to Phoenix when I was 19, in 1977, and after seven years finished my four-year degree at ASU, and then decided to move to The Big City. To me, there are only two Big Cities in the United States, New York and Los Angeles (sorry, Chicago!), and since I was in Phoenix, and had no intention of ever seeing snow and cold again, I moved to California. I was thirty-one, and working at a great corporate job in LA, when one day my entire department was laid off....

When I first started teaching, back in the '90s, I was surprised at how precious little people knew of stuff that I had known for a long time, and had taken for granted, like creating a layer mask in Photoshop, or even working with simple vectors in Adobe Illustrator. I very quickly adapted, and it was a good early lesson for me in empathy. These people weren't "stupid", they just didn't know about certain things. Unfortunately, a lot of people never develop this empathy, even teachers, and they can be just awful. I learned empathy, which I call "seeing through other people's eyes", and although I taught all levels of classes, I especially liked teaching beginning classes. They were actually much more difficult than the advanced classes, you had to start with stuff that experienced people just take for granted, like explaining what a layer is, and how to use a mask, or what vectors are. So, if your first reaction is to wonder "Who is stupid enou...

Although I've never been a truck-driving man, I have tremendous respect for people who manage to operate these gigantic machines, squeezing them through lanes, backing up to loading docks, that sort of thing. I've always driven little tiny vehicles, and the thought of managing something as big as even a pickup truck just boggles my mind. Of course nowadays driving a big truck is as easy as flying a 747. That is, you need expertise, and all of that, but you don't need muscle, which is what you needed to drive the truck at the top of this post. I'm no expert on trucks, but I gotta tell ya, I know that this truck didn't have power steering, or power brakes, or even an automatic transmission. I drove an old van that a friend lent to me back in the 1980s, and it didn't have any of those things, and even as a strong and healthy man I found it to be quite a workout!  The more I look at the pic, the more respect I have for the people who drove them. I can't imagine ...

As someone who has always loved the latest technology, and was always interested in things like that,  even when I was young, from pocket calculators to computers, I know that it often surprises people that I like old photos of Phoenix, and Los Angeles. And when I try to explain that I'm not pining away for "the good old days", that I'm time-traveling, I often get blank looks. I'm interested in everything that's thoroughly modern, like the traffic light there on the corner of 1st Avenue and Adams in the 1920s. I'll see if I can explain. As I drift into my senior years now, I hear more and more of my contemporaries say that they just don't trust the new technology. I might suggest the benefits of getting a Smart Phone, or maybe a website that they may like, most often they rear like a startled mustang. They say things like, "I don't trust the new technology! What if..." and they list a bunch of perfectly valid reasons for not using the lat...

I will turn 80 in Phoenix. No, not real soon, but someday. Well, in Glendale, which is a suburb of Phoenix. It's my greatest wish to live there until my time is done, which as far as I can tell, will be a long time from now! I will turn ninety, and chances are very good that I'll make it to 100, and maybe to 110! So naturally this morning I got to thinking about what it meant to turn eighty in old-time Phoenix. Since we can time-travel, let's go back to old-time Phoenix, and turn eighty. My first thought, of course, is Sun City, which really isn't Phoenix, but it's in the Phoenix metropolitan area. It's January 1st, 1960, and in order to live in this retirement community, we need to be fifty. OK, time to do some math. If we're 50 in 1960, we were born in 1910, right? And growing up in those days we would have seen some people turn 80 (mostly women), but not nearly as many as there would be in the future. But make no mistake, people did live 80+ years back in...

If you're puzzled as to whether Arizona has traditionally been conservative, or liberal, or Republican or Democrat, you might be surprised to know that it's really been all of those things, combined together, it's been Progressive. Times change, of course, as do what is considered a popular thing to say, and you really don't hear much about the Progressive Movement. But there was a time when it was so popular that it not only was on the logo of the biggest bank in Arizona, it was on the masthead of the newspaper. "Progressing with Arizona". Once you understand Progressivism, you get a clearer understanding of what happened to Phoenix, and why it grew so fast, and continues to do so. And there are elements of conservatism there, and also liberalism. So, Republican or Democrat, it really didn't matter. It was all about moving forward. Progressivism is what inspired Dwight Heard, who owned the Phoenix newspaper, then called the "Republican",  to agi...

The city of Los Angeles is much older than most people realize. It actually goes back to when California was owned by Spain, even before it was owned by Mexico, and certainly a lot longer ago than when it became part of the United States. But you don't really need to be a history expert to know that Los Angeles, like all big cities, relies on water. It was, of course, along the LA River (you know, that big concrete-lined thing that you see people in movies ride motorcycles on). Of course, even then it was just a wash, so a reservoir was built in 1907 to retain water. But the city was growing, and needed more water, and this is where so many people get confused. And it's because of a movie from the 1970s. Don't get me wrong, I love the movie "Chinatown", and have watched it many times. It's a fictionalized story of how William Mulholland (called "Mulray" in the movie) brought water in to Los Angeles from miles away. And yes, there really was a City of...

If you're not familiar with the term "gray market", it could be that you've never been involved with it. Or it could be that you're so involved with it that you don't even realize that it exists. And it's always been around, and always will be. Let's go back to Phoenix in 1989, when I was happy to be able to use the gray market! OK, calm down here if you think that the "gray market" has anything to do with retirees in Sun City, that's not what it means. It's a comparison to the black market, which is the buying and selling of illegal stuff. The "gray" means that it's not really that horrible, it's just not quite as squeaky-clean as, say, buying something for full price at a store with a return policy. Speaking for myself, I was happy to be involved in the gray market up through my late twenties. Times were tough for me, and if you buy things from, for example, the back of a van, with no guarantees, you can get a very...

When I decided to move back to Los Angeles in 1987, after spending several years in a "dead-end job" in Santa Barbara, I decided on the San Fernando Valley. You know, where the "Valley Girls" lived, and shopped at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, and the Good Girls who lived in Reseda were, that Tom Petty sang about. But I couldn't afford those nice areas, I moved without a job, just up and left. I knew that sending resumes from 60 miles away would be the best way for them to get thrown in the trash and I knew that I had to be there, and that's how I ended up in Canoga Park. If you know the greater Los Angeles area, especially the Valley, you probably cringed at the mention of Canoga Park. And you may be wondering if it was nicer way back in 1987? No, it wasn't. In fact in many ways it was worse than it is now. The only advantage to it was that it was the cheapest rent I could find and still be near places like Woodland Hills, Thousand Oaks, Encino, etc. My pl...

Let's go for a ride in 1942 on Wilshire Boulevard towards Beverly Hills. I found this photo at the Duke University site, in their collection of outdoor advertising (yes, billboards, people study them as part of the history of advertising) and it caught my eye because I like old photos of Los Angeles. Specifically, we're rolling down the hill on Wilshire just east of Beverly Glen looking towards Devon. The trees there are the ones at the Los Angeles Country Club. It's not quite Beverly Hills yet, it's what the real estate people would call "Beverly Hills adjacent". I'm not sure what the city limits of Beverly Hills was in 1942, but it still doesn't go quite that far east. But don't get me wrong, it's an expensive chunk of real estate! When I started researching this, which was labelled as "Dec. 3, 1942. Location: Wilshire & Devon NE, Los Angeles", I jumped onto Google Street View to see what I could see. It's definitely the hil...

I found this photo recently on the Duke University site, and since I have an interest in old photos of Los Angeles, I decided that it would be fun to do some detective work and find out exactly where, and when, it was taken. The Duke site has wonderful high-definition images of advertising, especially billboards, which is why this photo was taken, and why its archived. But my interest isn't the billboard, it's the location, and the year. And on this one, the nice people at Duke transcribed what was written on the back of the original photo, which was: "Dec. 3, 1942. Foster & Kleiser Co. Los Angeles Branch Location: Olympic & 3rd Ave NE, Los Angeles". Now I tend to be suspicious of things like this, because I've seen a lot of things mislabelled, especially on the internet, but I'm tending to believe this one. The first thing I did was to jump on Google Street view to see if the curve in the road matched up, and it did. None of the buildings are still th...

Something that I've always enjoyed doing is identifying the exact locations of old photos, especially of Los Angeles. Sometimes it's impossible, sometimes it's not easy, and sometimes it's ridiculously easy. This was an easy one - the street signs are clearly visible. I found this photo on the Duke University website which is dedicated to advertising. The reason that this photo was taken, and the reason that it was archived by a University is because of the billboard. And that's fine, but for me, what interests me most is that it's a slice of life of Los Angeles in the 1940s. I've been looking at this old photo for a long time, and comparing it to Google Street View, and am wondering if any of those old buildings are still there, especially the Two Harry's Club? If you know, please let me know. I'm trying to read what it says there: Two Harrys Club, Hammond Electric [Organ?], Old [song?] and Specials? Anyway, you can see the word Cocktails over the d...