History Adventuring

I've been to a lot of car shows in a longish life, and I go to them as often as possible. I live in Arizona, and I've been to the Barrett-Jackson, and the Gooding, among others that I can't remember the names of right now. I have friends who restore classic cars, and they've been inviting me along for years. To them, it's serious business, with a lot of money moving around, but to me it's just fun, looking at stuff. I rarely went to into the auctions, which were just too noisy and complicated for me. You had to listen to auctioneers, and there would be numbers up on a big screen, and you had to follow along. At least that's what I tried to do, but mostly I just wanted to go wander around and look at the cars. This usually happened in January, but I go to car shows all of the time. Where I go there are no velvet ropes, no people trying to sell stuff, just cars, all wonderful and shiny. In other words, I just look at the cars around me. Any given parking lot i...

This wonderful photo, which is from the Duke University site, has amazed me for a long time now. It's bursting with detail, and of course I wanted to know exactly where it was, and when the photo was taken. Luckily, my top history adventurer was up for the challenge, and determined that it's Atlanta, Georgia, specifically looking north on Marietta Street and Peachtree, in 1929. I'll show you some of the stuff he did to do the detective work on this. First of all, even a poor history detective like me can read a street sign. Peachtree is a very famous street, and as soon as I started Googling it, I had a suspicion that this could be Atlanta. But a good detective is always cautious, and there's more evidence, a lot more. Take a look at this 1911 Sanborn map of Atlanta, Georgia. These were insurance fire maps, and their detail is astonishing. This is Five Points. But wait, it gets better. Getting the exact date took some research, and some math. The J.M. High Company was p...

Since I love living in the West, make no mistake, I love the West of the Imagination. It's thrilling, but I also like the Real West, which isn't quite so exciting, but I find very comforting. Some people, I know, consider it dull and boring, and maybe it is. So if you can't get all excited about the Real West, I understand, I'll let it go. Of course, in the West of the Imagination, everything is larger than life, including the Western heros, who have to be at least seven feet tall. The women are incredibly beautiful, with eyes that flash, and bosoms that heave, and even the dogs are so wonderful that there's no chance that any kid would fall down a well without being rescued immediately. And I love the West of the Imagination! I can't tell you how many times I've seen "Shane", and I've seen enough Sunday Matinee movies to know that the U.S. Cavalry always arrives right in the nick of time. But for me, I also find comfort in the Real West. I enj...

As much as I've always enjoyed reading about crime, going back to the days when I read Batman Comics, I never really wanted to be around it IRL (In Real Life). I found a nice place to live, in a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona called Glendale. And since I love to pedal around, I got to thinking about what it would be like to live with criminals in old-time Phoenix. Of course, there are criminals in my quiet little suburban neighborhood, let's be clear on that. They're petty ones, the kind that steal bicycles, or cars, so it's wise to lock them up, but it's not like the neighborhood where I lived back in my twenties in California which had the almost continuous noise of sirens, and things that may, or may not have been, backfires from cars. I lived in an apartment complex with some pretty tough hombres back then, and while they may not have described themselves as criminals, or bad guys, they always ducked when the LAPD went by, that sort of thing. When I look at old phot...

Time-travel with me and let's go look at a wonderful car show of 1922 cars. Actually, it's just a bunch of cars parked by the Sea-View Restaurant in Asbury, New Jersey, but it's exactly what I see whenever I go to a car show. I've always loved going to car shows, and I've been to a lot of them, including the Barrett-Jackson here in Arizona. I have friends who collect classic cars, and they've often been kind enough to invite me along. And while they're buying or selling, I've always loved to just wander around, looking at the cars. And if I'm lucky, there comes a wonderful magical moment when I'm transformed in time. That happens when I'm standing next to a car that looks brand new, from long, long ago. And that's why an image like this is so fascinating to me. No, I'm not a collector, and no, I'm not interested in buying one of the cars. Luckily, people must recognize that I have shallow pockets when I'm wandering around look...

The Duke University site has a lot of great old photos, especially of Asbury Park, New Jersey, which is where this one was taken, which caught my eye because of the beautiful detail. The more I zoomed into it, the more interesting it became, and I even found out a little bit about the Kelly Springfield Tires spokeswoman around 1920, called Lotta Miles. I had never even heard of her, and at first I thought that she was a celebrity endorsement, until I realized that the name was just "lot of miles" for a tire company. Still, I found it interesting, as apparently there was a real person behind the fictional name - several of them in fact, which you could see advertising tires from the turn of the century until the 1940s. If you're a Lotta Miles history expert, please tell me more about her! Since this photo didn't have an exact date, I looked around on the internet and found this image, so I've labeled my file as 1920. It could be a little earlier, or a little later,...

It's Tuesday, February 2021, and as usual there are a lot of people preparing for the collapse of civilization. Some of them are my friends, some are just fellow-travelers with me on the Big Blue Marble. And while seeing things from their point of view often makes me sad, this morning it seems to be making every little thing better for me. As a time-traveler, I like to imagine what the world looked like in the past, and also what it will look like in the future. I developed a taste for science fiction stories when I was a teenager, and I especially like "what if" scenarios for the future. My favorite, by the way, is a future where everything is run by apes! I'm also a big fan of the movie "the Road Warrior", which had a scenario that was all about driving around like crazy, looking for gasoline in a future where civilization has collapsed. I've been watching that movie since I was a kid, and as a nerdy kid, I often wondered why they weren't looking f...

Although I left Minneapolis when I was 19, vowing never to deal with snow and cold again (and I've been true to that vow, I now live in the Phoenix, Arizona area, where I hope to someday rest my old bones!), I do have fond memories of Minneapolis, and the people who grew up here in Phoenix just think that I'm kidding. Summers are heaven in Minneapolis! There are, of course, days of heat and humidity, which Phoenix locals don't understand, and are very miserable, along with mosquitos the size of dive bombers. And I usually focus on that kind of stuff when I'm talking about being a kid in Minneapolis, but today I want to tell you how wonderful the summers are. It's 1970 in that pic up there, and I'm twelve years old. I'm bouncing on a giant inner tube, which my dad would put out for us kids, and it burned off a LOT of nervous energy. I grew up with three brothers, and the house was tiny, so my dad was wise enough to equip the backyard as if orangutans lived th...

I've never been to Atlantic City, New Jersey, but I've spent a lot of time on beaches. Well, I guess on the east coast it's called "the shore"? I really don't know. I grew up in Minneapolis, which has some wonderful beaches around the lakes, then I lived in Southern California, spending as much time as I could at the beach, and now I live in Arizona, which, to be fair, is all beach (but no ocean). I found this wonderful photo on the Duke University site, and I thought that it would be fun to dive into it. Let's take a closer look! Of course the first thing I'm gonna look at are the gorgeous bathing beauties! But of course I'm gonna look at everyone. Something that catches my eye is the swimming suits of the men. At first I thought that the man on near top center (above) wasn't a man, because of the straps on his back, but he's a man. Maybe his physique isn't as manly as the man on the right! I guess that I've just gotta look closer ...

Even though I've lived for quite a while (over six decades, in fact!) I don't recall anyone dying at home. Of course, I haven't paid much attention to death and dying, so I'm sure it's happened, but I've been thinking about it today, and I don't recall. There are a couple of reasons for this. If you don't mind me talking about death, I'd like to right now. If you'd rather not, I understand, too. The culture that I've grown up with, starting in Minneapolis, and now in Phoenix, Arizona, simply doesn't talk about death. It's considered morbid. Even my fascination with my family's genealogy creeped out some family members because I would put up photos on the wall, nicely framed, when I found them, of dead people. Death is relegated to Halloween, or it's seen as a cartoon thing, as action heroes spray machine gun bullets in movies. The reality of it is ignored, as if it didn't happen. That's reason one. The other reason is ...

No, of course I wasn't alive in 1938 when Orson Welles panicked the nation with his broadcast of "the War of the World" on CBS radio. But my mom was, and she would often mention it, and it became an early lesson in my life. If you haven't ever heard what happened, to put it briefly, CBS radio broadcast the story of aliens from Mars attacking the earth, as read by voice actor Orson Wells. And yes, they stopped every once in a while to remind people that it was just fiction, but apparently that wasn't enough. My mom, an intelligent and educated woman, always had a very short way with fools, and was always inclined to speak up about it. And from her I learned that it's easy to fool people, and it's easy to be fooled, and it's not very nice. And my "mama didn't raise no fool", and I was determined to grow up to be considerate to people who could be easily fooled, which is most people, especially nice and trusting people. Whether Orson Welles ...

As someone who thoroughly enjoys the Duke University Libraries Digital Collections, specifically their Resource of Outdoor Advertising Descriptions (ROAD), I thought that you might be interested in how I use it.  I have a lot of fun with it, and mostly I just browse around, looking at the backgrounds. The images cover from 1863 to 1999, and I find it fascinating. I became addicted to doing it when I started finding images of Phoenix in the late '60s and early '70s, and I've since moved on to enjoying a much wider range. But it's not necessarily indexed for someone like me, it's designed to allow scholarly people to study historical outdoor advertising. Me, I'm just looking at stuff, and what I enjoy most is putting in some random keyword, like shirt, and seeing what comes up. The next thing I see is a page with a bunch of thumbnails, and if something catches my eye I click on it, taking me to interesting places. Yes, of course I'm interested in the advertisi...

It's February of 2021, and if you're a patriotic American, like I am, you may be wondering whether you should fly the flag or not. I'm here to tell you that you should, even if you live in places like Arizona, which is where I live. This is an interesting time in history, and it's worth taking a closer look. I'll see if I can explain. Depending on how you've been getting your information for the past year or so, you have seen either a violent attempt to overthrow the United States government by rioters, or the most insidious case of a cover-up of corruption in U.S. history. I'll reveal my point of view, by saying that I've been following the story on mainstream media.  My little suburban neighborhood of Glendale, and the eastern edge of Peoria, suburbs of Phoenix, haven't been particularly outspoken on the subject of the point of view of events that have transpired, but there have been clearly-shown symbols that, if you know what they mean, express a...

Today we're time-traveling to Yonkers, New York in 1939. The photo is from the wonderful collection of the Duke University Digital Libraries, ROAD (Resource of Outdoor Advertising Descriptions). Yes, their scholarly interest is in the advertising, but I just like looking around. Come on! We're at Main Street and Riverdale, looking east. It's just an ordinary day in Yonkers in 1939, but everything in this photo fascinates me! I mean, look at those cars, especially the beautiful little runabout in the foreground. Just ordinary cars then, but all collector's items now! Even the cobblestone streets fascinate me! It looks like it's two twenty-two according to the clock at Ward's Jewelers and Optician. I don't suppose that it's too late to grab some lunch at the King Chow Co. Restaurant? Maybe we could stop into Georges Sport Shop. A raincoat might come in handy! But it's the other side of the street that has so much going on! Looks like that's a drugs...

One of my favorite things is "the slice of life", which I enjoy looking at in old photos, as well as IRL (In Real Life). These are just the ordinary, comforting, very human things that people do every day, and they're so different from the artificial stuff that I see in movies, or on Instagram, that it fascinates me. Today I'm looking at a photo that I found on the Duke University site. The reason the photo was taken, and the reason that Duke scanned it and stores it, has to do with the billboard. But even though it's the most important thing to this photo in many ways, it's the least important to me. I want to look at the slice of life. It's 1940, and we're at Broad and Livingston, Trenton, New Jersey looking north towards Assunpink. This is the United States of America a year before it entered World War II. And there more I look at this photo, the more I'm enjoying the innocence, and have a sense of a calm before the storm. But let's not worr...