Author: Derek Dahlsad

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The Hotel Del Monte

The wrinkles from the glue are disappointing, because this is such an excellent photo-montage of activities available at the Hotel del Monte in Monterey, California. Horses, it seems, were the key activity, whether they pulled carriages, were rode by fair women, or were raced against each other on a track. From the Hittel’s Hand-book of the Pacific Coast in 1882:

The most interesting feature of the town of Monterey, for the tourist, is the Hotel del Monte, erected by the capitalists of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company for the accommodation of visitors. It is one of the most complete buildings on the continent for the accommodation of pleasure-seekers. The length is 385 feet, the width, 115; the height, 3 stories. There are accommodations for 400 guests. The hotel has its own gas works, and is supplied with water from its own artesian well. The grounds of the hotel have an area of 100 acres, partly in beautiful garden and lawn, and the remainder wooded with oak, pine, and cypress trees. Neat by, and under the same ownership, are 7,000 acres of land, through which there are fine roads, open to the patrons of the hotel. A bathing pavilion contains four tanks, each 50 feet long and 36 wide. These are fulled with salt water which is heated to a temperature of about 70°. There are also separate bathrooms. The whole establishment is managed in the best style, and it has done much to attract great numbers of visitors to Monterey. The hotel is within a few yards of the beach, so that those who prefer to bathe in the ocean need not tire themselves by walking to reach it.

The building seen above, however, was a reconstruction of the original Del Monte, which burned to the ground in 1887. The investors of the Southern Pacific Railroad spared little expense to develop the finest resort hotel in California, away from the larger cities, bordering both the forest and the ocean. The hotel expanded with new amenities like those seen above over time, and eventually passed into the ownership of Samuel F.B. Morse. Morse, already owner of Pebble Beach Golf Course, now also controlled the Del Monte golf course, the oldest golf course in the West. This also put Morse in the position of rebuilding the hotel yet again when the building pictured above burned in 1924.

Could you stay at the Hotel del Monte today? You can’t exactly go as a visitor, but you can walk the halls SFB Morse built if you were a Navy officer. In 1943, the wartime flight training school leased the hotel and turning it into an educational home; the Naval Postgraduate School was moved there in 1951, occupying all 627 remaining acres of former tourist grandeur.

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The Byelorussian Soviet Republic: 1971


This map appeared in the front cover of the December 1971 issue of Soviet Life magazine. Soviet Life, as you might have guessed, has grown along with its namesake, becoming Russian Life today. Back in the 1970s, the magazine presented the Soviet Union in a less-than-propagandic way, avoiding too much political content and focusing on common life in the USSR. It made it into the hands of Americans, under the agreement that the Soviet regime would distribute the magazine America to citizens of Russia. In this issue, we learn of Belorussia’s contributions to the world, its participation in WWII and the United Nations, and its advances in arts and sciences. Most all of the article content can be found condensed into this illustrated map, showing off everything from classic styles of dress to cheese to construction equipment. The big logo in the middle is the Soviet-era symbol of Belarus, slightly different from an earlier style (which in turn was based on a general Soviet symbol): today’s symbol is strikingly similar, but exchanging the hammer and sickle for their own nation’s outline. While retaining some Soviet symbolism, the country changed its name from the Soviet-sounding “Belorussia” to “Belarus” with their independence.

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Ever-Expanding Fargo

If you had no idea that Fargo has grown in leaps and bounds, let’s look back 25 years. In 1982, this photo was taken for the Binford Guide to commemorate the 10th anniversary of West Acres Mall. The mall is seen in the upper-center area of the photo — and beyond that are miles and miles of farmland. 45th Street, barely visible at the top edge (it was a dirt road then) is about a mile from I-29: today (see a Google Map), the green, lush farmland you see is almost entirely paved and filled with a zoo, the YMCA, the largest Scheels store in the world, a 6-story office building (in which the Infomercantile webserver lives), and numerous other offices, strip malls, big-box retailers, and apartment buildings. The growth of the Fargo area is dumbfounding sometimes; when they talk about rural areas shrinking in population, it’s because they’re coming to the bigger cities. One thing I find most interesting, from both the photo and the aerial map, is the identification of what’s new versus what’s old based on the railroad line that used to run through this part of town. Buildings built on the diagonal were there before the tracks were removed; buildings on the north-south lines are new.

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Hubbard’s Academy of Immortals

In the old days, when a nation’s art and culture were monitored and controlled by the government in power, many added their greatest artistic minds to a roster called the Academy of Immortals.

American popular culture in the 19th century, a young nation with a rebellious streak, prided itself on being a country of the common man: our government was chosen by the unwashed masses (artfully referred to as the “host of Philistia” by critics), our popular music — including our freaking national anthem — were based on barroom tunes, and our art was crude, functional, and primitive. What place does an Academy of Immortals have in our fair, young nation?

By the late 19th century, it was as a cultural jab at Europe. The membership of our country’s Immortals was commonly seen as open to anybody with half a mind to participate: a country of the people, an art-world of the people. Elbert Hubbard, one of my favorite people these days, called his magazine the Philistine in honor of the free-thinking common man who has no time for culture handed down by ivory towers. His subscribers could, for a $10 lifetime membership, receive whatever back-issues he had on hand, and up to 99 years of free stuff — and each one was granted membership in his American Academy of Immortals. Not content to limit membership to existing fans, Hubbard sent out the sheet (seen on the right), to encourage his fans to turn in their buddies. What member of the proletariat did not deserve to be part of an American Academy of Immortals?

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Inside Black’s Store Without A Name


Meet George M Black. The big building on Broadway, the one sprouting up from Elm Tree Square today, bear this gentleman’s name. In 1912, Black opened up his own department store — Black’s — on that spot and began buying up the surrounding property. Black sold his store to Sears and used the money to build the Black Building — but he wasn’t out of the department store racket yet.

The photo above, scanned from a Binford Guide article about the sale of the Black Building in ’86, is of Black overlooking his post-1929 department store. Black had sold his previous store to Sears lock, stock, barrel, and name, resulting in a guy with retail smarts but no catchy name anymore. His solution: call his new shop The Store Without A Name. The marketing was witty — he held a contest to pick a new name, but to everyone’s surprise the majority of the votes went to keep the department store nameless. One bright suggestion was to abbreviate it to the ‘Swan’, but that didn’t have the sticking power of the unnammed shop. The Store Without A Name is now the parking lot next to the Avalon; the Black Building ceased being a department store when Sears moved out to the mall in ’76.

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Bedouins from beyond the Red Sea


This photo, from the Pennsylvania Report Scrapbook, depicts “Bedouins from beyond the Red Sea“. The photo was clipped from some other source, and judging from the paper it’s on and what I can see of it, the photo was cut from a magazine. As the rest of the photos are from no later than 1904, we can place it quite comfortably in the late 1800s or very early 20th century. Bedouins, as you may know, were nomadic herders in northern africa and the arabic regions. Both appear to be women, with children riding on their shoulders (the kid on the left is rather naked), while the woman on the right has no shoes. For as nomadic as the bedouins were, I’d have thought it more difficult to find some willing to stand still in front of a stock backdrop for a family photo.

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Miller High Life: King of Wisconsin

You may think Wednesday’s crack about Grandma getting tipsy off a couple ounces of Miller High-Life was a joke, the photo above shows that the Cool Kids drank High Life. This is clear proof is from the Pfister Hotel set, but the distinctive trapezoid label with an ‘X’ sticker right above it makes the bottle very recognizable even in small photos from other sources. Granted, these photos are from Wisconsin — Milwaukee is the home of Miller Brewing, and until the 70s there wasn’t as much national distribution as there is today. People tended to drink the beer that was brewed nearby, partly out of sentimental reasons, but also because you knew the beer was fresh. Your parents probably have stories about driving to another state to buy some good beer — driving from North Dakota to Colorado to buy up a pickup-truckload of Coors has been told to be by more than one person. One poster at Beer Advocate tells of driving to Wisconsin for some High Life…but more because of the lower drinking age of 18. As for the sentimental reasons, High Life had already been around for fifty years by the time this photo was taken — it was “the champagne of beers”, for crying out loud. Regardless if the stuff tasted like crap, you didn’t dare buy something else when company was coming over, and being caught at a swanky hotel lounge drinking anything else would be a travesty.

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Getting Grandma Plastered

Give Grandma a jelly-jar glass of Miller High-Life, and she might start to get a bit tipsy, don’t you know. Sometime in the 50s in Wisconsin, there was a party — I’ve got more pictures to upload — that prove there’s a big gap in what partying means today. In the 21st century, partying is what kids do. People get wasted on their 21st birthday, get their first job and drink every Friday and Saturday in bars with loud, untalented rock bands screaming into microphones, and sleep the bender off every Sunday. By the time they’re thirty, those childish ways are behind them and partying now means a $12 martini with a $20 steak and a jazz trio in the corner. The fifties were less age-centric in their parties: Kids did their partying when they had the money and time to do so, but grown-ups didn’t see getting plastered as a childish activity. If you’re in your thirties, ask your parents for stories about your grandparents: unless they were teetotalers, they probably had raucous parties…which, for the time period, meant listening to mildly naughty comedy records, playing cards, air so smoky it turned blue, drinking so much that someone had to be carried home, and driving all over town without fear of being stopped by the cops unless you actually hit something (then sitting bleary-eyed through church the next day). No wet t-shirt contests, no noise ordinance violations, no stepping over people sleeping on the floor at 11am who were too drunk to drive, no vomit on the front porch — fifty years makes all the difference.

Especially the wallpaper and drapes. The modernism of the sixties and seventies have ruined our decor. In the fifties, you could install flocked wallpaper without any sort of irony. Today, we might think that they had to be drunk to buy that wallpaper back then…they probably were, but it had nothing to do with the decor.

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Ethiopian Air’s Aviaticus Solaris Empyrus

On November 9th, 1970, Janett Schusky was flying on an Ethiopian Airlines ‘fanjet’ plane (Probably a Boeing 720) when it collided with a natural feature: the Equator. Impacting this line, 90° off the rotational axis of the planet Earth, caused damage to neither passengers nor craft, but Schusky’s survival entitled her to the title “Aviaticus Solaris Empyrus“, seemingly a jumble of important-sounding Latin words that may translate to something along the lines of “Flyer to the Heaven of the Sun.” Ethiopia’s famine and troubles during the 80s and 90s may make it seem backward and aboriginal, but they’ve been operating an airline as long as many European countries. Unlike last week’s TWA certificate, which promotes air travel as a worldly benefit, Air Ethiopia’s certificate here seems to promote Ethiopia’s connection to the rest of the world, despite having to cross the Equator to get there.

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Socialized Power For Our Children

My first reaction was that this advertisement, published in a 1952 farming magazine, was steeped in anti-communist propaganda. After all, socialism and communism are terms arm-in-arm, almost interchangeable, depending on where they’re used. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was the enemy, we had just defeated Germany’s National Socialist party, so in 1952 socialism seemed to be America’s greatest enemy.

The threat here turns out to be closer to home. Eisenhower, as I mentioned a couple days ago, was quite ‘left’ when it came to socialized and public works. Socialized power, or, rather, federally-funded power plants, was high on Eisenhower’s ‘to-do’ list. Eisenhower didn’t have some haughty Marxist ideals — he had been a leader during WWII, and saw first-hand how a country’s strong infrastructure kept it operating during adversity. Eisenhower’s highway system is still the road upon which American commerce and communication rolls, and he thought having federally-controlled electricity would allow the country to weather problems by controlling the source. Private electricity companies, as you might gather, felt quite threatened by the possibility of their racket being leaned on by government influences. “Won’t Someone Think of the Children?” the power companies cried, so soon forgetting how Roosevelt’s REA program brought hot water and radio to the children of the farmers that bought this magazine. At least with REA, private companies got the money for the work — turbines at Niagara was another thing altogether.

(click the image to read the content of the ad)