Author: Derek Dahlsad

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Fish stories on the Upper Sacramento

Found in the Pennsylvania Scrapbook, this magazine photo-illustration promises stories, but lacks the text. There’s four gentlemen, three that had been fishing, and one hiker (the guy on the far right). The guy in the middle smirks self-assuredly, while the other two fishermen glare — the smirker is clean shaved and well-dressed, the other two are less well-dressed and decorate their lips with bushy mustaches. A close look discovers that somebody left the water running. It seems there’s a funny story or a joke in there somewhere, but without the rest of the story, we don’t get it. The one piece of factual information is the reference to the Upper Sacramento River: it’s still a fly-fishing haven today, as it was a century ago when the photo was taken, but back in the day the region was equally known for both the beauty of the environment and the logging and mining that took from it. If you were a townie, working in the mines and pulling your dinner from the river, you’d probably be grumpy, too, if some big-city tourist trying to connect with nature outfished you.

also: Muriel Foster’s Diary * magical Shasta Springs water * temporary death of the Upper Sacramento

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Buckskin Harry, Fargo TV Cowboy

Buckskin Harry, as far as I can tell at this time, was a local television personality here in Fargo. Back in the day, local television stations did a lot more local programming than just the news; a lot of the national kids’ shows like Bozo the Clown had its roots in local TV stations. Even into the 1980s local stations had thematic characters do intros and commercial bumpers for horror movies.

We found this photo in a 1950s magazine, so it gave us a pretty good idea of about when ‘ol Buckskin graced the boob-tube. Our first resource was my grandparents — Grandpa Vernon remembered Harry on TV in the 1950s, but Grandpa was nurturing a new family around that time and wasn’t watching mid-afternoon kids’ programming.

Going through a 1955 Fargo Forum, I found some more specific information: Buckskin was on at 4 in the afternoon, an excellent timeslot lead into by Pinky Lee and Howdy Doody — and Buckskin’s show ran for an hour and fifteen minutes. I’m still doing my digging (my research method consists of doing very little, randomly encountering information…it works pretty well, actually), but if anybody out there remembers Buckskin, I’d appreciate any info.

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When Flair Was King

About a month ago, I drove past that ugly modern office building on the corner of Main and University, and struggled to remember what was there before. Then, I found this postcard, and memories rushed back in. No, I don’t think I was ever in Bronk’s (we were a Polar Package Place family; it was closer to our home), but its central location in Fargo and garish exterior would make it hard to forget. I’m going to look through my archives and see if I can dig up any more on Bronk’s, but I don’t remember seeing anything about it recently. Today, garish exteriors are reserved for children’s restaurants and theme buffets — the interior of a liquor store isn’t inherently anything, let alone to be ‘themed’ to attract customers. Modern stores aim for neutral efficiency, and ‘vice’ stores want to project professionalism lest they be called uncouth…but back in the day, when someone said to stop at the liquor store with the cowboy on top, you darn well knew where to go. Bronk’s disappeared in the late 80s by my recollection, and was replaced by a law office building. No cowboys on the top of the law offices, sadly.

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Smooching An Old Guy

This photo was captioned “Jack, Obie Jordahl’s Daughter, 8-24-57”. Obie Jordahl, I believe, was a barber at the Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee, and this fine evening he brought his daughter along to a drinking session in the hotel barber shop. Thing got wild — as you might expect — and the young miss Jordahl met the fate seen above, photographed and stored for all time. Poor, poor girl.

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Howie and his Truck

This picture was captioned “Howie.” Mr. Zillmer had a truck, was from Pewaukee, Wisconsin, owned a 1930s-era Chevrolet truck, and was friends with the photographer of this album. That’s about all we know — and with this magic of the internet, can anything more be discovered? Not as much as you might think — Howie could certainly be “Howard Zillmer” — the internet brings us a flyer from a church in Florida that lists Zillmer’s birthday as January third — Florida’s quite a ways away from Wisconsin, though. 2003 brought us the obituary of a Howard Zillmer’s mother, Augusta, who had been born in 1910 and lived in Pewaukee. Howard E Zillmer enlisted in the military in Milwaukee shortly after World War II broke out, but — also in Milwaukee — Howard R Zillmer held out until ’43. Our photogenic Howard, however, looks older than any of the possible Howards on the internet. If internet archives have slowly reached back to the ’40s, maybe eventually we’ll be able to find Howie. Until then, he’s remembered for driving his grain truck past Ruth.

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Visions of the Future: Subways!

We’re accustomed to seeing Artist Depictions Of The Future, mostly in technical magazines showing soldiers with jetpacks, robot soldiers, robots walking dogs, dogs with jetpacks, and so on. This picture, from early 1900s, is an artist depiction of “an express station of the underground railway.” This could certainly be a depiction of the Pacific Electric Railway or San Francisco’s pre-Muni rail service, given the predominance of California photos in the scrapbook. Really, it could be anywhere: subways were around at the time, so riding trains underground wouldn’t have been overly special. Electric underground trains were relatively new, and the addition of “express” is probably a sign of why this deserved attention. The future was here — where you could board a smoke-less, clean trolley underground, out of the rain, and zip through town to your destination. Only horses and those new noisy automobiles drove the streets…the future was there!

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Rusk Auto-House Found

When I first learned about the Rusk Auto-House, I discovered that one was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, Building #87002634 — but the address didn’t make sense. I walked around that block, and found nothing but parking lot. I assumed it was torn down quite some time ago, but in going through my Binford Guide archive I found a photo of that very Rusk. Located on a house’s driveway exiting on to 7th avenue, a half block west of Broadway and facing St. Mary’s Cathedral, sat this pressed-steel garage. That was in 1988; the garage must have disappeared not long after, as I don’t ever remember anything on that corner except parking lot.

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Potatoes!

From this collection. Potatoes. What more can I say?

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The Best Of Friends

This is the last of the atheistic Freethought postcards I got at an antique show a few months ago. It’s the least witty or thoughtful of the three, but it was the hardest to translate. We’ve got a priest and a devil, arm in arm, looking a little displeased, but neither is fighting it. The first line reads, “Example of an extreme friendship”; the second says, “A pair who exist due to afflictions.” This sentiment is similar to the first card, an attitude that the church preys on people who aren’t giving their condition enough thought and trusting in religion. It’s an odd thing to be anti-church, while using the church’s boogey-man as the reson for the comparison, but, hey, it works. Me, I personally really like the stylized devil he drew — in today’s modern culture, we almost universally show a “Mephistopheles Dracula”, a red-skinned suave gentleman with a van-dyke beard, stylish cape, and tiny horns on the forehead. Or, we depict Satan like the Incredible Hulk, with huge teeth and bulging muscles. This Czech devil (probably intentionally) looks ill and weak. A fat, well-fed cleric and an impotent devil? That probably meant more than a weak analogy.

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Enid Brant, Scrapbooked

All we have to go on is her caption: Enid Brandt, San Francisco’s Child Pianist. Her photo comes from the Pennsylvania Report Scrapbook, what we’d consider ‘altered art’ today. The book was originally the “Pennsylvania Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, 1895,” but an industrious photo-lover cut photos out of magazines and glued them over the top of the less-than-interesting education statistics. Most photos appear to be from glossy magazines of the time, and they all seem to range in the 1900-1905 range, based on photos of politicians and other places. One thing missing from the scrapbook, despite the amount of California photos? The San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. Enid doesn’t appear in Google as growing into a prodigy and master of her instrument; I hope the talented young lady made it through the quake and fire.