The Tourist Pose

Take a look at The National Geographic, Sunset or Arizona Highways, from the fifties, and you'll see this pose.  Usually, it's a nice couple, looking at someone in native dress or a tour guide, with the attraction  in the background.  Of course, those photos were usually in the super saturated Kodak color films of the day.  I'd be surprised if the person who took this photo wasn't a regular reader of at least one of those magazines.

Written on the back, "Earl & Opal Allred at Calico, Calif. 1956."  I did a quick search for Earl and Opal and found an Earl W. and Opal E., living in Los Angeles, and latter in California City.  But when Ancestry.Com asked for my credit card number...well, that ended things right then and there.

Calico is a ghost town north of Barstow, California.  It's a county park, and a bit more preserved today.  California City is a semi-failed development in the California desert.  The idea was to put hundreds of thousands of people in the Mojave, but those plans fell through when L.A. was reluctant to allow a tap in to the Owens Valley Aqueduct.

The Army Hospital Album 31

Well, we've moved from the ocean to the desert.  I'm going out on a limb here.  I think the last two photos were taken in the Red Rock State Park area, just north of Mojave, which is north of L.A.

Click on army hospital collection in labels and all that.

Roads in the Desert

The California desert is criss-crossed with dirt roads. When I hike across the Mojave, more often than not, I'll spend at lest some time following an old jeep route. But where do they go? I'll follow the track across the desert and it'll just end, way out there, in the middle of nowhere. At one time there was a logic to all that road building. Mines now filled in, old homesteads, blown away by the desert winds, World War 2 bombing ranges and observation posts. I'm sure this road was well used when this photograph was taken, and there was a reason for these three people to be there. But what was it? There is a small building in the depression in the background.

Old California 3

This is the third and last part of the old California estate collection. Again, this one seems to be a travel collection. There is a lot of emphasis on the ocean. The navel officer is the only picture in this group that is labeled, "P.S. himself." Post script or the initials of the person, and is he a friend of the photographer or the man himself? I've noted before that I love the mystery of old photos, and trying to make some sense of them, but other than service aboard a ship that was armed, there isn't much to learn here. All the harbor shots are more focused on commerce with an emphasis on tugs and harbor transport. Note that behind the steam launch photo, the masts of a sailing ship can be seen; the four masts of a clipper. The paddle wheeler is almost certainly on the Sacramento River, one of the few rivers in California that had commercial boat traffic. The shot from the beach has a flotilla of war ships. The Great White Fleet? The railroad picture is of a crane of the S.P.L.A.& S.L Railroad. That's the San Pedro, Los Angeles, & Salt Lake Railroad, whose main line connected the harbor at San Pedro, now part of Los Angeles to Salt Lake City in Utah. The company no longer exists, but the rail line built by the company is still used. The main visitor's center for the Mojave National Preserve in Kelso, California was a station for the line. While it operated under different names, the S.P.L.A.& S L. name was only used from 1901 to 1916. The antelope picture only made it because of my no editing policy. If a location had been written on the back I might have been able to find out when the last animal died there or if a few still survive, but no location, no research. The twenty mule team shot is interesting. The famous borax wagon teams carrying the mineral from Death Valley to the rail head at Mojave, California only operated from 1883 to 1889 and had two box wagons and a water tank. Same idea for the wagon depicted, but a different set-up. And the flood picture, my guess is the Sacramento delta.

The Barstow Album Page

I found this album page in Barstow, a small town in the high Mojave Desert of California. The mystery is how it came to be in Barstow. There are no trees or babbling brooks in the desert. (See my hiking and cycling blog, www.selfpropelled-wjy.blogspot.com for snapshots of the Mojave.) Barstow was on the old National Trails Highway, latter designated Route 66#, the most important road from the mid-west to Santa Monica, the Pacific Ocean and Southern California. From it's days as a dirt road, through the roaring twenties, the dust bowl era of the great depression, to the boom years of World War 2, and the post war era, the majority of those making the move to Los Angeles went through Barstow. This page could have been from an album once owned by a migrant from Arkansas or Missouri who took a job at the Santa Fe Railroad yards in Barstow. Or maybe someone from the high desert had to get out of the heat for awhile and they vacationed where there were green trees and cool shade.