Sick of paying to maintain power grids built in the 1950’s?

Monday, May 24, 1926. National Parks created. Oil concessions extended. Tokachi erupts.

The U.S. Senate passed bills creating Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky, Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, and Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina and Tennessee.

You can tell the likes of Harriet Hageman and Deseret Mike Lee weren't in Congress at the time.

The Kingdom of Iraq extended the "D'Arcy Concession" of the oil fields in the Diyala Governorate for an additional 35 years past its scheduled expiration date of May 27, 1961. In reality, events would cause the concessions to be renegotiated after World War Two and expire in 1958, the year that the Kingdom of Iraq itself expired.

Most of the concession territory was in Iran and was cancelled in 1932.

Mount Tokachi erupted in Hokkaidō, Japan, killing 140 people.

The volcano is located within the Daisetsuzan National Park.

Last edition:

Thursday, May 20, 1926. Trains and Planes.

Labels: 1920s, 1926, 1930, 1930s, Aircraft, Barnstorming, Calvin Coolidge, Ernst Udet, law, Railroads, Transportation

 When I was young I recall my mother  commonly doing this, which would have been in the 60s and 70s.

Women Wearing Hair Scarves in the 1940s & 1950s

A Fossil Fuel Free Future is Here.

This was obvious, but will remain unrecognized for quite some time, for the same reason that coal is almost dead, but people don't grasp it.

Average people's ability to really grasp an existential change in something is pretty poor as a rule.  It's not so much that people choose to live in the past as it is that they have no grasp that the past of their younger lives and of their parents lives, the latter of which a lot of people hold to in a sort of mythical way, evolves.  We see that a lot in the U.S. right now.

The entire imaginary economy of Donald Trump is one that's grounded in a mythical 1970s, when he was young and clubbing and men lusting after girls in their teens was basically okay, du e to the sexual revolution.  MAGA, for its part, imagines a mythical 1950s economy, not understanding why the economy of the 1950s was the way it was.  In both instances, and particularly in regard to the 1970s economy, things were not as rosy as imagined.

Coal has been dying ever since the Royal Navy went to oil for ships.  We've discussed that before here:

Coal: Understanding the time line of an industry

Labels: boats and ships, British Navy, Coal, Daily Living, Industry, Lodging, Mid-Week at Work, Petroleum, Railroads, Transportation, U.S. Navy, United States Fuel Administration

Coal is not coming back.  In fact, it's demise is accelerating.  Lot of the globe, including China, in spite of what a demented Donald Trump thinks, is racing towards renewables.  Trump can't really imagine it as he's 80 years old and in the 70s there weren't very many big windmills, although even then there was a push towards renewable power.

Indeed, that push was started by the Arab Oil Embargo and people have been working on the technology ever since.  Now renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels for power generation.  Only nuclear can compete.

Every since the 70s engineers have been working on electric vehicles as well. Their day has arrived.

And Donald Trump started a war that will accelerate the pace of this change, rapidly.  Trump might end up being recalled as the greenest President ever, accidentally.

The change just won't be a switch to clean electrical power, and that switch is rapidly coming and no amount of John Barrasso and Harriet Hageman calling for the mythical "clean coal" will stop it.  It's also going to be a switch away from the sort of vehicle based economy we have now.  People aren't going to stop owning cars, but already a younger generation really isn't all that enamored with them.  Self driving vehicles, as much as I hate the idea, are coming in. With them will come self driving semi tractors and more importantly, in my view, remotely driven electric trains.

There's no reason that railroads can't be controlled like giant model train layouts.  Model trains already provide the model for it.  We're not far from that day.

That day is coming now whether Donald Trump, Harriet Hageman, John Barrasso, or people with an emotional tie to fossil fuels like it or not.  Your livelihood depending on it won't matter either.

It's already happening.

Friday, March 12, 1926. The Savoy opens.

The Savoy opened in Harlem, and would remain open until 1958.

Japanese destroyers were fired upon by the Chinese from the Taku Forts.

Last edition:

Thursday, March 11, 1926. Governments and labor.

Labels: 1920s, 1926, 2020s, 2026, 2026 Wyoming Legislature, Eamon de Valera, Fascism, Iraq, Ireland, Irish Free State, Italy, League of Nations, Northern Ireland, Politics, Unions, Wyoming Freedom Caucus

 

Dirty secret corporate media won’t discuss: US is reason Iran’s democracy ended and Ayatollah came to power

Painted Bricks: Dissing the ConRoy Building, and being inaccurate about it.

Painted Bricks: Dissing the ConRoy Building, and being inaccurate ...: What the crap? The original intent of this blog was simply to record the ghost signs of Casper, Wyoming.  It did that pretty rapidly, and th...

Dissing the ConRoy Building, and being inaccurate about it.

What the crap?

The original intent of this blog was simply to record the ghost signs of Casper, Wyoming.  It did that pretty rapidly, and then it went on to catch them elsewhere and expand out a bit from there. Basically, we like historic buildings here.

One of the things we've noted, however, in doing this is that fables grow up around buildings.  Sometimes it's really hard to figure out their origin.

I've been familiar with this building for over fifty years.  It's one of three sister buildings in Casper that all were designed by the Casper architectural firm of Casper firm of Garbutt and Weidner, who at least based on these three buildings, were heavily into the same appearance for their "skyscrapers" at the time. This is the "ConRoy Building", the Consolidated Royalty Building.  We noted its centennial several years, well nearly a decade, ago, elsewhere:

Happy Centenary! Things or rather places, that are 100 years old.

I've been meaning to post this forever but just wasn't in any big hurry to do it. Then it suddenly dawned on me that if I didn't do it soon, these places would be 101 years old, not 100. So here goes.

A thread dedicated to a few local places and establishments that made it to year 100 in 2017.

The ConRoy Building

 

 The ConRoy (Consolidated Royalty Building).  The building's appearance has changed somewhat, but you have to really observe it to notice the changes.  The windows were replaced from the original style about fifteen years ago, giving it more modern and more efficient windows.  The elevator shaft, not visible here, is an enlarged one to accommodate a larger elevator than the one put in when it was built in 1917.  The awning restores the building to an original appearance in those regards which it lacked for awhile, but at street level the building has a glass or rock masonry treatment which clearly departs from the original.

One that I've mentioned here before is the ConRoy, or Consolidated Royalty Building.  Built in 1917 as the Oil Exchange Building, the building was one of Casper's first "sky scrapers",  if in fact not the absolute first.  Ground was broken in the summer of 1917 and the building was completed some time in August 1917. The Consolidated Royalty Oil Company, a company in which former Governor B. B. Brooks had a major interest, occupied the fifth floor of the structure.

 

The ConRoy Building occasionally gets some interesting avian visitors.

Unlike its two sister buildings, the Wyoming National Bank Building (now apartments) and  the Townsend Hotel (now the Townsend Justice Center) designed by the same architect, the building has never been vacant and remains in use today.  At least one of the current tenants descends from a firm that was a very early tenant, and perhaps a 1917 tenant.

 

The building has been updated over time, and its appearance is slightly changed due to the addition of an odd decorative rock face in the 1950s, but it by and large looks much like it did in 1917 from the outside.  It's one of the few old downtown Casper buildings that hasn't undergone major appearance changes over the years.

May 2, 1917 edition of the Casper Daily Tribune announcing vacancies in the yet to be built Oil Exchange Building.  The remainder of this issue was full of war news, and indeed it was partially the oil boom caused by the war that brought the building about.

More recently it figured here, as the owners of the building commissioned some murals on the fire escape doors:

Backdoor art.

So how on earth does it end up in a political campaign?

Frankly, I have no idea, but the entire idea of it being built by "a Democrat" is a real wild one.  The principal figure in the building being built was B. B. Brooks, who served as a Republican Governor for Wyoming, as we noted above.  Brooks had his offices on the fifth floor of the building.

B. B. Brooks, Republican.  He would not be amused.

This building has been continually occupied since 1917, and some of the businesses currently in it have been in the building since the 1940s although as earlier noted, one of them might have been in the building as early as 1917. Of the other two sisters, one is now the Townsend Justice Center which houses Natrona County's courts, and Wyo. Bank Bldg is an apartment building with a cafe on the street level.

All three buildings originally had, fwiw, massive period style lobbies which are sadly now all gone although you can catch glimpses of them, particularly in the Wyo. National Bank Bldg. The ConRoy once had a cigar store and magazine stand on the street level, after the lobby was taken out, and into the 50s, which explains the current appearance of its very small lobby today.  Basically, the ConRoy and the Wyoming National Bank building were victims of "modernization" concepts in architecture from the 1950s and 1960s, at which time those buildings were forty years old and less, and nobody thought of them being particularly historic.  The Townsend probably retained its architecture the longest, as it was a hotel originally, and up into the 70s when it closed. By that time it was pretty much a flop house with a popular cafe.  I recall it as my father had lunch there until the cafe closed, which many other downtown businessmen and professionals did as well.  It made for an odd place to go as a kid, which I sometimes did with my father, as the cafe was really popular, as was the adjoined Petroleum Club, but in the lobby the working girls were recovering from their prior night.

The ConRoy, on the other hand, has hummed on much like it has since 1917, although some of the notable early tenants, like the Casper Star Tribune, have moved on.  The building was recently featured in the Oil City News when some of the equipment for a new elevator, replacing the one from the 1950s that replaced the one from 1917, was lifted by crane into the structure.

Anyhow, this is baffling.  Of course, I only know of this as somebody else whose familiar with the building pointed it out to me and was horribly amused by it.  I don't know that I am, as I like things to be accurate.

But why would a person do this, and how would such a wild rumor get started?

Saturday, January 30, 1926. Pinks and Greens.

The Allied occupation of the first zone of the Rhineland in Germany ended. 

It was a Saturday.

Mitchell was out.

The Army was just introducing its new service uniform.

1926 was the year the U.S. Army adopted an open collared "service uniform", with a different pattern for enlisted men as opposed to officers.  Here Maj. John B. Coulter is shown wearing the newly introduced uniform.  While the cut is a little different, and breeches are not common now, and were then, this is the same basic color scheme of uniform, "pinks and greens" reintroduced for all ranks in 2018, after having been originally phased out in 1954.  While it was a good looking uniform, it was actually not as practical as its predecessor, given that it was supposed to be a combat uniform.  This would cause the Army to rapidly develop combat specific clothing immediately before World War Two.

Officers had to buy their uniforms (they still do) and Coulter must have just purchased his.  Coulter was a cavalryman (hence the breeches) who had entered the Army in 1912 and who would serve until 1952, retiring as a Lt. General.

Last edition:

Wednesday, January 27, 1926. The Paul Whitman Orchestra at UW.

Labels: 1920s, 1926, Education, Music, University of Wyoming

Wednesday, January 6, 1926. Deutsche Luft Hansa

Deutsche Luft Hansa (DLH), the predecessor of Lufthansa, was formed.

It ceased operations in April, 1945, but it's personnel later reformed the company as Lufthansa in 1955.

Last edition:

Sunday, January 3, 1926.

Labels: 1920s, 1926, Cartoons, Ethel Hays

Sunday, October 11, 1925. The line of duty.

The China Zhi Gong Party as founded in the United States in San Francisco by a pair of exiled former warlords who opposed the the Kuomintang.  It remains today as one of the eight minor Chinese political parties currently permitted to exist as flunkies.

M'eh.

FBI agent Edwin C. Shanahan, was fatally shot after following a suspected car thief, Martin James Durkin, to a garage.  He was the first FBI agent to die in the line of duty.

It was a bit of an immigrants take.  Dunkin was an Irish American, and so was Shanahan.  Cop, and cop killer, both of recent immigrant stock, a story that was not uncommon.

Dunkin was convicted and remained in prison until 1954.  He died in 1981.

The Senators beat the Pirates 6 to 3 in game four of the 1925 World Series.

At Locarno delegates agreed that due consideration would be given to Germany's special military status until such time as a general arms reduction plan could be implemented across Europe. This was thought to secure Germany's entry into the League of Nations.

Last edition:

Saturday, October 10, 1925. The Chinese Imperial Collection.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, 1925 World Series, 1930s, 1937, Art, Chinese Civil War, Clothing, Edgar Franklin Wittmack, Qing Dynasty, Republic of China, Second Sino-Japanese War

Smoked Salmon Sandwich (1951) on Sandwiches of History

What's the meaning of Charlie Kirk? Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me. Other times I can barely see. Lately it occurs to me. What a long, strange trip it's been

 Additional labels for:  

What's the meaning of Charlie Kirk? Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me. Other times I can barely see. Lately it occurs to me. What a long, strange trip it's been

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, September 10, 1945. Eh? (Additional Labels)

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, September 10, 1945. Eh?: Post war news items were getting a bit weird. Mike the Headless chicken was ineffectively beheaded, and would go on to become sort of a frea...

Monday, July 2, 1945. Advances on Balikpapen.

Maria Michi in Rome, Open City.  She also played the role of the welcoming Italian turned prostitute in Paisan.  Both films were directed by Roberto Rossellini and filmed immediately after World War Two.  Why am I featuring her? See below.

Tokyo's population was down to 200,000 people due to evacuations from the bombed city.

Australian troops took Balikpapan's oil facilities.

American operations conclude on the Ryukyus.

The submarine USS Barb fired rockets on Kaihyo Island near Sakhalin,the first instance of a submarine firing such weapons.

Mountbatten is ordered to launch Operation Zipper, the liberation of Malaya, in August.

The 1945 Sheikh Bashir Rebellion broke out in Burao and Erigavo in British Somaliland against the British.

"The American Farmer" was the cover story in Newsweek.

Louis Till, father of Emmett Till who is remembered for being lynched at age 14 in 1955, was executed by the U.S. Army at Aversa, Italy for two counts of rape and murder.  

The elder Till had married the younger Till's mother when they were 18, over the objections of her parents. The marriage was not a happy one and she divorced him after he physically attacked her.  A conviction from that resulted in his joining the U.S. Army in order to avoid a prison sentence.

While Tills' conviction and execution are debated, the circumstances of the crime, which involved a home invasion and rape, are vile, and it seems that the trial was well conducted.

What's this have to do with the younger Till's lynching?  Absolutely nothing.  The junior Till never knew his father as the relationship had disintegrated when he was a mere infant.

There may be something, however, to take away about the horrors of the postwar world.  Armies are made up of all kinds of people, particularly conscripted armies.  Putting somebody in uniform so they wouldn't go to jail was fairly common.  There was a guy in boot camp with me who was there for that very reason, and I know a very successful person who essentially had the same thing occur to him.

And wars are a huge violation of the moral order.  Invading armies have always been associated with crime, with rape being a particularly common one.  Occupying armies, and even garrison armies, have a fair amount of moral depredation they bring on as well.

This certainly doesn't apply to everyone in uniform in these conditions, and not even the majority of those in uniform, in most modern armies, but it's frankly the case that World War Two created a vast amount of prostitution in Europe, some of it of a massively desperate type as portrayed in Rossellini's Paisan, and discussed in Atkinson's The Day of Battle.  Italy was quite frankly particularly hard hit as its infrastructure was far less developed than that of France or Germany, and it's population lived much more primitively and much closer to the poverty line.  Indeed, the vast bulk of the Italian population even before the war lived in what Americans of the same period would have regarded as poverty.

In these conditions, Italian women became targets.  Many prostituted themselves.  Some entered what might be regarded as a species of concubinage.  A biography of Bill Mauldin notes, for example, that for a period of time both Mauldin and another Stars and Stripes reporter kept girls in their mid teens, something that would have been regarded as a crime in the U.S. given the girls' very young age.  Paisan, as noted, depicts a middle class Italian girl descending into poverty, and then trying to grasp a straw out of it that nearly appears.  The classic The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit depicts a middle class American businessman who was an officer during the war engaging in a secret affair that produces a child while a soldier in Italy.

Concubinage is one thing.  Rape quite another, but murder is beyond the pale even for most whose morals decay in wartime.  But not for everyone.  And of course, we haven't touched on the Red Army, for whom wholescale rape, and then murder, of the women of the countries they overran was routine.  The percentage of Soviet soldiers that went home as rapist likely isn't known, but it was appreciable, and appreciated apparently by Soviet women, which lead to that generations domestic lives being notoriously turbulent.

War changes everything, and most of what it changes, isn't for the better.

Last edition:

Sunday, July 1, 1945. Battle of Balikpapan. The Post War German Map. Blondie.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Australian Army, Automobiles, Battle of Balikpapan, Borneo, Dutch Army, Germany, Growing up in the 1970s, Music, New Wave Music, Personalities, Post WWII Occupation of Germany, Rock Music, World War Two

Officer Bill Gannon Sandwich of Dragnet (1952) on Sandwiches of History⁣

Friday, June 15, 1945. Infantry Day.

The longest British Parliament since the Cavalier Parliament of 1661–1679 was dissolved ahead of the July 5 elections.  Parliament had been in session since 1935, as elections during the war had been suspended.

The Battle of Bessang Pass in the Philippines came to an end in an Allied victory.

It was the first flight of the XP-82, the Twin Mustang.

Coming too late for its intended role as an escort for B-29s in World War Two, it would see action during the Korean War before it was retired in 1953.

Today In Wyoming's History: June 15: 1945  Governor Leslie Hunt proclaimed to day Infantry Day.

Conflict, starring Humphrey Bogart, Alexis Smith and Sydney Greenstreet was released.

Last edition:

Thursday, June 14, 1945. Slogging.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Charles de Gaulle, Chester Nimitz, Chinese Army, Chinese National Army, Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower, Japan, Northern Ireland, Okinawa, Ulster, World War Two

US Marine achieves feat not done since 1959 during USMC Marksmanship Championship Competition

US Marine achieves feat not done since 1959 during USMC Marksmanship Championship Competition: MARINE CORPS BASE QUANTICO, Va. – U.S. Marines from across the Corps competed in the annual U.S. Marine Corps Marksmanship Championship Competition on MCB Quantico, April 10-18.

The Aerodrome: Air Force One.

The Aerodrome: Air Force One.: 

Air Force One.

Air Force One has been in the news a lot recently, and it  started before the Qatari proposal to give the United States, or Donald Trump (it isn't clear which) a luxury outfitted Boeing 747.

Technically "Air Force One" is a call sign, and merely denotes an airplane the Chief Executive is a passenger in.  If a President rode in an Air Force Cessna, that would be Air Force One.  But everyone knows that it refers to one of two Boeing VC-25s, militarized 747s, that are designated for the Presidents use.

RD-2

Interestingly, the first aircraft designated for Presidential use was a Navy airplane, an amphibious Douglas Dolphin RD-2 that was luxury outfitted for use by President Roosevelt.  It was used from 1933 to 1939, and obviously not for transglobal flight.  The President didn't really do extensive travel until World War Two.

Roosevelt's once used VC-54C.

In spite of concerns over commercial aviation being used to carry the President during the war, it was in fact used and it wasn 't until 1945 that a new designated Presidential aircraft was acquired, that being a  Secret Service reconfigured a Douglas C-54 Skymaster (VC-54C) which was named the Sacred Cow.  It contained a sleeping area, radiotelephone, and retractable battery-powered elevator to lift Roosevelt in his wheelchair. It's only use by Roosevelt was to fly the then dying President to Yalta.  Truman used it thereafter, but it was replaced by military DC-6 (VC-118) thereafter.

Truman's VC-118.

President Eisenhower, who of course knew planes well, to Lockheed C-121 Constellations, Columbine II and Columbine III. The Constellation was a very popular airplane at the time, and Douglas MacArthur also had one, that one spending many years after its service at the Natrona County International Airport on an abandoned runway.

Columbine II was the first Presidential aircraft to receive the designation Air Force One.

At the end of Eisenhower's Presidency Boeing 707s came in, in part because the Soviets were using a jet to transport their Premier.  707s remained through the Nixon era, giving good service in this role.

747s, as VC-25s, entered specialized manufacture for use as Air Force One during Reagan's administration, although the first one would enter service after that.  They've been used ever since.

These aren't normal 747s.  They are packed with communications and electronic warfare equipment in order to have combat survivability.  

Replacing the current two aircraft that are used as Air Force One is a topic that the Air Force started looking at quite a few years ago.  The 747 variant which the VC-25 isn't made anymore.  Production of 747s stopped in 2023 in favor of more modern aircraft.  Still, the airframe remains useful in this role, and after the Air Force started to look into options, updating a 747-8 appeared to be the best option.  Only Boeing was interested in the project anyway, and it will take a massive financial loss to do it.  

The aircraft that are being retrofitted for this role was built, originally, as a commercial airliner. The projected is a massive one, and the delivery date will be in 2027.

What the new Air Force Ones will look like.

Enter Qatar.

Qatar has offered to give the US (I guess) a luxury Boeing 747-8 for use as Air Force One until the other 747-8s are complete.  But here's the thing.  Boeing has been working on the complicated task fo converting the two existing 747-8s for this use for several years. After all, it's basically a combat aircraft.  All accepting the plane would do is give Boeing a third one to convert, which wouldn't be ready for years.

Trump is being childish about this, as he is about a lot of things.  He doesn't seem to grasp the nature of the aircraft, and likely a lot of other people don't as well.  In his case, this is inexcusable.  It's a combat airplane.

Frankly, it's a Cold War combat airplane.

Which gets to this.

The 747 was a big massive airliner in an era in which it was the queen of the sky. That era is over and airlines have moved on to more modern aircraft.  The world in which Ronald Reagan ordered 747s is gone as well.  It's still useful to have an aircraft that can be used in a global thermonuclear war, which is what it is, but that's not going to happen and it makes no sense to use it to go on weekend golfing trips to Florida.

But that's what Trump tends to use it for.

That raises an entire series of other questions, many of which have little to do with aircraft, but some of which do.  It's notable that other Presidents have used lighter aircraft for more mundane trips.  In November 1999, President Bill Clinton flew from Ankara, Turkey, to Cengiz Topel Naval Air Station outside Izmit, Turkey, aboard a marked C-20C.  In 2000, President Clinton flew to Pakistan aboard an unmarked Gulfstream III.  In 2003, President George W. Bush flew in the co-pilot seat of a Sea Control Squadron Thirty-Five (VS-35) S-3B Viking from Naval Air Station North Island, California to the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, with that latter obviously being an exception. Barack Obama used a Gulfstream C-37 variant on a personal trip in 2009.

Trump can use something else than a 747 for what he uses Air Force One for in almost every single instance.

Indeed, the entire topic brings up a lot of things about the risks of having an airplane like this, a luxury airliner inside, which is really a combat aircraft.  It makes it easy to forget what it really is, and it makes a President feel like an Emperor, which he is not.