Wednesday, May 31, 1899. The Harriman Alaska Expediction departs.

The scientific Harriman Alaska Expedition left Seattle for the coast of Alaska.

Last prior edition:

May 30, 1899. Decoration Day.

Labels: 1890s, 1899, Memorial Day

Wednesday, January 9, 1924. Oil.

 Oil in Mexico, oil at Teapot Dome, Oil prices.

Oil.

The intersection of N40th St and Meridian Ave N, Seattle, Washington, January 9, 1924.

The market capitalization of Ford Motor Company exceeded $1 billion for the first time. 

Palatine seperatist Franz Josef Heinz was murdered by member sof the Viking League with the permission of the Bavarian government.

The Bishop of Speyer, Ludwig Sebastian, would refuse to give Heinz a church burial.

Friday, July 27, 1923. Casper living on Tulsa Time?

The analogy wasn't as wacky as it might seem.  

I've been to Tulsa, FWIW, and I don't dislike it. A typical Midwestern city.

Or perhaps more accurately an Oklahoma, north Texas city.

I would not care to live there, mind you, but Tulsa is not a bad city.

Courthouses of the West: Tulsa Municipal Building, Tulsa Oklahoma:

This is the Tulsa, Oklahoma Municipal Building which housed Tulsa's government between 1917 and 1960.  While I'm not certain that it housed a courthouse, it has that appearance, and I strongly suspect that the city's municipal courthouse was located here.  This building no longer houses Tulsa's city offices.

President Harding arrived in Seattle and gave a speech at the University of Washington's Husky Stadium.  

It would be his last.

FWIW, I have not been to Seattle, save for McChord AFB, and only briefly.

The Republican Party, anticipating another speech, announced that Hardin's speech from San Francisco, scheduled for July 31, would be broadcast nationwide on the radio.

The Federal Archives list these photos of a Martin MS-1 that the Navy was experimenting with.  The concept was to carry the biplane on a submarine, something that proved viable, and while the U.S. Navy gave up on it by World War Two the Japanese did not.

The Imperial Japanese Navy would, in turn, use submarine born monoplanes to attack the U.S. West Coast, albeit with no success.

Friday, November 27, 1942. Vichy Scuttles its Fleet, Jimi Hendrix born.

The Vichy French scuttled their own ships in harbor in Toulon to keep them out of German hands.  It was a brave act by Vichy, perhaps the most admirable thing it did during the war.  Operation Lila, the German offensive operation to seize the French Navy, had in fact commenced on November 19.

Three battleships, seven cruisers, fifteen destroyers, twelve submarines and thirteen torpedo boats of the French Navy went down at French hands.

Admirable though it was, it was not as admirable as what the Italian Navy would do the next year, which was to bolt to the sea so that it could join the Allies.  Indeed, in retrospect, or even at the time, the decision not to break out can be questioned, but Vichy was still making pretenses to being the de jure French government at the time, even though it was rapidly losing that status, and in fact already had.

Venezuela broke off relations with Vichy.

James ("Jimi) Marshal Hendrix, the greatest guitar player who ever lived, was born in Seattle, Washington.

Self-taught, and unable to read music, Hendrix came out of a blues saturated background and crossed over into Rock & Roll during its greatest era.  Nobody played the guitar like he did before him, and nobody has surpassed his abilities since.  Amazingly, Hendrix did not take up the guitar until he was 15.

A master of distortion at a time in which using it had not yet been figured out, Hendrix became a full time musician following his discharge from the Army in 1962.  Entering the music scene in the turmoil of the 1960s, Hendrix was unfortunately drawn to the drug culture of the era, which ended up taking his life in 1970 at age 27.  In his short musical career he established a body of music which stands out to this day.

Hendrix was just learning how to read music at the time of his death, and interestingly enough, was learning how to play wind instruments in addition to the guitar and bass that he already knew how to play.  Given that 80 years of age isn't an uncommon one, had drugs not taken his life, he could still be living today, and the music scene would have undoubtedly developed much differently than it did since 1970.

Wednesday, January 4, 1922

In the darkening twilight I saw a lone star hover gem-like above the bay

Ernest Shackleton’s last diary entry, written aboard the Quest, at South Georgia Island, January 4, 1922

Street in Seattle Washington, January 4, 1922.

January 12, 1921. War orphans, grapes, shoes and Seattle.

Cartoon from the Evening Star, by way of Reddit's 100 Years Ago Subreddit.

 

The story about Admiral Newton A. McCully adopting seven Russian children was apparently a big enough story to be the subject of a comedic lead in for the Evening Star the following day, January 12, with the cartoonist comparing the tragic fortunes of the Russian children, victims of war, with those of the Democratic Party in the recent election.

France's government fell on this day due to its failure to enforce German war reparations.

At the Department of Agriculture, they were looking at grapes.

Women were photographed shining shoes, which was apparently unusual at the time.

And a residential street in Seattle was photographed.

October 22, 1920. The formation of the Arab Legion (أل جيش أل عربي).

 Cap device of the Arab Legion

On this day in 1920 the British in Transjordan formed the Al Jeish al Arabi (أل جيش أل عربي), the Arab Army.  In English it was much more commonly called the Arab Legion, although the unit was never officially called that.

Glubb in 1940, the year after his appointment as the commander of the Arab Legion.

The unit combined the policing and military functions for the Transjordan.  It featured, at first, British officers and Arab enlisted men and was commanded from 1939 until March 1, 1956, by British career soldier and World War One veteran John Bagot Glubb, popularly known as Glubb Pasha.  Up until 1956 the unit continued to have a significant contingent of British officers, although by that time it had Jordanian officers as well.

Arab Legion 25 Pounder in action during the 1948 Arab Israeli War.

This created the bizarre situation in the later years of the organization under that name as Jordanian forces fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War under British command at its senior levels, even though the UK was not a combatant in the war and British officers were not supposed to play an active role in the war in disputed territory, something that proved impossible to adhere to in reality.  On March 1, 1956, cognizant of the problems this was creating, as well as the odd image it fostered, the Jordanians dismissed its British officers and renamed the unit into another variant of the term "Arab Army".  Today it is termed the Jordanian Armed Forces.

The British influence formed the unit into one of the best armies in the Arab world, a distinction it retains to this day.

Seattle street, October 22, 1920.

On the same day, candidate Warren G. Harding was posing for a sculptor.

May 27, 1919: The Peace Conference waits on the Germans, Wyoming troops wait on discharge, Tragedy in Casper.

David Lloyd George, Vittorio Orlando, Georges Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson in Paris, May 27, 1919.  Of interest, only Orlando wears the Edwardian suit, a somewhat less formal alternative to formal dress clothes. Everyone else were's morning coats, which were not i the nature of tuxedos today, but conventional formal wear.

The peace conference continued on with the question still being, would Germany sign, or not?

The Wyoming State Tribune was reporting that British and American Marines had been landed, as a result of the uncertainty, in Danzig.  I've never read that claim before and I frankly wonder if its correct.

In the same issue, a building story about the perception that troops from the West were not being mustered out as quickly as those from elsewhere was reported on.

And the news that the NC-4 had nearly made it to Portugal was featured.

It was also featured in the Casper paper, which also had the story about Western troops. The big news in Casper, however, was a tragic explosion near town.

It wasn't Memorial Day, like it is now, but the weather was certainly more holiday like.  Casper was enjoying a warm spell in 1919.  It isn't now.

 Seattle, May 27, 1919.

Seattle Washington was photographed.

April 21, 1919. Des Moines river front, Red Cross councils, Victory Loan Drive.

Des Moines, Iowa riverfront.  April 21, 1919.

Officers and War Council of the American Red Cross, including President Wilson and former President Taft.

President Wilson was photographed with Red Cross dignitaries, including former President Taft, on this day in 1919.  Most of the men photographed were wearing frock coats, which remained full daily formal wear at that time (they weren't the equivalent of tuxedos) even as Edwardian suits were coming in.  The latter were regarded as less formal.

American hospital ward in France, April 21, 1919.

Of course, a lot of men were still in France.

American engineers in France.

Some of the men back were participating in a big Victory Loan drive which was kicking off in earnest on this Monday.

Victory Loan Parade, Seattle Washington.

Seattle Mayor, and soon to be founder of San Calmente California, is 44 years old in this photograph.

Yes, 44.

I'd have guessed older.

And I don't know how old his wife is, in this photo, but my guess is that  she's no older than him, and if typical demographics then and now are assumed, she's likely in her late 30s.

This photograph was taken on or about March 2, 1919.  This just seems flat out the norm in photos of this era.  Everyone is older than they appear.

Some maintain, well, look at the number of kids. That'd age ya. . . Maybe, but even the kids usually, at least by the time they're in their mid teens, look older than at least my generation did when they were kids.  That boy in the back row, for example.  I'll bet he's 15 or 16.  He looks like he could be 25.

Hard living conditions?

Ole Hanson was the mayor of Seattle in 1919, and that was no treat.  That was the year of the big mid winter labor strike that many people worried was the beginning of Bolshevik agitation in the U.S. And frankly, while those concerns were misplaced, they weren't completely without some justification.  Europe was aflame in many places in Communist revolution, which had started in in ports in both the USSR and Germany.  No wonder people worried.

Hanson certainly worried.  After he resigned he wrote a book based on his concerns from 1919.

In it, he declared:

I am tired of reading rhetorical, finely spun, hypocritical, far-fetched excuses for bolshevism, communism, syndicalism, IWWism! Nauseated by the sickly sentimentality of those who would conciliate, pander, and encourage all who would destroy our Government, I have tried to learn the truth and tell it in United States English of one or two syllables....

With syndicalism — and its youngest child, bolshevism — thrive murder, rape, pillage, arson, free love, poverty, want, starvation, filth, slavery, autocracy, suppression, sorrow and Hell on earth. It is a class government of the unable, the unfit, the untrained; of the scum, of the dregs, of the cruel, and of the failures. Freedom disappears, liberty emigrates, universal suffrage is abolished, progress ceases,...and a militant minority, great only in their self-conceit, reincarnate under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat a greater tyranny than ever existed under czar, emperor, or potentate.

Indeed, he was convinced that the Seattle strikes were the attempted revolution, and said so:

The so-called sympathetic Seattle strike was an attempted revolution. That there was no violence does not alter the fact... The intent, openly and covertly announced, was for the overthrow of the industrial system; here first, then everywhere... True, there were no flashing guns, no bombs, no killings. Revolution, I repeat, doesn't need violence. The general strike, as practised in Seattle, is of itself the weapon of revolution, all the more dangerous because quiet. To succeed, it must suspend everything; stop the entire life stream of a community... That is to say, it puts the government out of operation. And that is all there is to revolt — no matter how achieved.

He toured the country with that message.

And he founded the town of San Clemente, seeing it as a Spanish style resort town on the Pacific for Californians tired of urban life.

He died in 1940, at age 66.

Monday, February 10, 1919: Theodore Roosevelt Mourned, IWW Men Deported, Butte Broke, Allies to Depart Russia but Japanese Not So Much, and Bad News for Houx

Readers of newspapers across the nation were reading of recent tributes to the late Theodore Roosevelt.  In Casper, locals read about just that occurring locally in the Methodist Church by Judge Charles Winter. 

First United Methodist Church today.

First United Methodist Church, the one referred to in the article, is still there and is one of Casper's oldest churches.  It didn't look quite the same, however, as it was added to in 1927, twenty years after its initial construction, and again in 1951.

Charles Winter had a son, Warren, who served as a very long time Casper lawyer and lived to be nearly 100, keeping his office open the entire time.  He had also been a Federal Magistrate for a time, so he reprised a judicial role in his family.  His entry into the law, however, was delayed by the Great Depression, as there were no jobs at the time he passed the bar.  A great track athlete in his youth, his funeral service was in this same church.

Big news was present in the form of the story that the Allies would be withdrawing from Russia.  The various allied nations were engaged in Russia in various degrees, with the British being particularly active in combating the Red Army.  A person could be somewhat skeptical that the withdrawal was going to go really well as the paper also related that the Japanese were becoming more involved.

The strike in Seattle wound down and a selection of IWW men were being sent backing back to their native lands.  In Butte Montana, lack of funds were causing public employment layoffs.

And the bad news just kept coming for former Democratic Governor Frank Houx, who had lead the state during the Great War but who had lost his seat to Governor Robert Carey.  Oil leases he had gained were reportedly being recaptured due to accusations of impropriety.  Democrats in general were also in the local news as they were being blamed for the failure of a bill to amend the Constitution to require suffrage for women.

The Laramie newspaper was reporting snow for the week. . . in a week where we also expect snow.

And both papers reported the Germans were threatening to surrender Germany to the communists if better terms weren't worked out in regarding war indemnity.

Exciting Western themed movies were opening that week for those who might wish to escape the news for awhile.

The Seattle Metropolitans win the Stanley Cup

On this day in 1917 the Seattle Metropolitans became the first US hockey team to win the Stanley Cup.

The Metropolitans were members of the Pacific Coast Hockey Association. They beat the Montreal Canadiens of the National Hockey Association three games to one.

The Seattle Waterfront

Copyrighted on March 23, 1917.

Thursday, July 30, 1914. Bringing an action, if possible.

Let Papa plan not war, for with the war will come the end of Russia and yourselves, and you will lose to the last man.

Grigori Rasputin; telegram to Imperial Russian Lady in Waiting, Anna Vyrubova, July 30, 1914.

First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill instructed  Royal Navy Commander of the Mediterranean Fleet Admiral Archibald Berkeley Milne "to aid the French in the transportation of their African Army by covering, and if possible, bringing to action individual fast German ships, particularly Goeben, who may interfere in that action."

A disaster in seattle:

Seattle's Grand Trunk Pacific dock burns on July 30, 1914.

Last edition:

Wednesday, July 29, 1914 First shots.

Labels: 1910s, 1914, Austro Hungaria, Austro Hungarian Navy, Massachetts, Serbia, technology, Technology is ruining everything, telephone, World War One