Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

The image above, with the caption "Jack Was Here", appears on the power box of My Brother's Bar in Denver.  The image is of Jack Kerouac, the famous Beat Generation poet who died due the effects of cirrhosis at age 47 in 1969.

Or is he famous?

When I took this photo on my phone, I texted the image to my wife and son.  My son replied "Jack who?"  It's not an unreasonable question.  He's well read, but he'd never heard of Jack Kerouac.  I have, but quite frankly, I've never read him.  Not one word, including the famous "On The Road.".  And I have low interest in doing so. Perhaps that's because I have read snippets of Beat Generation poet Alan Ginsberg, and have no appreciate for the material of his I have read.  Perhaps, of course, that's unfair and Kerouac and Ginsberg should not be compared.  I don't know.

Perhaps also it's because the Beat Generation seemed to be a comma between the 1930s and 1940s and the 1960s, leaving their moment very brief and seemingly irrelevant. But I think that may mean more than it seemingly says. Perhaps some personages are truly only relevant to their times, and irrelevant to all others.  Or, if not irrelevant, not more relevant, or much more relevant, than everyone else.  In other words, maybe Kerouac doesn't pass the test of time very well.

Indeed, I did know that Kerouac had lived in Denver for a time and that he'd left an unpaid bar tab at My Brother's Bar, which he frequented in that period.  But I was only aware of that last minor item because I'd heard it on a television show about hamburger joints.  Apparently My Brother's Bar, located just next to REI in Denver, is a major famous grill.  I didn't know that.

 The interior of My Brother's Bar in Denver.

It is a neat old bar.  I frankly would have been a little spooked to have ventured into that area of Denver a decade or two ago, but not so much now. As noted, it's right next to REI, and just down the street from the Denver Aquarium, which is pretty neat.  It's a really old establishment.  It's apparently so well known that they've never put a sign up.  You just have to know its there.

According to the Food Channel, it's famous for the Johnny Burger, which was created there and named after a bar tender who thought it up.  That's what I had.  They are very good.

Anyhow, I guess that may, or may not, be a comment on fame.  Sic Transit Gloria Mundi were the words, we are told, that a slave spoke to those who were granted a Triumph.  All glory is fleeting.  And not only fleeting.  Over time, it seems, some locations are not remembered for who were there, but for the really fine hamburgers they serve.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Pens and Pencils

I just learned the other day that ballpoint pens came about in the 1940s. Apparently, in the WWII time frame, they remained largely unreliable.

 Waterman fountain pen advertisement, claiming the pen to be the "the arm of peace" in French.

I don't know why that surprised me, but it did.  Pens, in the 40s, and the 50s, largely remained fountain pens.

Frankly, even the Bic ballpoint pens I used through most of junior high and high school were less than reliable. The ink dried up, or it separated in the plastic tube holding it.   Sometimes they leaked and the ink came out everywhere.  But they were easier to use than fountain pens.  With fountain pens I was always like Charlie Brown in the cartoons, with ink going absolutely everywhere, or at least all over my hands.

Which didn't keep me from trying to use them.  I did.  I've always liked fountain pens, and I always admired my dad's ability to use them.  When I was young he had some nice fountain pens at home that he used.  I have them know, but I don't use them.  In later years he switched to cheaper basically disposable fountain pens which took cartridges, rather than having to be filled up from an ink bottle, and I tried to use that kinds in school. But it just didn't work out for me.

More recently some company has developed a wholly disposable fountain pen, and sometimes we have those at work. They're really neat, and they generally don't blow up.  Still, on the other hand, modern roller ball ink pens, a nifty successor to the ballpoint pen, is such a nice pen, and so rarely blows up, that they really can't be beat, as a practical matter.  Still, fountain pens, even disposable ones, are pretty neat.

In the era this blog tried to focus on, fountains were it, in terms of pens.  Mass production of fountain pens, and relatively modern fountain pens, began in the late 19th Century.

But, given as the story of the pen for the first half of the 20 Century was the story of the fountain pen, that means a lot of writing was done with the pencil.

Portrait of Abraham Lincoln in which he is holding a pencil.

Pencils seem to have become semi extinct in some ways in modern times, although that's obviously an exaggeration.  I can hardly get my own kids to use a pencil, even for math homework, which drives me crazy.  By extension, however, I can recall my attempts to use a ballpoint pen for math homework as a source of irritation for my own father, so perhaps that's simply an example of history repeating itself.

Pencils, however, were the writing instrument for people on the go to a large extent prior to the ballpoint pen. When I was a geology student we largely used pencils in the field, not pens, and I'm sure that's true of every outdoor profession.  Army quartermasters, who were issued a pommel bag to go with their 1917 Packers saddle, found that the pommel saddlebag had loops for pencils so that the quartermaster could take notes.  Pens just weren't an option.

Something that was an option for some things, however, was the brush.  A lot of cartoons were ink and brush.  Bill Mauldin's famous cartoons from World War Two, for example, were done with ink and brush, not pen and ink.  Perhaps most modern cartoons are as well, I have no idea.

Anyhow,  the prime focus of this blog is to try to track changes in the 20th Century, and here's a subtle, but important one. Soldiers in the field, newspaper reporters, lawyers in court, prior to WWII, were packing around pencils, not pens. 

Recorded Music

On the October 3 This Day in Wyoming's History blog the following item is noted:

October 3

1842   Sam Houston ordered Alexander Somervell to organize the militia and invade Mexico.  Attribution:  On This Day.

1863  President Lincoln declared that the last Thursday of November would be recognized as Thanksgiving Day.

1866  The Regular Army arrives at Ft. Casper with  troops from Company E, 2nd U.S. Cavalry arriving as reinforcements.  Attribution:  On This Day.

1895  Uinta County's Sheriff John Ward arrested Bannock Indian Race Horse for "the unlawful and wanton killing of seven elk in said county on the first day of July, 1895." Race Horse was exonerated when the United States Circuit Court held that the "provisions of the state statute were inconsistent with the treaty" of July 3, 1868.  Attribution:  On This Day.

1901  The Victor Talking Machine Company incorporated.

1941  The Wyoming Labor Journal advertised for skilled defense workers to work on Pacific Islands. . . probably not the best opportunity in retrospect.  Attribution:  Wyoming State Historical Society.

The Victor Talking Machine Company made, of course Victrola's, an example of which appears here below.

 

Its an odd thing to think of in this day and age, but before the Victrola, people didn't have recorded music, for the most party, in their houses.  It just didn't really exist.  That isn't to say that households were devoid of music, far from it.  Music, however, was provided by the people themselves, with knowledge of musical instruments being very widespread.

The first "record player" to appear on the scene, of any kind, was invented in the late 1850s, but average people didn't have them, or probably even know of them.  It was Edison's cylindrical record player of the late 1890s that really launched record players, with a device that both played tubular records, and which could also record them.  But  the really big launch of the record players came  with the gramophone, which entered the market in 1901.  The gramophone and the Victrola were the same thing.

None of this is news to hardly anyone, but what is interesting about this which is misses is that they were actually fairly expensive items.  And they weren't always simply the box and turntable scene so often in the movies. They were nicely cased items of furniture deserving a central place in a person's home. 

Victrola on dedicated stand. The stand holds records.

Starting in 1901, the Victrola became a coveted household item.  A way to bring music of all kinds into the average home.  Worked by a hand crank, and sounding tinny today, at the time people raved about the sound.

 The front doors on the Victrola box are to open up the sound box.  The doors to the stand are a record cabinet.

That's an oddity of human nature that's also rarely mentioned about record players of any kind, although it was the subject of an excellent essay in The New Republic some 30 years ago.  Nobody would view the Victrola as much more than a novelty, or historic oddity, today. But in their day, running from 1901 to 1933, when the 33 1/3 record was introduced, they were the hi-fi, high tech, musical wonder of the age.  To their owners, the 78 rpm records they played sounded just like being there.

Up until 1931, that was.  In that year RCA, which owned Victor, introduced the 33 1/3 rpm record.  These new records were designed for electric record players, not the hand cranked dinosaurs that preceded them.  Not that they would replace them instantly, but certainly by 1950 the old Victrola was a dinosaur.  78s continued to be made in the 1940s, but by the time 45s were introduced in 1949, they were remnants of a bygone era, although record players were still made that played them.

Those record players were often set in "Stereos", big heavy furniture cased units that included a turntable and an AM/FM radio. As noted, stereophonic speakers came to be the rule after the war too.  Stereos of this type, often in very nice furniture cases, predominated into the 1960s, along with much cheaper turntable units.  At some point by the 1970s, however, really high end audio equipment had evolved into component parts, that looked electronic and were.  Each piece was separately bought by serious music lovers, with the much more cheaper small portable unit also being an option.  I had the latter, not being able to afford the former, in that era.

The Linn Sondek reflected the absolute pinnacle of the turntable.  Sound so good that, after listening to one, a person could hardly stand to listen to the cassette tape deck in their car.  The sound was absolutely unbelievable, and still is.  A Linn Sondek produced sound so good, with good speakers, that it's deflating to listen to it, as whatever else you have fairs poorly in comparison.

As referred to above, however, not only had record players evolved from hand cranked machines of the 1900s, involving no electronics at all, into electrically driven and broadcast items, rival forms of recording and playing music back had come into existence as well. I suppose mention should first be made of the player piano, a piano that was mechanically able to reproduce music without the aid of a on the spot musician.  Most people have probably seen an old player piano, or a pianola, at some point, and they're sort of a musical oddity today, but they've been around in one form or another darned near forever. Sales of them, however, really got rolling in 1876 after they benefited from being shown at the World's Fair.  Sales peaked for them in the 1920s but by the 1930s, not surprisingly given advances in radio and record players, and the Great Depression, they started dieing in the 1930s.  They certainly lacked the portability that Victrola's had, and even though I've emphasized the cabinetry associated with them above, it was very common, early on, for people to pack their Victrola to a party, along with some records.  You can't do that with a player piano.

Audiotape had come into existence in the 1930s, along with electric record players.  Reel to reel audiotape was a German invention of the 1930s. The technology spread into the US in the 1940s after the U.S. Army had acquired the technology after Germany's defeat in the war.  As this would indicate, reel to reel audiotape wasn't the domain of the common man at first, but by the 1960s some serious audio fans were buying reel to reel tapes players for some special type of recordings.  For example, one dedicated music fan I know has a reel to reel recording of Woodstock.

Audiotape had the ability to be altered such that it could be used in a small format and adapted for automobiles.  I don't really understand the technology, so I won't bother to get into it, but cassette tapes first came out in 1963.  Cassette tapes had low audio quality at first, however, and so 8 track tapes were the tape player for automobiles in the US.  Apparently they were largely unknown in Europe. Fairly big and clunky by contemporary standards, the 8 track also had a highly annoying feature of having a very audible "click" as they changed tracks, but apparently nobody minded that much.  It always irritated me, but my exposure to 8 track tapes was fairly limited.  I recall them being a feature of teenagers automobiles before I was old enough to drive, but already in my early teens. They were around in the 60s and 70s but rapidly died as audio quality of cassette tapes passed them by in the 1970s.  

Cassette taps were much smaller and very readily adaptable to cars.  Every young person's car had a radio that included a tape player or a separate tape deck.  I had both in one car or another, and actually still have two in vehicles that I bought back when they were still in use.

All this, tapes and records, were dealt a near death blow by the Compact Disk, which started to make its appearance in the 1980s.  Very expensive and a specialty item at first.  I think the first one I ever heard was the Nakamichi Dragon, an expensive unit that was set up to be compared to a Linn Sondek.  It sounded great, much better than any record player I'd ever heard, until compared to the Linn Sondek, to which it, and everything then and now, fared poorly in comparison.

CDs, however, had advantages that records just couldn't compete with.  Most people can't afford a Linn Sondek (myself included) and so the CD player, as prices dropped, was a better audio option. Also, car units could take CDs.  CDs had much better sound quality than tapes and better than could be produced by most record players.  Soon, record players of all types, and certainly all tape players, seemed like antiquated items from a distant past.

Well, as this story would go, this didn't stay fixed in place.  CDs are now in danger of dieing themselves, replaced by a purely electronic medium.  The Ipod came in, and songs could be individually purchased the way that they had been in the 78 rpm days, or the 45 rpm days. . . one at a time.  33 1/3 "long play" albums and CDs had trapped the buyer into usually buying some junk to get what they wanted, although there are certainly many LP exceptions.  Now, most music buyers go to Itunes first and the record store second.  

Ipods have partially yielded to Iphones, which are a revolution of their own.  With the Iphone 5, a person can have a device that can hold thousands of tunes, more than they could listen to in a weeks time, played straight trough with no repeats, and which also operates as a phone, a camera, a diary. . . and everything, really, that a computer can do.

Oddly enough, for pure music fans, this has brought back in something that logic would almost hold should be dead. . . the record player.  CDs made vinal record collections obsolete except amongst a rare few (indeed, the Linn Sondek has never gone out of production).  The electronic medium revived them.  It's now quite easy to convert records into digital music, and the quality is amazingly good.  For relatively low cost the old record libraries can be converted into digital ones, much the way that they were converted into tape at one time for use in car stereos, but with much, much better quality.

 The modern turntable.  An Ion turntable that's jacked into a computer.  Into the foreground is a CD  by The Pogues.  To the left, "ear buds" for an Ipod.  The turntable itself plays through the computer's speakers and the computer can digitally record the records, or if jacked into the back, it can play, and the computer can record, cassette tapes.  Record speed options are 33 1/3 and 45.  The wooden/felt block is a record cleaner, once a common site but now an artifact.

Of course, some would regard converting music from the digital format into an electronic one is an abomination, and as also noted the Linn Sondek LP12 is still made, and after 40 years of continual manufacturer is still regarded as the best turntable that money can buy.  But the age of digital, highly portable, music is obviously fully here, and is not going away.

This blog, of course, attempts to explore items of historical interest, historical periods  (particularly the 1890 to 1920 period) and trends.  So it may be worth it to briefly examine what the impact of this technological revolution has been.  To start with, the portability of music is now at an all time high.  Never before has a person been able to take hundreds, indeed thousands, of recorded pieces of music and pack it with you.  That's pretty neat.

What's somewhat missed, however, is that the same revolution has essentially created the professionalization of music, the blending of it, and the categorization of it. Sounds odd, but true.  Prior to records, music was extremely local and homemade, as a rule.  This doesn't mean that there weren't professional musicians. There were.  There have been, indeed, since at least the Middle Ages.  But it was also the case that most families had members who could play musical instruments, if in fact they didn't all know how to.  This is much less common today. And it was also common for people to learn certain common songs and sing them at home. This is very uncommon today.  Good examples of this are presented in the the films Breaker Morant and Michael Collins, in which, in the former the central figure is shown singing at a Victorian home gathering, around a piano, and in the latter the protagonist is showing doing the somewhat related thing of reciting a poem in a gathering of friends.  People might still do both today, but to have somebody stand near a piano and sing would be somewhat unusual.  I've never seen that done.

The very way we even think of music is a result of records.  Prior to records there were popular songs that circulated nationally, or regionally, but that's basically what they were regarded as.  There were also, of course, the great works of classical music and opera, which were separately categorized.  And there were regional works that tended to remain regional.  After records started to sell, however, record companies started to categorize music by type, so as to be able to better sell the records. The original categories of popular music were four in number, country, western, rhythm, and blues.  Country music was mostly the music of Appalachia and the white south.  Western music was the music associated with the American west at the time.  Rhythm and blues were two categories of "race", i.e, black, musical forms from the American south that already had an audience with some whites.  As the latter categories were "race" records, overall these four categories were lumped into two bigger ones, Country & Western and Rhythm & Blues.  Therefore, simply by virtue of record marking, one entire music genera, Country & Western, was manufactured and lives on.  The "Western" part of the C&W music scene is all but dead today, and the "Country" part basically died in the 1950s when the last of the real "old timey" type artists disappeared.  Today two other categories, Blue Grass and Folk actually are much closer to the original Country than Country & Western generally is.  Rhythm, a category of black music is also gone, and I don't know if it has a modern descendant.  Rhythm & Blues remains as its own category, and Blues, an extremely resilient form of music, lives on as a separate category and gave birth to Rock & Roll, which originally differed from it only slightly if at all.  

Even that story, that of Rock & Roll, however, could not have occurred without the record player as the music that came from the blues would likely not have without it.  Blues gave birth to Jazz, Big Band and Rock & Roll.  Exposure to blues by regional players created jazz, and exposure to jazz created Big Band, but records made jazz and Big Band what they were.  This is all the more the case for Rock & Roll which essentially was created when the electric small band blues of the late 1940s and early 1950s was re-flagged as Rock & Roll in order to sell records to a while audience.

So, I guess to sum it up, in the late 19th Century we had a lot of music in the country, and most if was local.  Cowboys with guitars, farmers with fiddles, Yiddish laborers with violins, soldiers with harmonicas, black sharecroppers singing the blues, and so on.  The record player started coming in big about 1900.  It didn't change all that, but it certainly impacted it.

Disappearing Homesteads

This is a 20th Century homestead located in Natrona County, Wyoming. And it's a nice one.

It was probably built in the teens or twenties. The house is small, but it had steam heat. It also had a concrete cistern. The small stout barn has the name of the owners proudly burnt into the beams. In short, the homesteaders were prosperous. . . but only for awhile.

The Great Depression did this homestead in. It failed, and a neighboring rancher bought it from the bank. This is the story of homesteading all over the West in the 1930s. Thousands of small homesteads were consolidated into larger, neighboring ones. While I've never seen any figures on it, it would be my guess that the average actual working ranch in Wyoming today is probably made up of the remnants of at least five other ranches, all of which would have gone belly up during the Great Depression.

There was a lot at work creating this. The weather, the economy, and mechanization. The impact on the land, however, was enormous. Hundreds of families moved off the land, and into towns and cities, forever.

Connectivity

In the past couple of days, I have had instances in which I have been sitting in my office, with my computer connected to the net, and I have found it necessary to text message somebody using my cell phone.

Indeed, over the past year, not only have I found that it continues to be necessary (no surprise) to own a cell phone, but I am now text messaging on my cell phone as a work necessity. Text messaging tends to be associated with teenagers at the mall, but at least in my recent experience it's gone on to be a feature of at least the legal work place. Not all that long ago I found myself walking through Denver getting and receiving text messages pertaining to a deposition that was going on in Texas.

Here at my office, where I am right now (taking a break for lunch) I have, right where I am, a laptop computer, a telephone, a second miniature laptop, a cell phone, and an Ipod that's jacked into the computer, which allows me not only to send and receive email (including work email, and I've done that) but to keep my calendar and contacts electronically.

When I started this profession a little over twenty years ago, my office was equipped, as all our offices were, with a phone and a computer. The computer did not have net access. I don't really recall what I used that computer for, but chances are that I didn't use it all that much on a daily basis. I did write legal memos on it, and it had some programs that were used to substitute for casebooks we had in our library. It was probably three or four years after that when we purchased a computer that had net access, and we obtained West Law in our office for the first time. Before that, most local lawyers had a West Law account at the County Law Library, which was in the old County Courthouse. Having a good fax machine in that era seemed pretty neat. Now all this seems quite quaint.

It does make me wonder about the earlier era, however. Twenty years ago we were already on the cusp of a technological revolution. Even ten years before that we sort of were. But what about before that?

From probably the mid 1920s through to about 1980 the telephone was the only piece of connected technology any law office had. Fax machines hadn't arrived. If you wanted to send something, you did it by mail. Or if you wanted quick contact, you called. What was office work like then? It no doubt involved a lot of dictation of correspondence, and indeed we dictated when I first started out. Some people still do that. But we all did. And dictation in that era did place a bit of a premium on avoiding revisions, although we all revised. Revisions in that era were truly manual, and the result was, the further you go back, that the product had to be regenerated.

What about before 1920? At some time prior to that, most offices didn't have phones. How different office work must have been then. Quick contact just wasn't going to happen. Contact would have mostly been through the mail. Dictation would have been all direct. Everything was much more hands on and manual.

It'd be interesting, if we could, to go back to one of those offices, say an office of 1912, and see how they really worked, what somebody in our profession (assuming that there is a 1912 equivalent) actually did, on a daily basis, and how they did it, before communications became so instant over vast distances.

Visual memories of oil booms past.

Recently I took some photos for the Railhead blog we have, which is dedicated to all things locomotive, which really caused me to realize the extent to which a boom can alter the face of a town. More specifically, it caused me to realize how much the oil boom of the late teens and twenties has had an impact on the appearance of Casper, even though there's been multiple booms and busts since then.

What caused me to ponder this is that I took some photos of the walkway that's been put in across Casper on the old Chicago and North West line. That rail line is now long gone, and the old rail bed is now a walkway through downtown Casper, and a trial that stretches all the way out of town towards the East. It's an impressive effort, but of course for most of its course it is basically unimproved. Not all of it is scenic by any means, but the downtown portion is pretty neat.

In walking it, it occurred to me that a tremendous amount of what a person sees on it was built in the teens and twenties. Not everything, by any means, but an awful lot is. And some of what does not appear to be only has a more modern appearance as new facades have been added.

This in turn caused me to ponder how many other buildings in downtown Casper remain from this era. While Casper does not have an extremely well preserved downtown, like some towns do, it does show a remarkable impact form the World War One oil boom. Fire Station No. 1 remains, now in use as a private office, having been built in 1921. The Townsend Hotel also remains, and I believe that it may stretch back that far. It's now a courthouse. The Consolidated Royalty Building, still in use as an office building, was designed by the same architect as The Townsend Hotel, and was built in 1917. It was originally the headquarters for an oil company. I don't have any pictures of it, but Natrona County High School, still in use, was built in 1923.

Just off downtown, several impressive churches were built in the same era. St. Anthony's is one example. First United Methodist is another, in that it was added on to during this era. First Presbyterian was built in this time frame. A new St. Mark's was built. All of this was no doubt occurring as people were moving into town, indeed the town became a small city in this era, but it probably also reflects that the oil activity had increased people's fortunes, and they were generous with their added wealth.

Casper has certainly suffered recessions and depressions since then. One of the buildings mentioned above, the Townsend Hotel, was abandoned for a very long time as a result of one of them. A few older downtown buildings have disappeared, after have sat empty for awhile. Nonetheless, the impact of the oil boom that came about due to World War One and which lasted into the Roaring Twenties has left quite a visual impact.

Casper's "neighborhood schools"

Casper's "neighborhood schools" Here's another link in from the hub blog, a rare editorial on my part. Shifting away from that, here's a change that's occurred locally that's very much within my own lifetime and observation. This is, of course, a local story, but I'd guess that similar things have occurred in many locations. When I was a kid, I went to Garfield Elementary School. The school had been built in the 30s, I think. Originally it was called the "Harding School", named after President Warren G. Harding, and it was a school for developmentally challenged students. Some time in the 50s, or maybe earlier, it was added on to and became Garfield Elementary School, a regular grade school for students living in that portion of the Standard Addition to the City of Casper. Basically, the school took in those students who did not go to Park, which was downtown (named for the nearby park) or Grant, which wasn't really far away either. Garfield was pretty much the only grade school on that side of town until Crest Hill was built in the 1960s. Starting about 1990, and really getting ramped up in the late 1990s, the local school district went to a new system that abolished boundaries, and created a competitive system between the schools. Some old schools died, Garfield included. New schools were built, but without any consideration for local population considerations. They usually were built with land availability in mind. Now the school district wants to shift back. But I doubt it really can. Too many things have changed, most locally. But some things have changed everywhere in the US. Whereas we walked to school, hardly any kid does that anymore. Vehicle transportation is the norm for everyone now. I routinely find that various people I'm working with, no matter where they are located, will have to stop work early to pick up children from school. That just didn't happen with us, when we were young. We walked to school, and walked back. And competition between schools seems to be the norm all over now. Lots of kids go to "charter schools", etc. Our district may be unusual in that all the schools are competing with each other, but an element of competition seems to have come in everywhere. This makes public schools a bit more like private schools, in some locations. Generally, I think that's a good thing. On one more thing, it is simply the case that a lot more students, no matter how we might imagine things to be, complete school, or more grades of school, than they used to. Even as late as mid 20th Century a very high percentage of Americans did not complete high school. Probably around 40%, on average, of Americans left school in their mid to late teens at that time. It wasn't regarded as that big of deal. Arguably school was harder to get through then, but it was also the case that a high school degree was less valued then. It wasn't regarded as necessary for those going to work on farms or ranches (although many farmers and ranchers completed their schooling, and in some regions of the country, by that time, many were going on to college educations). And it wasn't necessary for those going on to many types of industrial, or even office, employments. Now it is not only necessary, but for many some degree of college is as well.

Holscher's Hub: Dugout

Holscher's Hub: Dugout

This is a dugout. That is, this is a very early dwelling by some homesteader, most likely.

A lot of homesteads started in this fashion. For that matter, quite a few started and failed having never become any more built up than this. I've seen dugouts that I could date to as late as the 1930s.

This gives us an example of many interesting changes that are hard for modern Americans to really appreciate. The conditions of living expectations were simply different. Not far from this example, I know of another one in which a stone dugout was built, and about a mile away another wooden framed dugout, which were the homes of families. Not single men, but families. Man, wife, and children. And this was their bedroom and kitchen.

Early homesteading was hard, of course. But homesteading continued on up until about 1934. The peak year for homesteading was 1919. The dream of owning a place of ones own was strong (it still is) but making it in agriculture was hard in ways we can hardly imagine. Movies and television have liked to portray mansions on the prairie, but that was very rare. More typically, they have liked to portray white clapboard houses on the prairie, but frankly that was somewhat of a rarity too. For a lot of people, this was their starter home. A log structure likely came later. If it was a 20th Century homestead, and the homesteaders were Irish, a house in town was actually almost as likely.

To add a bit, another thing that is hard for some to appreciate is that in the mid 20th Century there were a lot of little homesteads. They were being filed, proven up, and failing, in rapid succession. Almost all of these little outfits have been incorporated by neighboring outfits now. A few hang on as rentals to neighbors. There is no earthly way these small outfits could survive economically today, on their own, and they barely could earlier. But, while there were many of them, they were also very isolated in an era when a lot of people still traveled by horse, and those who had cars, sure didn't have speedy cars.

Knowing, or not, what we think we know.

An old thread, now revived, on SMH.

This thread fits in well with this blog, and is almost the theme of it. But, in general, how much do we really know of the routine of any one era? News tends to feature the rare, unusual, uncommon, or noteworthy, not the ordinary. But news in some ways tends to be what ends up being recorded as history.

The story of German horse use during World War Two is a good example. In popular histories, it tends to be reported that the German army of WWII was a mechanized, modern army. That's partially true, but to a much greater extent it was a hiking and horse using army. By war's end, it was the least mechanized army fighting in Europe.

Why is that not often noted? Well, the German propaganda machine would have had no interest in noting that, and every interest in emphasizing mechanization. Allied reports, for their part, would have emphasized the terrifying and dramatic. So, our view is not entirely accurate from the common sources.

Occasionally, things throw back.

Great video.

Building trends and economic eras

It should have occurred to me more clearly a long time ago, but you can begin to discern an economic era in a town based on its significant buildings.

That's certainly the case in this town. I've long known that the building I work in, the Con Roy building, was built in 1917 as part of a building boom associated with World War One oil production. But up until very recently I hadn't noticed how far that building trend must have carried. In putting up some photos for my blog on churches, it really became apparent to me. Most of the downtown churches here, fine old structures, were built right after World War One. I know that all those congregations had existing smaller churches, so they were replacing old ones with new much larger ones. Probably the size of the congregations had dramatically increased as well.

Same thing with some large old buildings here, except their earlier. Say 1900 to 1914. All associated with sheepmen, who must have been doing very well in a way that no rancher could today.

1920, law, and the Geology Museum

I learned just the other day that the University of Wyoming College of Law was founded in 1920, and received ABA approval in 1923.

Shoot, that's a lot earlier than I thought. I had thought, for some reason, that the College of Law dated from after World War Two. It sort of redefines my concepts of what the university regarded as worthwhile or important early on. When the College of Law was founded, I think the school was about 30 years old.

In other news, the University has had to cut its budget fairly significantly due to the decline in mineral revenues. Nearly the entire state budget is funded through severance taxes, which have taken a real hit in the last year. The change in economic fortunes has been massive, due to the national slow down, and the regional decline in the value of natural gas. So, as a result, Gov. Freudenthal has ordered ever state agency to cut back, and also enacted a general hiring freeze.

The University has taken the ax to distance programs, I guess (I'm not really up on that). But as part of the cutbacks, the very old Geology Museum is being closed.

It's a shame. I'll admit that I find it sad, as I'm a graduate of the Geology Department. I hate to see it close. I don't know how old it is, but it's real darned old. I don't disagree with the need to cut back, but I find it very difficult to accept that a cut back in a feature of a hard science department is academically sound.