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:
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:
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?
Plutarco Elías Calles nationalized all property of the Catholic church in Mexico.
The degree to which the leaders of the Mexican Revolution were anti Catholic in a very Catholic nation is hard to overestimate, although at the same time, particularly in some regions, Catholic viewpoints were very represented amongst the revolutionaries. Emiliano Zapata in particularly was notably Catholic.
Be that as it may, Madero was not a practicing Catholic and had peculiar spiritual views. He was in fact a spiritualist and a Mason. Still, his victory in the revolution, temporary though it was, was seen by Catholics as an opportunity to form a Mexican Catholic political party, which they did. The Church condemned Madero's assassination.
It was that killing that sparked the second stage of the revolution. Álvaro Obregón and Calles both featured prominently in that, and both were anti Catholic. Calles was also a Mason. In that phase of the revolution, moreover, democratic forces, which had brought about Madero's rise, started to wane and with the murder of Zapata and the victory of Carranza Mexico headed off in a much more radically leftist direction. In some ways the Mexican Revolution, in spite of its romantic portrayal in American cinema, was much more of a 20th Century European Revolution, many of which featured radically anti Catholic leaders against Catholic populations in favor of utopian leftism.
Calles fit that mold and was the sort example in the office of president of Mexico. His anti clerical laws would lead to the Cristero War the following year.
Mexico remains a very Catholic country to this day and the Mexican people are very Catholic. But like other religious communities, the period of anti religious domination hurt the religious nature of the people nonetheless and the culture of the country. Mexico has never really recovered from the anti religious views of the revolution. Ironically, one of the beneficiaries of that has been Protestant Millennialism which has been successful in drawing in religious Mexicans who are unchurched, a byproduct of the revolution.
Actor Leslie Nielsen was born in Regina, Saskatchewan. He served in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War Two as an aerial gunner, although he was not deployed overseas.
I'm shocked — shocked — to find that gambling is going on in here!
Captain Renault, Casablanca.
Initially my reaction to all this was, I don’t care. I don’t see what the big deal is. But now I see what the big deal is. The members of Congress who were pushing this were not wrong!
Retiring Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis.
About fucking time.
It's frankly very difficult to credit this comment. A pack of rich men, and 30 members of the current Trump interregnum, are mentioned in the Epstein files, including Trump, and she didn't see what the big deal was? As if the rich and powerful buying underaged sex slaves on U.S. territory, pretty openly, isn't a big deal.
That would be the viewpoint of a complete moron.
Lummis isn't a moron.
She's also not running for office again either.
Either she's really checked out, which at age 71, and admittedly now too worn down to do her job, she may very well be. Maybe she just isn't paying any attention.
Or maybe her lifetime in politics has simply numbered her to stuff like this, which should worry us all, as that would suggest some pretty gross filth is pretty common.
Or, maybe retiring, and after having realized that a tsunami of filth is coming, she decided to get out of the water.
Now, if only we could draw some candidates for her replacement who never sipped the Koolaide.
And maybe now somebody will confront Barrasso whose only purpose seems to be to stand behind Trump and company and give stern looks.
Light ships of the Royal and German navies fought at Dogger Bank.
Canadian soldiers rioted in Calgary and vandalized two businesses owned and operated by German Canadians. There were rumors that the stores hired illegal aliens rather than Canadian veterans, which sparked the violence.
BASH: Is this measles outbreak a consequence of the administration undermining support for vaccines?
DR OZ: I don't believe so. Secretary Kennedy has been advocating for measles vaccines
BASH: Oh, come on
From a CNN Interview of Mehmet Oz, a prime example of the Oprah Effect.1
In fairness to Dr. Oz, who in fairness should not be a government official, he does want people to get the measles vaccine.
Also in fairness, the dissing of vaccines isn't really a Trump thing in and of itself, but he gave it some boosted unneeded assistance by taking the political step of promising Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. a job as the HHS Secretary if he'd drop out of the last Presidential race. Kennedy is a quack, and an opponent of vaccines in varying degrees (it seems to change day by day). The rise of this movement, however, started with people like Jenny McCarthy who sadly has a son with autism. McCarthy herself was a Playboy model and her only real expertise is in showing her naked visage, something that really doesn't qualify a person for anything serious, and in fact may achieve much the opposite.
Oh, and by the way, Jenny McCarthy appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show multiple times in the 2000s to discuss her erroneous theories on autism and vaccines, and to promote a book she wrote.
Much of this story has to do with the inability to understand the difference between present conditions and past ones. People tend to assume that negative developments in a population mean a negative present condition. Sometimes they do, but sometimes they also represent a positive one. I'll give a personal example.
In 1982 I had pneumonia while at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma. I was extremely ill, literally on death's door.
Before the advent of antibiotics the fatality rates for bacterial pneumonia were between 60% and 70%.
Not good.
Now, the survivability rate is pretty good.
I've had a colon surgery for a developing condition that would have killed me even thirty years ago.
The point? Well, if I go on to develop Alzheimer's, which I pray I do not, it'll mostly be because I didn't die at age 19 of pneumonia.
Also, fwiw, Meet The Press this weekend had a physician on who noted that diseases we can now vaccinate for are associated with cancer, which is a developing field of medicine. I.e., you get some disease that's not big deal when young, and then you get cancer when older. You don't want cancer.
A fellow I know who suffered a heart attack, and who was otherwise very healthy, may have developed his heart condition this way as well.
Get vaccinated.
Footnotes:
1. The Oprah Effect is so named here to explain the phenomenon of Oprah Winfrey putting some flaming bogosity on to her popular daytime television show and thereby having millions of people give it credence. There are a fair number of examples, including the rise of Dr. Oz.
I was not aware that this was a 1976 movie, but then, I've never thought of the topic either.
I've actually never seen Taxi Driver all the way through.* It's just too icky for me. But the point raised here, tracking the depictions of New York City from the early 1960s into the 1970s, from "magical" to decline, is a really interesting observation.
Somewhere I have a series photographs of my mother in New York that must date from the late 1940s. She and some friends went down from Montreal to visit. She told me once how "clean" New York was, that being her observation from that trip.
I've been to New York state, but it's been years and years. My exposure to New York City, however, is limited to the airport, a memory which is equally old.
Footnotes:
*Indeed, of the movies mentioned in this thread, the only one I've seen all the way through is Breakfast at Tiffany's.
The HMS Mimi and HMS Toutou sank the Hedwig von Wissmann on Lake Tanganyika.
From Punch:
Officer (to Tommy, who has been using the whip freely). "Don't beat him; talk to him, man—talk to him!"
Tommy (to horse, by way of opening the conversation). "I coom from Manchester."
Today In Wyoming's History: February 9: 1916 Bill Carlisle robs passengers on the Union Pacific "Portland Rose". Attribution: Wyoming State Historical Society.
Stalin in an "election" speech carried on Soviet radio, stated another war was inevitable due to the "capitalist development of the world economy", and that the USSR needed to plan accordingly.
The Chairman:
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin has the floor.
(Comrade Stalin’s appearance in the rostrum was greeted by the voters with loud cheers lasting several minutes. The entire audience in the Bolshoi Theatre rose to its feet to greet Comrade Stalin. There were continuous cries of “Cheers for great Stalin!” “Long live great Stalin, Hurrah!” “Cheers for our beloved Stalin!” )
Comrade Stalin:
Comrades!
Eight years have passed since the last elections to the Supreme Soviet. This has been a period replete with events of a decisive nature. The first four years were years of intense labour on the part of Soviet people in carrying out the Third Five- Year Plan. The second four years covered the events of the war against the German and Japanese aggressors — the events of the Second World War. Undoubtedly, the war was the main event during the past period.
It would be wrong to think that the Second World War broke out accidentally, or as a result of blunders committed by certain statesmen, although blunders were certainly committed. As a matter of fact, the war broke out as the inevitable result of the development of world economic and political forces on the basis of present-day monopolistic capitalism. Marxists have more than once stated that the capitalist system of world economy contains the elements of a general crisis and military conflicts, that, in view of that, the development of world capitalism in our times does not proceed smoothly and evenly, but through crises and catastrophic wars. The point is that the uneven development of capitalist countries usually leads, in the course of time, to a sharp disturbance of the equilibrium within the world system of capitalism, and that group of capitalist countries regards itself as being less securely provides with raw materials and markets usually attempts to change the situation and to redistribute “spheres of influence” in its own favour — by employing armed force. As a result of this, the capitalist world is split into two hostile camps, and war breaks out between them . . .
And so, how should our victory [in World War II] be interpreted? What can this victory signify from the point of view of the state and the development of the internal forces of our country?
Our victory signifies, first of all, that our Soviet social system was victorious, that the Soviet social system successfully passed the test of fire in the war and proved that it is fully viable.
As we know, the foreign press on more than one occasion asserted that the Soviet social system was a “dangerous experiment” that was doomed to failure . . . [but] now we can say that the war has refuted all these assertions of the foreign press and has proved them to have been groundless. The war proved that the Soviet social system is a genuinely people’s system, which grew up from the ranks of the people and enjoys their powerful| support; that the Soviet social system is fully viable and stable form of organization of society . . .
Now a few words about the Communist Party’s plans of work for the immediate future. As you know, these plans are formulated in the new five-year plan, which is to be adopted in the very near future. The main tasks of the new five-year plan are to rehabilitate the devastated regions of our country, to restore industry and agriculture to the prewar level, and then to exceed that level to a more or less considerable extent. Apart from the fact that the rationing system is to be abolished in the very near future (loud and prolonged applause), special attention will be devoted to the expansion of the production of consumers’ goods, to raising the standard of living of the working people by steadily reducing the prices of all commodities (loud and prolonged applause), and to the extensive organization of scientific research institutes of every kind (applause) capable of giving the fullest scope to our scientific forces. (Loud applause.)
I have no doubt that if we give our scientists proper assistance they will be able in the very near future not only to overtake but even outstrip the achievements of science beyond the borders of our country. (Prolonged applause.)
As regards long-term plans, our Party intends to organize another powerful upswing of our national economy that will enable us to raise our industry to a level, say, three times as high as that of prewar industry. We must see to it that our industry shall be able to produce annually up to 50,000,000 tons of pig iron (prolonged applause ), up to 60,000,000 tons of steel (prolonged applause ), up to 500,000,000 tons of coal (prolonged applause ) and up to 60,000,000 tons of oil (prolonged applause ). Only when we succeed in doing that can we be sure that our Motherland will be insured against all contingencies. (Loud applause.) This will need, perhaps, another three five-year plans, if, not more. But it can be done, and we must do it. (Loud applause) . .
In conclusion, permit me to express my thanks for the confidence which you have shown me (loud and prolonged applause. A voice: “Cheers for the great leader of all our victories, Comrade Stalin! “) by nominating me as a candidate for the Supreme Soviet. You need have no doubt that will do my best to justify your confidence. (All rise. Loud and prolonged applause rising to an ovation. Voices in different parts of the hall: “Long live great Stalin, Hurrah!” “Cheers for the great leader of the peoples!” “Glory to great Stalin!” “Long live Comrade Stalin, the candidate of the entire people!” “Glory to the creator of all our victories, Comrade Stalin! “
Charles "Lucky" Luciano was deported to his native Italy where he'd spend the rest of his life, dying in 1962 at age 64.
Luciano in 1948.
Born Salvatore Lucania, the Mafia boss had immigrated to the US in 1906 as a child.
The House of Representatives approved the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, increasing the number of U.S. Representatives, beginning in 1913, from 391 to 435, the number that it has had ever since.
This has created unequal representation and something really needs to be done to change it.
Voters in the Arizona Territory approved the proposed state Constitution.
Writer Jack London, who was a Socialist, came out in support of Socialist revolutionaries in Mexico.
The Army intended to deploy lighter than air craft near El Paso in an attempt to figure out what was going on in the revolution near there.
Indentured servitude for Chinese workers in British Malaya was abolished, effective June 30, 1914.
Exactly what backers of Art 1 § 38 should have known would occur. Lampoon posted under fair use exception as I couldn't think of a more applicable illustration.
Wyoming Constitution Art. 1, § 38. Right of health care access
(a) Each competent adult shall have the right to make his or her own health care decisions. The parent, guardian or legal representative of any other natural person shall have the right to make health care decisions for that person.
(b) Any person may pay, and a health care provider may accept, direct payment for health care without imposition of penalties or fines for doing so.
(c) The legislature may determine reasonable and necessary restrictions on the rights granted under this section to protect the health and general welfare of the people or to accomplish the other purposes set forth in the Wyoming Constitution.
(d) The state of Wyoming shall act to preserve these rights from undue governmental infringement.
Hmm, depends a bit on how he voted on the dumbass Art. 1, § 38..
'Lange has a point, as much as I hate to admit it. But the party that really owes the state an explanation is the paranoid sots who backed the Constitutional amendment set out above from 2024, and those who voted for it, about a right to make your own medical decisions, which you already had, as they feared AHCA meant death panels.
That was freakin' absurd.
Lange, did you vote for it?
This was really predictable. That set it up. It was obvious.
Nobody is more opposed to abortion, which I regard as infanticide, than me. Indeed, my views in this general area are probably far more "conservative" than most peoples.
And to extend it, I'm not in favor of the death penalty either.
And, no, I don't think abortion is health care by a long measure, but if this hadn't been passed, the question would never have come up.
But to set this in the constitution of the state, what the crap did you think would happen? It puts the court in the place of making an existential decision.
A really easy one to make, in my view, but if you take my view, on natural rights, a lot of right wingers wouldn't be very comfortable, very soon.
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