Lost Korea As Cool As A Lost Van Gogh

I told the lovely Dr. Carla Trentelman that one of the biggest discoveries I'm making while digging through Union Station's archives is how easy it is for stuff to get lost even in a museum.

"I really understand how a long lost work by Van Gogh or Michelangelo or Titian can turn up sitting on a museum shelf," I told her. "It's right there all the time but nobody knows it."

We've all seen the "Raiders of the Lost Arc" film where the Arc of the Covenant gets buried in an anonymous government warehouse. On a smaller scale, that is what is happening in every museum in the world. At least, every museum that doesn't have a world-class anal retentive indexing system installed. Stuff gets misfiled, or not indexed in sufficient detail. People die or retire and new filing systems are put into place that skip stuff. Nobody has time to really look, closely, at everything on every shelf.

Union Station's archive is pretty small -- rows of shelves jammed into a room the size of a small living room. One guy, Lee Witten, has done his best to organize and catalog things, but he's a volunteer like everyone else here and hasn't got time for the sort of detail that would reveal that lost VanGogh, so to speak.

I mean, he'd spot a real VanGogh, obviously, especially if it were among the thousands of feet of super-8 movie film of trains he's spent the last several months going through, but a propaganda leaflet from the Korean War?

He didn't know it was here.

I'm trying to learn the collection here. Lee's indexing is vast, with thousand of entries in our database, but that would rot my brain to go through one by one.

So I'm just pulling boxes off the shelf at random to see what's there.

Last week it was a collection of old valentines from Ruth Myers Schrider. I mentioned in that blog (click) that there was also some stuff from Korea, and this week I looked at that.

Tom Myers was Ruth's brother perhaps?  He spent some time as a civilian working for the American military occupation force in Korea beginning in 1947. Korea was divided between north and south after WWII ended, the US, Japan and others countries still had armed forces there while the politics of deciding how the country would be governed got sorted out. That sorting led to the Korean War.

What a trove of stuff Myers left.

In a way it's cool because it's so ordinary: There are books of a "Getting to Know Korea" nature given to soldiers serving there so they would know how to behave in a strange culture.

"Koreans will not bear any assumption of superiority on the art of any men on grounds of race, creed or color," one book says. "They themselves are without any of these prejudices on any of these counts."

Avoid the women, it says. "The limitations imposed by the length of duty tour in Korea precludes most Americans becoming sufficient familiar with the social customs" to avoid committing a major breach of etiquette.

In fact, "sexual relations, regardless of how inspired, other than through the lowest form of prostitutes, is deemed by Koreans to be classed as an act of rape," and will get both man and woman in serious trouble.

There's fun items of every day life: A bar list from the Dai Iti Hotel in Tokyo which served drinks for 20 cents or so, collections of post cards showing typical Korean life and culture, a menu from the American-run hotel of some sort for Thanksgiving showing a typical turkey dinner with all the trimmings.

Interesting, the menu claims it is the "famous Cho-Kwang Hotel on Skidrow Alley" in Seoul.

Skidrow Alley? One smells one's chain being jerked, especially since the "hotel" staff are all US military personnel.

Lots of pictures, of course. Some scraps of Korean money. The bar list has some sort of crude map drawn on it.

All very mundane, but that's the point. Mundane items of daily life are precisely what don't, normally, get saved over the ages. These show slices of life of a Korean before a terrible war tore through that peninsula in the early 1950s.

Wrong Turn: More and more expensive roads

I got home from the clean air protest in Salt Lake on Saturday (yes, I took FrontRunner), had a hot toddy and good nights rest and awoke to find the Sunday paper full of the news of a brand spanking spiffy new road in Davis County.

Three miles (click) long, it cost $70 million to build, but as we know, cost is no object with building roads in Utah. The normally fiscally conservative Utahns who hate teacher unions because they demands living wages for educators, decry waste from programs that feed the poor, and generally want pennies pinched en masse, have no problem blowing $70 million on a stretch of asphalt a piddling 3 miles long that will probably need resurfacing in ten years, or less and won't return a dime of revenue to anyone.

Rant: Why is it politicians scream that things like FrontRunner need a "subsidy" to operate, but never talk about the subsidy that roads require? Sure, roads enable commerce, but so do trains. OK, I know: Roads are built by contractors who make campaign donations, and roads make sure those contractors have  years and years of maintenance work to do, too. Jobs for all!

That's why roads don't need "subsidies." They just need millions of dollars in repairs every year. Trains? Not so much. Rails don't develop chuckholes.

This same rant applies to Amtrak, by the way. Congress makes all of us pay billions every year for highways for car drivers to use, and governments on all levels massively subsidize airports and air traffic control (Salt Lake City puts $50 million a year into running Salt Lake International), but passenger rail traffic is derided for it's massive "subsidy."

<Rant mode> <Exit>

No clue how many folks driving that spiffy new road in Davis complained about the bad air they were driving through as they took their kids to the doctor or asthma clinic. Ten percent of Utahns have asthma, so some certainly did.

The sad thing about the story is that it praises former Clearfield Mayor Neldon Hamblin for his foresight in planning the road, and working for it, when what he did was plan and push for what is essentially, as we are starting to see, dead technology.

No, seriously. Oil, despite the current apparent boom in drilling in the US, is an 8-track tape energy source. The Wasatch Front, as we can see any day the sun shines on all that air pollution, is being literally choked by cars. And cars themselves, at least those powered by internal combustion engines, are old school, slowly being replaced. Sure electric cars have their issues, but those issues are being solved.

I still say, if employers in Utah had any brains they'd be pushing for alternatives for their workers to using cars. Cars are expensive, forcing employees to demand better pay and getting grumpy when they don't get it. If employees could avoid using their cars to get to work every day, they'd have more money to spend on fun stuff and be happier. When I was working at the Standard my car was my single largest living expense, costing upwards of $100 a month.

Nothing against Hamblin, but if he'd really had foresight 25 years ago, he'd have pushed for more developments around his city that were planned to work better around mass transit, and more mass transit, not more roads. Housing projects clustered around transit stops, for example, and
bicycle and walking paths so folks could get to those transit stops more easily and naturally.

A more promising story is the one about Clearfield's current mayor and council working to build a $120 million development adjacent to the city's FrontRunner stop. (click) The idea is to have housing and businesses adjacent to the FrontRunner, both to let folks get to the train easily, and to attract folks from other cities who want to get to the shopping by train.

Which is exactly what sponsors of mass transit promised it would do.

A development near the train also won't need any $70 million roads to get to it. If the planner and builders have proper foresight, they'll figure out a way for people to walk.

Historical and darn cute Valentines

With Valentine's Day only weeks away, I thought it would be fun to peek into one of the more interesting collections I've found in Union Station's archive: The Ruth Myers Valentines.

I'm still trying to figure out more who Ruth is, or was.  She was Ruth Myers Shrider, who married D.O. Schrider and died in 1942, according to the note on the box. Her husband died in 1955, and I'm guessing the family donated all the old stuff just so they didn't have the pain of throwing it away.

In addition to old Valentines there are pictures and documents from T. E. Myers time in Korea during the Korean War, some railroad documents and pictures, and lots of other stuff. To be honest, I'm  just beginning to dig through the boxes.

This first one contains a lot of Valentines that Ruth apparently collected in the 1930s, although some seem addressed to her brothers or other siblings. Whatever.

What's really cool is just looking at the old designs -- the 30s styles of clothing, the way children are portrayed, the die-cut lace and movable elements of the cards. And, yes, the occasional politically incorrect one.

You can imagine going into the 5 and dime
and picking them out for a penny a piece, or whatever. Or perhaps one of those boxes of 30 that included one for the teacher.

Anyway, that's it -- spiffy old Valentines. I told Lee Witten, the archivist here, that we could probably get a fortune for these things on eBay, but obviously that won't be happening. They're history, they're culture, and they're here for as long as the walls stand.

Wear Your Official Utah State Face Mask!

OK, So Utah has a state flower (Sego Lily), a state cooking pot (Dutch oven) and a state rock, (coal). I still say coal is a mineral, not a rock, but this is the Legislature talking, so who cares?

And a state gun, of course, the Browning Automatic 1911.

So why not, these days, a state face mask? I propose the standard issue surgical mask, of which many brands exist. Some even prevent the spread of flu!

Everyone says "Oh, Utah's air has always had this problem," but I challenge you to find a copy of the Salt Lake Tribune, Deseret News or Standard-Examiner dated before 1970 containing an officially issued government warning not to breathe deeply outdoors.

Sure, there were days the air was bad -- we could see the smoke plume from the copper mine in Magna steadily filling the valley -- but nothing like today.

Nothing. Sorry, I was here, it is true.

Saturday I'm going (via mass transit) to this rally (click!) in SLC to demand the Legislature do something a bit more aggressive than just handing out bumper stickers urging folks to car pool. A recent plan to take measures that won't meet federal standards is a good place to start (click) but it should not stop there.

The Legislature is fond of saying that attacking industrial pollution scares away jobs and only deals with 10 percent of the problem. Nobody ever says how many jobs Utah's foul air scares away, California seems to have no trouble attracting jobs (click)  despite strict standards, and if we can take care of 10 percent of the problem, that's a good place to start.

Yes, car pooling would help, but spending more on mass transit and less on highways would would make mass transit more convenient and shift population patterns to a healthier method of getting around. If the car is an expensive hassle, and FrontRunner/Trax/bus can do the job, people will find a way.

The real trick will be breaking Utahns' habit of wanting to live in that quiet rural subdivision (which they rapidly make noisy and non-rural by crowding in) and live close to where they work so they burn less gasoline getting to their job. Sure, big city taxes and housing costs are higher, but what is the cost of replacing your car every three years? And filling your tank once or twice a week?

The cooking pot, lily and gun are all marketing symbols, meant to show what joys the state has to offer.

A state mask will be different, a way to tell our own residents, our own lawmakers and policy makers, what sort of state we are really building here.

If that sends a bad message, well, build differently.

Fun Railroad Stuff That Just Shows Up

Came into the Union Station archive this morning to find Chief Archivist Lee Witten almost drooling over a pile of old books, photos and railroad gear that he was lovingly sorting out on the table.

All of it was donated to the archives by Donna Forbes, Midvale, whose dad started as a telegrapher for the Union Pacific Railroad in 1942 and worked as a dispatcher and rules examiner until he retired in 1983.

He was a saver, even preserving the original flimsies for telegraph orders on his first day at work. His notebooks are filled with carefully handwritten notes on promotions and tests of guys working to be promoted to conductor, train orders and all sorts of other stuff.

There's a couple of telegraph keys and a practice key, complete with tapes of signals to be translated so he could build his speed or keep his skills honed. There's a nice pile of pictures of old steam engines.

Mr. Forbes worked in Las Vegas and then Salt Lake City. I'm guessing he died since then -- I will be talking to his daughter to get his full history -- and all his stuff is the sort of thing that gets tossed out by children or grandchildren unless they think, as Ms. Forbes did, that they should be preserved.

So she brought them to us and they will be saved, with extreme care and gratitude.

Anyone with a gun can lose it, so let's regulate texting.

About two years ago I was assigned to take an all-day class at Roy High School on how to be a cop responding to a hostage situation in which guns were involved.

Standard-Examiner photo by Kera Williams

I was great fun and the Standard-Examiner even shot a video of me doing my Clint Eastwood "Dirty Harry" impression. I didn't actually shoot my gun in the situation, but that was fine with me too.

You can read the whole story and see me armed to the teeth here (click).


So?

Well, just yesterday in Florida a retired cop, 70, armed with a .38 cal pistol, shot a guy in a movie theater armed with a box of popcorn. They were arguing over the guy with the popcorn texting. The guy with the gun felt the situation was one in which he simply could not get up and move away from the texter, he was RIGHT, by god, and that was all there was to it.

Neither did the other guy, they stood and fought, words and popcorn flew, and in the heat of the moment the retired cop shot the guy with the popcorn.

Amazingly, the New  York Times seems to think (click) that this means we, as a nation, need to discuss texting in movie theaters. My comment on that ridiculous concept made number 4 on the reader picks.

No, I'm not going to pitch gun control here. Why bother? It's never going to happen.

My Best Dirty Harry look
S-E  photo by Kera Williams

Instead I'm going to relate one item from that class I took in 2012, the one involving guns, remember?

Before the class started, I wrote:  As Roy Detective Adam Madsen, the course instructor, put it, "We are a nation of superheroes. You never see Arnold Schwarzenegger lose or miss. We are raised to believe that we can go in and solve any problem."

Madsen then disarmed everyone in the room. OK, he didn't frisk us, but he said "Does anyone here have a gun?" and when Roy City Councilman Mike Stokes said "Yes," Madsen told him to go lock it up in his car, outside.

Why? Because, as Madsen said, during a tense situation anyone -- ANYONE -- can lose their head just a little, grab a gun and use it.

Anyone. Even Stokes, who has taken concealed carry classes, has a permit, the works.

When your blood is up, your eyes hazed with adrenalin, you don't think clearly. Throw a box of $5 popcorn? Sure.

Pull your gun and fire it?  Sure.

Anyone. And cops know this. Plenty of them have been involved in real shootings in recent years (click) including Madsen. They know the tunnel vision, the fear, the tension. Training is supposed to steer them down the narrow path of legal correctness, but it is debatable how well that works.

Which is why they don't allow real guns during gun training classes like the one I went to. Someone could get shot.

I suppose one could say this is a good argument for controls, or regulations, but as I said, that ain't going to happen. If someone in the gun industry commits the unpardonable sin of even thinking that maybe, perhaps, someday, someone should consider talking about some sort of regulation, however tiny, they're immediately banished (click.)

So why bother? Another day, another unfortunate incident involving a handgun.

What we REALLY need to do, yes, is crack down on that texting in movie theaters.

Union Station hits Los Angeles TV!!!

Rich Koski, Ogden Convention and Visitors
Bureau, talks to Tina Malave

 Union Station's business manager Tracy Ehrig was shepherding some folks with a TV camera around the grand lobby when I wandered in to work this morning.

Turns out they are from ABC-7 in Los Angeles filming a segment for the "Eye on LA" show.

Tina Malave, the reporter, said the show is normally aimed at foodies in LA, local history of LA, or folks looking for things to do in the big city. Sometimes that includes fun road trips, she said, so they're doing a segment on Ogden.

She said they have visited Snowbasin and Powder Mountain, visited the Dinosaur Park and spent some time on Historic 25th Street, looking at the businesses and many restaurants. Today they're touring Union Station.

The segment will air Jan. 25 at 6:30 p.m., she said, and while they don't stream the show on-line there may be segments of it available there. The show's web site is ABC7.com\eyeonla.

Too fun.

Tina Malave, Eye on LA, talks to Tracy Ehrig, Union
Station Business Manager