Amazing Treasures That Just Show Up

Some days you dig and dig and dig and never know what you found, if anything. The purported grave of Alexander the Great is one such experience. (click).

Then there's the opposite: You walk into the office and there's a treasure, just sitting there.

In this case, it was a miniature version of a steamer trunk, about 6 inches wide and 18 inches long, green with brass-colored edging. Tracy Ehrig, our business manager, was in the fault where we keep all our artwork and said it was just sitting there.

Who put it there? No clue. Union Station has been owned by Ogden since 1978 and in that time has had several directors. The last one, Bob Geier, said he has no memory of this little trunk. Tracy, who has been here a number of years, didn't know about it either.

No number on it to indicate it was ever received officially. No record in our files. It's just: Here.

What's in it. Wow, cool stuff.

There's a bunch of newspapers from Omaha, Nebraska, dated 1944, a few magazines from 1949, several WWII ration books with stamps still inside, a book that helps someone in the navy recognize naval vessels from their silhouette, and a bunch of letters and a telegram.

There's a band that would have been pinned around a soldier's arm with "S.P." on it, for "shore patrol," the navy's cops. There's a black silk band with "US Coast Guard" written on it.

The interesting thing is none of this stuff is local to Utah. The letters are either mailed to, or from, Omaha addresses. The telegram is from Gentry S. Cannon who is wiring home from San Francisco on April 14 that he'll be home Sunday the 16th at 6:45 p.m, which puts the telegram in 1944. An envelope shows Gentry  in the Navy, serving on the USS Cambria, so he is probably coming home on leave.

(A side note to some folks today who may not know what a telegram is: Back before instant messaging, and when telephones were an expensive novelty that many folks did not have, a way to send word quickly to someone was a telegram.

(It was like you see in Western movies where a telegraph operator taps out morse code on a key, but by the 1940s it was more modern. You paid by the word, your message was typed or keyed into a teletype machine like a typewriter, it came out of another teletype machine at the receiving end where the message was pasted, or copied, onto a piece of paper and delivered to your recipient.

(As telephones became more common, telegrams lost favor. Now Western Union mostly just sends money for people.)

All this stuff is great fun, but also educational. The envelopes only contain receipts or bills, but those are a window into daily life in the 40s. Gentry Cannon was paying on a loan to the State Finance Company in 1945. He paid $15.83, which included 74 cents interest and $15.09 on the principal of the loan. It may seem funny to be borrowing less than $100 in the first place, but back them $75 was a decent week's wages, about the same as borrowing $1,000 today.

I love this book recognizing ships. It has a "Restricted" classification, meaning I shouldn't let it fall into enemy hand, I guess. On the other hand, all the ships in it are long gone. The Scharnhorst and Tirpitz didn't last the war.

There's a fun booklet called "The Home Volunteer's Defense Manual" full of advice on how you, as a consumer, can help win the war by -- get this -- being thrifty.

Remember how, when the so-called "War On Terror" started after 9-11 President Bush said the thing Americans could do to help was "go shopping." Spend money, burn up the credit cards, boost the economy to generate taxes?

During WWII it was the opposite. The production of war materials and weapons was a very real thing to civilians because the entire resources of the nation were put to the effort. The book notes that it takes the steel of 500 refrigerators to make one Army battle tank, and we needed all the tanks we could make, so it has advice on how to make your fridge last longer.

Ditto on preparing tough cuts of meat, using up leftovers, making home tools and appliances last longer, and on and on. Everything made a difference. People were urged to save cooking fats to make bombs with.

So it's a box full of really interesting stuff. I could spend a day reading the newspapers, which are all about the D-Day invasion. I need to research those ration stamps and see what one could buy with them.

Meanwhile, we'll be formally adding the whole to our collection. It may have just showed up, but it's staying here now.

TBT- 100 years ago around Union Station

Throwback Thursday on Facebook is a time of old pictures, mostly, so here's a few from Ogden's Union Station going back quite a ways.

This one, showing our Grand Lobby, breaks my heart. Would you look at those chandeliers? Gorgeous things.

A few of of thought this picture had been photoshopped, but no. This is an actual historic photo, courtesy of the Union Pacific's history library, showing the Union Station's lobby as it looked when the place was finished, 90 years ago.

Those amazing chandeliers lit the lobby for years and years. What happened to them?

We'd love to know. I am told they were shipped out to be refurbished and never came back. Melted down for the war effort during WWII? No clue.

We are working to put a few of those benches back. We'll never have them all -- a lot are gone, and we need the space clear for events -- but two will be there on a permanent basis, both for the historic value and, frankly, just a good place to sit.

One was returned from restoration in December and the second will be back this month. We'll be announcing its coming with great fanfare, of course. Watch this space.

ROUGH TOWN

From the Jan. 8, 1915 Salt Lake Telegram

Ogden's downtown is beyond family friendly these days, with cafes and even a maternity shop. But it wasn't always so. The area's rough reputation was well-deserved. The street was so tough that one preacher even suggested someone dig a tunnel under it, all the way from Union Station to Washington Boulevard, just so travelers wouldn't have to see all the shenanigans going on.

100 years ago today Edward Hart found out the hard way. He was standing at the intersection of Commercial Alley (now Kiesel, I think) and 24th Street when someone hit him on the head, stole his money -- $20 was a sizable sum back then -- and gold watch, and ran off.

The police found the watch in a pawn shop, where it had been sold for $6.

Toys of the Past: Funny sounds, smiling faces, fun golf

Some of the most fascinating stuff in the Effie Hopkins collection is the junk, the ephemera that I'm sure she didn't give more than a second thought when she was tossing it in the box.

Effie, you may recall, was a Pleasant View farmer's wife who saved newspaper clippings. About 6 cubic feet of her collected clips were donated to Union Station and I've spent the last two years sorting, pondering, and enjoying.

In addition to news clips of current events, politicians, movie stars and the like, Effie saved a few of the random things that most folks toss as the years go by.

Really, who needs this junk?

We do. Mundane stuff from the past is most interesting today because it is usually what gets tossed.

Among the masses of clips I found these three items: A picture, a golf score card, and a Hostess Bread ad with a piece of chain?

Yeah, weird.

The golf card is easy. Apparently on aug. 29, 1962, someone played a round of miniature golf at Lagoon. The course was a fixture but was taken out in 2009 to make way for one of the new high-adventure rides the park leans towards these days. Why play golf when you can be turned upside down 200 feet in the air?

The names of the holes are fun: Tee off, Billiard Shot, Flower Hole and, of course, the Loop-the-Loop guaranteed to lose your ball in the pond nearby.

Who was playing? the initials of the players don't help. Effie had a son, Donald, so maybe that's the D, but who was B? Her daughter was Virgie.

Then there's this picture with two women. Can we assume that the older woman is Effie? I'd like to.

Effie Hopkins?

According to the back, the picture was taken at Lagoon on June 10, 1961, so visiting the amusement park was probably an annual event for the Hopkins clan. Effie died in 1965.  I wonder if that is her daughter next to her with the classic 50s and 60s pearl choker.

The convenient easel!

The back of the picture says it was taken by a Photomatic machine, produced by the International Mutascope Corporation. A mutascope was a  type of movie picture viewer that showed you a "movie" by flipping through cards as you turned a crank, and the Mutascope Corporation manufactured a lot of arcade machines of various types. You can read more about them here (click.) 

These Photomatics were the Polaroid of their day. You could see them in stores, bus stations and like. When my kids were small I took them to K-Mart, which had one, along with a stack of quarters and have four or five strips of photos of each of us made. All framed, they made a funky collage.

Modern photo booths are digital. The Photomatic machines used chemistry to produce actual photographic prints after you sat down and watched the light flash at you four times. The process took a couple minutes to complete before your prints dropped out. The machine delivered the finished print in a cheap metal frame (this one is rusting) so the mechanics inside must have been pretty interesting.

Finally is this Swiss Warbler bird call.

A Photomatic

I remember these things being sold at novelty shops and off of racks of cheap toys at the grocery store.

Do we dare try it?

Considering the age of this one, and obvious rust, I'm a little leery of trying it, but I did find a  Youtube video (click) of someone allegedly making one work. The instructions say to balance it against the roof of your mouth with your tongue. I have a vague memory of trying one as a child and succeeding only in spitting it out as I blew.

This one was part of the post-war stream of cheap junk produced in Japan and flooding American drug store toy shelves until the Japanese got smart and started producing high tech computers, cameras and cars.