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.

Assignment: A Day's Shoot With A Graflex. Wonky lens, amazing results.

As I've said before, I like to do a one-camera-one-lens shoot from time to time.

It helps me focus on what I'm shooting, not what I'm shooting with. With two lenses you double the chances of having the wrong lens, while with one you look for subjects that fit your equipment.

So it was last week.

My friend Larry Carr and I are both proud owners of Graflex Cameras. These are the first single lens reflex cameras, made from the early teens into the late 50s by the same folks who gave us the vastly more famous Speed Graphic. Unlike the SLRs today (often digital), these are also large format -- the small ones used film two inches wide, while the bigger ones shot 4 by 5 inches or even 5 by 7.

Ours are the smaller ones, thank God. In any size, the Graflex is a bit of a bear to use.

There is nothing automatic. It has a complex system of winding the curtain until one of five slit widths is in place to expose the film.  You set a combination of slit width and spring tension to make a shutter speed, and the cameras we have don't even stop the lens down to take a picture after you focus. You open the lens to focus, then stop it down to shoot. Mostly, I selected high shutter speeds and wide lens openings so I didn't have to mess with it.

They are the fullest manual cameras made.

Overhead shot in the mall of a child playing.

Which of course is the fun.

Mine is an RB Graflex Junior, made about 1920. Larry's is a simple RB Graflex, made about 1947. The RB means it has a rotating back which can be turned to take either horizontal or vertical pictures. The viewfinder has a mask that shows you both options at the same time, with the lens covering enough to take either way. You have to remember which you have the camera set on, because nothing in the viewfinder tells you.

After I got a roll back for mine, Larry and I decided it would be fun to take ours to Salt Lake City for a day of shooting. So we did, both shooting black and white film. I was shooting cheap stuff, Arista EDU 400. Larry was shooting Fuji.

I should mention, the lens on mine is a Baush & Lomb made Zeiss Tessar, which would be a really good optic if it didn't have what looks like fungus inside it, and cleaning marks on the adhesive inside the lens.

Shopowner. Funky cameras are
great ways to make friends.

Still, the image on the viewfinder looks good. I had hopes, and have to admit I was pleasantly surprised. The images in scans look really good, sharp, nice bokeh (that out of focus part) and with a nice feel that an uncoated optic gives because of the way the light bounces around in them.

Plus, all the shots have out-of-focus background, mostly because I was shooting with an open lens so I could see on the ground glass. Even in bright sunlight I was using f-8. The lens is 5 1/2 inches, or about 135mm.

This is why so many old images taken with these cameras also have narrow depth of field, which helps isolate what you are shooting from the background. Camera reviews of modern digital cameras talk about this as a "professional" feature, but it used to be the way it was, and does make for nicer images.

Larry came up with a good tip for anyone shooting one of these. Since the shooting sequence is so complex, count "1, 2, 3" after every shot: 1 is to push the mirror return lever back down, 2 is to wind the shutter (two clicks!), and three is to wind the film.

This assumes (4) that you remembered to take the dark slide out in the first place. If not, go back and shoot the picture again.

So we had fun, and people everywhere commented on our cool cameras. How often does that happen with a digital, eh?

I'll shoot it some more. You should be working so well when you are 95, eh?

A literary bike rack

Sun peeks through clouds at tall buildings

The Salt Lake City Library has the most amazing light

Snap shot of a walker and a bike rack

Ken Sanders in his bookstore

Larry Carr

Union Station Gets Benched, But in a Good Way.

One of the many strongly graphic images in the film "Road to Perdition" is inside the Chicago train station. The young protagonist is sitting amid row after row after row of men reading newspapers.

Cody Wright takes a well-earned break on the bench he just finished

Such scenes probably happened often during the Depression. If you were unemployed, cold and tired, a train station offered a place to sit and not be bothered.

Scene from "Road to Perdition"

What you sat on was, of course, those amazing train station benches, golden oak finished in cigarette burned shellac that wore like iron. Chicago's main station still has a lot of them. Ogden's Union Station grand lobby was filled with them, too.

But no more. When the passenger trains went away, the benches went too. Some were cut in half lengthwise and now line the hallway leading to Union Grill. Others were used to line the main room at the Marshal White Center.

And still more were stored in the old UP Laundry Building, where we can't get at them because of asbestos danger.

But two were left in our lobby, subject to the trials and tribulations of time. They were pretty beat up after 90 years, pretty rough, even with pieces of wood missing.  They needed some love.

Unloading newly refinished bench

We tried the wood shop at the Clearfield Job Corps first. It turned out the benches needed specialized work that shop could not do. We contacted Ellis Planing Mill in Ogden, which referred us to Cody Wright in Willard.

Cody specializes in furniture and home restoration. He did the brick work on the lime kiln in Ogden Canyon and is the go-to guy to redo the windows, floors, doors or other finishings in that vintage Ogden house you are restoring around the Eccles Park in Ogden.

Pushing it through the door

Cody took the first bench, filled all the cracks, recut some new wood, tightened and glued and rebuilt, fitted the original (and some reproduction) brass feet, and put a new lacquer finish on that pretty nearly matches the original shellac.

Thursday it came back, and it is impossible to say how beautiful it is. The quarter sawn white oak is burnished to a lustrous buttery finish. The fit and finish is flawless. All the old cigarette burns are gone.

Just like new.

Cody said it would be impossible to make a bench like this today. Even if you could find a team of craftsmen to do the carpentry, wood carving and turning, you can't buy 16-foot quarter sawn white oak at any price. They don't have trees that big any more.

Second bench on its way to restoration

But we have two benches made out of it.  Hard to imagine, but when the Union Pacific built Union Station in 1924 they probably picked up the phone, called a factory and ordered dozens of these things, which the factory cranked out. They were standard railroad station furniture, built to last a lifetime.

These two lived 90 years, which is longer than most lifetimes, and are being rebuilt to last a second.

The first is done. Come on down and have a seat.

Cody Wright unloading the finished bench.

Naked Engines at Golden Spike

Worker marks out inspection squares on 119's steel housing.

PROMONTORY -- The two steam engines at Golden Spike National Historic Site are naked. Buck nacked. Nude. Undressed. Full Monty. Completely revealed.

Getting a pretty thorough going over, too.

The engines are exact working replicas of "Jupiter" and "119," which met cowcatcher-to-cowcatcher in Promontory on May 10, 1869. They were brought to the site in 1978 and have chugged to their meeting point faithfully ever since.

Like all steam engines, they need tender loving daily care, and they get that from an army of staff and volunteers. But like steam engines, even with the most tender loving care, not to mention the astonishingly gentle work they are asked to perform, they need a major look-through every now and then.

This is regardless of how far the engines have run or how hard they've worked. Steam engines are powered by steam under pressure. Put pressurized steam in a steel container, you get corrosion that builds up over time and has to be dealt with or the engine dies.

Dead steam engines are no fun, so there is a strict schedule of this work.

Every 15 years, to be precise. The first one was 20 years after the engines were brought to the site, which was pushing things, so this time the 15-year-schedule is being followed.

This is huge. They take everything off the engines -- all the fancy red and blue and gold and brass. All the valves and levers, bells and whistles, lights and levers, widgets whatnot.

119, naked like you've never seen her before

Inside each engine is 166 two-inch tubes that run from the firebox, through the main engine body to the front where the smokestack is. Those tubes are the heat exchanger, allowing the heat from the wood (Jupiter) and coal (119) fires in the engines to heat the water that makes the steam that drives the wheels.

Every one of those tubes had to be removed. The steel face plates they were mounted on must be carefully inspected for cracks, and new tubes installed.

In addition, the bodies of the engines, the giant tubes containing the fire and steam, must be carefully inspected for corrosion, wear, cracks and any other weakness. When we were there workers were carefully marking out 1,472 neat square inspection areas on each engine and grinding a spot in the center of that square down to bare metal.

Fron of 119 shows where tubes were removed

They'll then use ultrasonic inspection tools to test each spot, making sure the steel hasn't worn thin. Eventually the entire body of the engines will need to be replaced, but we hope not this time.

This takes a lot of work, but volunteers have been showing up, uninvited, asking to help out.

While a team from Union Station's Archive was there photographing the work Dec. 4 we met Rodney Lee, Seattle. Lee took three weeks off from his job to come to Utah, totally at his own cost, to help out. When I talked to him he was doing the glamorous work of preparing the smokestack of the Jupiter for repainting.

Rodney Lee, Seattle, takes a break.

He just loves the craftsmanship that went into the engines, he said. He's a bug on old mechanical stuff anyway. "The guys in the past years, they didn't have computers or computer milling machines, they were incredibly sharp."


Someone needs to make all that craftsmanship look its best. All the valves and other gear are cleaned, overhauled and polished or painted.

Jupiter's firebox and controls laid bare

All this work means the engines will not be available for the annual steam festival on New Year's Eve this year, which is a shame but a necessary one. Richard Carrol, the supervisor of the engine shop, said they expect the testing to be done by February, and then workers will have to scramble to have the engines back together, spick and span, up and running by May 1.

They need them dressed in their finest and out for their opening act May 10, after all.

119 with her cab removed and sitting on her tender.

119, getting a good going over. Her cab is removed and sitting on her tender.

The 119 as she stands today.

The 119 during 2010's steam festival

How she normally looks

Kid-Friendly Maintenance of Way Exhibit gets a major upgrade

Union Station's kid-friendly Maintenance of Way exhibit is getting an upgrade, both to make it more kid-friendly.

Holly DeHaan, Clinton, shows her nephew Owen Saunders, 2,
railroad ties in Union Station.

It already was a favorite of children. The Maintenance of Way exhibit is in the back of the Utah State Railroad Museum and includes a Gandy Dancer, a rail maintenance car, a baggage cart, and displays of tools the railroads used to keep their trains running.

Tools and carts can be boring for adults, but little kids love climbing all over them, pushing buttons, pulling levers and generally working off calories. My own grandkids really enjoy themselves.

To enhance the experience, Union Station is adding a couple of educational and interactive exhibits. One is a "Why don't trains crash" exhibit that has train signal lights kids can activate by pushing buttons. Want to know the signal for "stop!"  Push the button and see it.

Telegraph Exhibit has
the code.

Another shows railroad lines in and around Utah along with pictures of the train stations in major cities. Pushing a button lights up the route that serves that station.

Owen Saunders signals a train

One button does show a railroad line from Salt Lake City to Las Vegas, for example, and wouldn't it be nice if Amtrak would revive the Desert Wind so we wouldn't have to drive there?  And a train from Seattle to Ogden and Salt Lake while they're at it?  

OK, editorial rant over.

Amanda Felix, our museum manager, said other upgrades include new flooring around the Gandy Dancer (a push-car used in rail maintenance) and other exhibits so people wouldn't trip on the rails. A second phase will include iPad exhibits and a replica of a train office where kids can buy and sell train tickets and route trains around.

Museum Manager Amanda Felix checks out hobo signs

A station volunteer on the Gandy Dancer

Hobo Signs used by tramps to tell other
tramps about the area and people in it.