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Social History: The California Palace of the Legion of Honor and Alma de Bretteville Spreckels…

March 15, 2012 By Michael L. Grace 1 Comment

The California Palace of the Legion of Honor, often called Legion of Honor by San Franciscans, refers to both the fine art collection and the building that houses it. It was a gift from Alma de Bretteville Spreckels and is a three-quarters scale imitation of the Palais de la Légion d’Honneur in Paris. Built on a former cemetery, the plaza of the Legion of Honor is also the western terminus of the Lincoln Highway, the first road across America.

Social History: Alma de Bretteville Spreckels (March 24, 1881 – August 7, 1968), known both as “Big Alma” (she was 6 feet (1.8 m) tall) and “The Great Grandmother of San Francisco”, was a wealthy socialite and philanthropist who, among her many accomplishments, persuaded her first husband, sugar magnate Adolph B. Spreckels to donate the California Palace of the Legion of Honor to the city of San Francisco, California.

She was born Alma Charlotte Corday le Normand de Bretteville in the Sunset District portion of San Francisco, the fifth of six children of Viggo and Mathilde de Bretteville, two Danish immigrants. The family was very poor during her early childhood; but, in contrast to Viggo who claimed to be descended from Franco-Danish nobility (he claimed Napoleon Bonaparte as an ancestor) and used that as an excuse to avoid working while simultaneously deriding the “nouveau riche” of California, Mathilde had enough ingenuity and business sense to open a combination Danish bakery–laundry service–massage parlor which became the family’s source of income.

ELINOR SMITH – THE FLYING FLAPPER – 1920s

April 19, 2010 By Michael L. Grace Leave a Comment

Great Video on Elinor Smith.

Elinor Smith was born in 1911. She knew she was born to fly at the age of 6 when she took her first airplane ride. She started taking lessons at the age of 8. She was fortunate at that time to have parents who supported her in what she wanted to do. Her mother didn’t want to deny her daughter opportunities just because of her gender and her father had always had a passion for planes. These things helped her in her quest to fly. Elinor set many aviation records. Most of these records came because of her age. She was youngest woman to fly solo at the age of 15. At the age of 16, she became the youngest person to earn a pilot’s license in the U.S. On October 21, 1928 at the age of 17, Elinor flew under four East River Bridges in New York City. The bridges she flew under were the Queensboro, the Williamsburg, the Manhattan, and the Brooklyn Bridges. She is the only person ever to accomplish that feat. Her first world record was the endurance record she set on January 31, 1929 of 13 hours, 16 minutes, and 45 seconds. During that flight was the first time she had ever landed at night. In April of 1929, Elinor again broke the endurance record making it now 26 hours, 23 minutes, and 16 seconds.

January 2010 – Website Of The Month – THE WARD LINE

January 28, 2010 By Michael L. Grace Leave a Comment

January 2010 – Cruising The Past Website Of The Month – THE WARD LINE

We applaud Michael Andelson’s THE WARD LINE terrific website!

The Ward Line is best remembered for the ill-fated Morro Castle of 1930.

Andelson’s site not only explores the Morro Castle disaster but gives you a unique history of The Ward Line.

Footage from the fire of 1934 to the aftermath of the Morro Castle luxury liner.

The turbo-electric liners Morro Castle and Oriente were the largest and finest Ward Line ships ever built, though hardly the most successful.

Launched in the early stages of the Great Depression, the so-called “millionaire’s yachts” were fast, well-appointed, and safer than most ships of their era.

On the Oriente in 1939 – The bar of the Oriente of 1930 was one of the few shipboard locations that betrayed her Art Deco origins. All in all, the interiors of the Morro Castle and Oriente were quite traditional.

But a strange series of circumstances led to the Morro Castle’s destruction by fire in September 1934, resulting in the loss of 134 lives– the largest loss of life at sea in peacetime in U.S. history.

This tragedy has been the subject of many articles, books, and television programs, so this page is dedicated solely to images and memorabilia related to the Morro Castle and her sister.

Hopefully, these images give a better insight into the ship before her tragic loss– the “feel” of the ship, how she was advertised, and life onboard the Ward Line’s most infamous liner.

The Morro Castle, like the Titanic, was a scene of great tragedy.

GOODBYE 1929: The Death of the Roaring Twenties. HELLO 2009: The beginning of the second great recession a.k.a. “depression”…? History does repeat itself.

January 10, 2009 By Michael L. Grace Leave a Comment

Pictured here are seven sections of the California Limited ready to depart from Los Angeles for Chicago in 1929.

A “section” meant an extra train. There were six extra all-Pullman trains leaving Southern California — a total of seven trains, with over a 1000 passengers, and nearly 100 pullman, dining and observation cars.

GOODBYE 1929: The Death of the Roaring Twenties. HELLO 2009: The beginning of the second great recession a.k.a. “depression”…? History does repeat itself.

Where were you when the market crashed last October?

A Pullman porter makes up a berth (the lower of a sleeping car section) in the 1920s.

In 1929, passengers were traveling all over America. Over 100,000 passengers a night were accommodated by the Pullman Company in sleeping cars. There were over 35 million revenue passengers in 1929 along. For each passenger there were crisp linen, green curtains, a clothes hammock and a smiling white-jacketed porter.

Santa Fe’s CALIFORNIA LIMITED heading for Los Angeles and Hollywood in the 1920s.

Many were aboard Santa Fe’s all-Pullman Deluxe CALIFORNIA LIMITED when the crash hit. Passengers went from millionaires to paupers as the train headed across New Mexico and Kansas.

We all know that history repeats, but do we really believe that? Time will tell.

A wonderful new youTube video on the 1929 Crash. It looks like a “retro” version of the current crash. Partying, the crash and then poverty. Only the times have changed.

In 1929, many people were traveling aboard Santa Fe’s all Pullman train, the deluxe California Limited (eventually to be replaced as the deluxe train by the Chief and then the Super Chief in the 1930s), from Chicago to Los Angels when Wall Street Crashed.

The dining car on the CALIFORNIA LIMITED.

Waiters stand at attention in the dining car. The dining car steward is seen in the background. All waiters aboard American trains were African-Americans. Like Pullman porters they struggled with low salaries and management resistance toward unionization. They relied heavily on tips and were the backbone of the African-American middle class.

The California Limited was one of the named passenger trains of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway.

The All-Pullman train was a true “workhorse” of the railroad.

It was assigned train Nos. 3 & 4, and its route ran from Chicago, Illinois to Los Angeles, California.

Operating seven sections of the Limited was common, and during peak travel periods as many as 23 westbound and 22 eastbound sections departed in a single day.

Lounge Car – With the dining car steward supervising waiters who were serving passengers tea and cake. There was no liquor served aboard the trains during the 1920s. Prohibition was the law. But bootlegged booze was common.

The line was conceived by company president Allen Manvel as a means to “…signify completion of the basic [Santa Fe] system…”

When “Deluxe” was Deluxe.

Manvel felt he could attract business and enhance the prestige of the railroad by establishing daily, first-class service from Chicago to the West Coast.

All single room Pullman Car.

The California Limited, billed as the “Finest Train West of Chicago,” made its first run on November 27, 1892, with five separate trainsets making continuous round trips on a 2½-day schedule (each way).

Publicity shot of a single room. Waiting for a sophisticated lady passenger.

The California Limited was the first of Santa Fe’s name trains to feature Fred Harvey Company meal service en route. The later trains also offered all of the amenities of the day including air conditioning, an onboard barber, beautician, steam-operated clothing press, even a shower-bath.

The Limited was also the first train in the Santa Fe system to have its observation cars fitted with illuminated “drumheads,” which bore the train’s name juxtaposed over the company’s logo.

The California Limited was permanently removed from service on June 15, 1954, giving it the distinction of having had the longest tenure of any train making the Chicago-Los Angeles run within the Santa Fe system.

The Pullman Company, founded by George M. Pullman, provided nearly all the overnight sleeping accommodations aboard American trains. They were the largest employer of Africa-Americans who were porters, maids and buffet car attendants on the deluxe Pullman limited trains. At one time they numbered over 8,000.