Here’s a Union Pacific menu we haven’t seen before. We have seen the color photo on a 1929 menu in the Art Nouveau series. Most of the cover photos from that series were also used in this series, which I call Moderne, but could just as accurately be called Art Deco.
Click image to download a 1.5-MB PDF of this menu.
The Art Nouveau series featured 17 different cover photos, but three of them were nearly identical shots of a scene in Bryce Canyon while three others were nearly identical shots of the Great White Throne in Zion. I am pretty sure only one of those photos of each scene made it to the Moderne series. One of the other photos shows a deck and stonework that was part of the Grand Canyon Lodge that was built in 1927. The lodge burned in 1932 and was not rebuilt until 1936, so I don’t think UP would have made a menu with that photo in the Moderne series, whose covers were printed only in 1935.
That leaves twelve photos, of which I’ve so far presented eleven. The twelfth, which I’ve seen but haven’t collected, is Mount Rainier from Mirror Lake.
The text on the back covers of the Art Nouveau and Moderne Longs Peak menus is the same, but the black-and-white photos are different. The Art Nouveau menu photo shows Odessa Lake and Notchtop Mountain, while this one shows Dream Lake. The photo with Notchtop Mountain is more dramatic.
Click image to download a 487-KB PDF of this envelope.
The back of this particular menu says it was printed in September, 1935, but that only refers to the outside cover. The inner menu says it was used for the “evening meal” in the coffee shop of the Challenger. There’s no date, but it came in an envelope that was postmarked July 9, 1936.
Handwriting on the envelope says it was mailed by Dr. Paul Hagen in Green River, Wyoming, to Mrs. Paul Hagen, 816 Woodland Avenue, Crookston, Minnesota. The internet tells us that Paul Olsen Hagen was born in Winnebago, Minnesota in 1881 and began practicing dentistry in Crookston in 1912. He continued there until he died of a heart attack at the age of 64 in 1945.
Paul’s wife, the former Inez Stickley, was born in Minnesota in 1885 and lived to be 94, dying of old age in 1979, possibly in the house they shared. That house was built in 1916, so the Hagens were probably the first owners. It’s a beautiful place on a large, 0.4-acre lot.
We don’t know why Dr. Hagen was taking the Challenger to California (or maybe Utah), but it’s possible he was attending a convention of the American Dental Association. Before boarding the Challenger, he probably would have taken Great Northern’s Winnipeg Limited from Crookston to St. Paul and then the Chicago & North Western, possibly the Nightingale, to Omaha. Dentistry pays pretty well, so he must have chosen the Challenger rather than the Los Angeles Limited because he was frugal, a trait that is valued by Norwegians in the upper Midwest.