We’ve previously seen UP booklets on California from 1915 and 1921, which had similar (though not identical) covers but different text and photos inside. However, they both covered the entire state, including the redwoods, the Bay Area, the Sierras, and southern California. This booklet is focused only on the latter region, meaning “Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Barbara, Pasadena, Long Beach, Riverside, Santa Ana, [and] Redlands.”
Click image to download a 11.1-MB PDF of this 36-page booklet.
The booklet has a lot of photos, but they look like someone just discovered photoshop. Almost every photo is really two photos, one inlaid over the other. For example, pages 12 and 19 show pictures of California highways, and as if to reinforce that they are highways, someone has pasted photos of cars which were apparently driven by drunkards as they are not going straight down the roads.
I don’t see a print date on the booklet, and it mentions that the 1932 Olympics will be held in Los Angeles. But the locations of the Olympics are decided years in advance. More telling are statements about the weather in 1921 and 1922 combined with a promise that Union Pacific’s hotels in Bryce and Zion will be “completed in the spring of 1924.” This dates the booklet to 1923.
Today is the tenth anniversary of the birth of Streamliner Memories. Except for a two-month hiatus last year, I’ve posted every day during that time, a total of nearly 3,600 posts with 4,880 PDFs of railroad memorabilia and documents. The research I do for these posts has led to articles in Minnesota History, the Great Northern Goat, the Streamliner, and the Railroadiana Express.
In 2014, I began a tradition of posting Union Pacific items on August 1, with a particular focus on identifying all of UP’s photo menu covers. Later this month, I’ll post two new Moderne-series covers, one new Black-and-White-series cover, and one new wraparound color photo menu with a scene in Colorado. My UP Menu Checklist now includes 130 wraparound color photo menus, 15 more post-war color photo menus whose photos don’t wrap around to the back, 17 Art Nouveau menus, 12 Moderne menus, 10 black-and-white menus, a dozen Howard Fogg menus, four Patriotic menus, and numerous others for a total of more than 240 unique menu covers.
I have practically run out of items from my own collection, so I much appreciate the scans of items that people have contributed to this web site. I hope I’ll be able to keep posting new items for another year or more.
Happy anniversary. Really enjoy the site.
Congratulations on ten years of doing this fascinating work. I never fail to learn something after looking at whatever you post, and I especially enjoy your comments on the history of a route, or how a train compared to the other trains run by the railroad, not to mention how it stacked up against the competition.
And for those railroads that reused out-of-date photos from years earlier, employed overly creative descriptions, implied that not-yet-delivered equipment might be seen in service, failed to use a logical layout, or neglected to describe just how lacking their third rate train might be, you always manage to catch the details, and convey to your readers in the dryest and most droll terms exactly what they’ve done, and why they most likely did it.
Thank you for sharing these from your collection and those you’ve been loaned. They will continue to be of interest many years henceforth.
rewrite and RailwayExpress,
Thanks for your support. I just noticed I had originally planned to post this on August 1, so I wrote about the 10th anniversary. Later, I moved it to August 5 but neglected to move the anniversary stuff to the August 1 post. Doesn’t really matter, but that is why it seems to be confused about the date.