[PRCo] Travel films

[Schneider Fred]

I'll take the blame for something that Bob Rathke chose to send to  
friends but didn't perhaps wish to take the flack for sending to the  
list.   He sent the Chicago travel town flick to a few friends but  
not to the list.   I think it is a great item ... the kid of stuff my  
7th grade geography teacher used to show and I would look wistfully  
for the streetcar to appear.

The first one is Chicago in 1948.   That was the year of the Railroad  
Fair.  I had asked my dad if he thought we could go see that fair.   
Well, my mother's favorite cousin happened to live in Palos Park,  
Illinois and my grandma's sister lived on 63rd Street on the South  
Side of Chicago.   It didn't take a whole lot of arm twisting on the  
part of this eight-year-old.   We wandered north through Erie,  
Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Hamilton, Owen Sound, then west to Detroit,  
Dearborn (my first of three visits to the Ford Museum and Dearborn  
Village) and on to Chicago.   I remember being stuck in traffic on US  
route 20 on a summer Sunday evening going no where when a South Shore  
train filled with beach goers slipped past us in the dark at full bore.

And the Chicago Railroad Fair.   There were some diesels on display  
but the message was that there were a lot of miles left in those  
steam engines and they would be around for many years to come.   The  
railroads wouldn't scrap that investment overnight.   Yeah.  Right.    
Who would have believed that five or six years later, for all  
intents, they would be gone and ten years later only a handful of  
teakettles would be left running excursion trains.

As you look at the film that Rathke found ... and thanks Bob ... you  
will find a couple of red trolleys and some beautiful and colorful  
Santa Fe and Northwestern diesels.

http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=ZaMGqzkNwLY

Best thing about what Bob found are all the related travelogues.
And Victoria and Vancouver in 1936 .... you will see a few streetcars.

http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=wo95I5uKbyY&feature=related

The next one starts with the Sunset Limited or the Argonaut in steam  
crossing the Huey Long Bridge into "Nawlins".    Four minutes, six  
seconds into the film you are treated to Canal Street when it had  
four streetcar tracks.   The second film talks more about food and  
why tourists went there.   They show Antoinnes Restaurant and tell us  
it is famous .... well, not with Fred Schneider after a super  
arrogant waiter told me if I wanted him to translate the French menu  
I didn't deserve to eat in his restaurant.

http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=WuvsO4Uqev0

http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=07IAAwhqYkk&feature=related

And Los Angeles in 1935 when it was a small town.....48 seconds into  
the film is a nice color view of an L A Railway Standard.   Three  
minutes in we see a PE 600 in downtown Hollywood.   Los Angeles [the  
city itself] had 100,000 people in 1900, about 1.4 million in 1935,  
about 3.9 million today (second to New York City's 8.3 million).   In  
1935 the population was dominantly white with although some came from  
Mexico and some were left over from the time when Mexico owned that  
part of the U. S. A.   If any of you know Dave Garcia, the air brake  
expert from Orange Empire Railway Museum, his ancestors were in what  
is now southern California when it was Mexican-owned and he claims  
his great grandfather could remember the lowering of the red, green  
and white flag and the raising of the red, white and blue flag.    
Most of the black population in Los Angeles moved there looking for  
jobs in the ship yards in the Depression and World War II.   The film  
strip in 1935 shows a city demographically radically different from  
today.

http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=egHq5t7kH0Y

Fred Schneider