Just because you’re snowed-in here-and-now doesn’t mean you wouldn’t have been in similar circumstances there-and-then. In this case, the passenger train “City of San Francisco” has been stranded in over ten feet of snow after a blizzard within the legendary Donner Pass. The travelers survived this journey, unlike their fabled predecessors, the legendary Donner Party […]
MORE ...A foreign spy is arrested in a city park by FBI agents. The papers read, “two American citizens were key figures in the spy network. Further arrests are expected shortly.” That’s one strike against the daily enemy. The Daily Enemy, an early 1960’s anti-spy film produced by the US Department of Defense, is a warning […]
MORE ...A newsreel marking the protest over the Griffith Park fire disaster of 1933, where 29 workers were killed while widening roads in Los Angeles. The fire was one of the worst in the city’s history at that time.
MORE ...I need some faces there that can show soul in their eyes. – Cecil B. DeMille Produced in 1935, Hollywood Extra Girl depicts the life of an extra and what it takes to move up the next rung of the ladder. It stars the iconic director Cecil B. DeMille whose brash dramatics fit perfectly within […]
MORE ...In this short piece from 1953, experience the raw power of nuclear weaponry. Watch the US government test soldiers in the unbearable heat of California’s deserts to observe the effects on men and equipments, launched from the barrel of a mobile cannon. MILITARY SCIENCE Tough Test for Men and Equipment Amid temperatures averaging 120 degrees […]
MORE ...From a live broadcast in 1959 on KTTV in Los Angeles, Skeets McDonald and Joe Maphis perform a countrified version of Nat King Cole’s Mona Lisa. Performing on Town Hall Party, a show broadcast over radio and television during the 1950s, became something of a hometown Grand Ol’ Opry for the large community of Okies […]
MORE ...Brooklyn Goes to San Francisco, produced in 1956, is a guided tour of mid-1950s San Francisco through the eyes of an authentic Brooklynite. Narrated by Phil Foster, best know for playing Laverne’s father Frank DeFazio on 1970s sitcom Laverne & Shirley, wisecracks and a classic New York drawl counterpoint panoramas of the Golden Gate City’s […]
MORE ...1945’s March of Progress, produced by the Key System, a privately owned streetcar system owned by business magnate Francis “Borax” Smith, lays out a selective albeit fascinating historical view of a growing California. Take a trip from the early years of Spanish missions and Gold Rush boomtowns to the modern era, where cities like San Francisco […]
MORE ...Born in 1925, Jimmy Pruett, a lifelong resident of Los Angeles, California, grew up blind. In his youth, he learned both guitar and piano, developing his own unique style by the age of nine. It was around then that country artist Stuart Hamblen discovered Pruett and gave him a spot on his radio show on […]
MORE ...In this short newsreel segment, witness legendary horserace jockey Willie Shoemaker win his first of 8,833 victories. It was 1951 at Golden Gate Fields in Albany, California, just north of Oakland, that the teenage Shoemaker embarked on a career in which he would dominate the field for 29 years. Born in Fabens, Texas in 1931, […]
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