Night Used Up

[rejectomorph]

Turns out that the Pomona Public Library has an online collection of about 5000 old Frasher Foto postcards (all black-and-white, from what I've seen), many depicting odd corners of Southern California that one would not expect to have drawn the attention of a postcard publishing company. I mean, The Azusa Rainbow Angling Club? There are a few pictures of ships in L.A. harbor in the 1930s and 1940s, too, mostly small freighters very suggestive of Somerset Maugham tales. The scans are rather small, but then so was Southern California in those days.

Anyway, that's mostly what I did with my night. Slowly, my hard drive fills up with the evidence of a vanished world in which there were no Wal-Marts. I expect this computer to eventually be confiscated, as part of our WalMasters' program to eradicate all evidence of places which existed before 1987. In the meantime, I get to look at that evidence whenever I want. It proves I'm not crazy. I really saw such things!

Comments

[jourdannex.livejournal.com]

I had to add you after reading a link from someone elses LJ, I hope you do not mind.. These photos remind me of my grandmother's pictures of L.A. areas before everything took over..Huge lots and homes and gardens...horses...I remember next door to us the people had horses, and if you went out too late at night you ran into coyotes in your own driveway. No mini-malls, nothing but space, orange trees and blue skies. There are these hills that you go through on the 57 Freeway towards Brea and Yorba Linda. I have always prayed when I drove through that I would not see any impending signs of development. I wanted to just see the hills...the oaks on them...and the cows dotted. They are still there :) For now.

[rejectomorph]

I'm glad I got to see Southern California before so much of it was swallowed by sprawl, and before its old urban neighborhoods were diminished by the same process. It was great to be able to board a bus on a busy downtown street and then, twenty minutes later, be riding through an area where you might still glimpse a deer grazing on one of those voluptuous hillsides.