Quote:
Originally Posted by MichaelRyerson
union station, 1939
A woman speaks with a porter outside the baggage waiting room at Union Station
What's not to like about this beautiful shot?
USC digital archives/Dick Whittington collection
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Thank you
MR. I could look at that one over and over.
When my daughter was tiny (2 or 3) she said she used to think the waiting room chairs we "as big as apartments". LOL, kids.
paladino
Our many trips to see cousins in San Diego County all started off with getting to the station early so the kids could play and explore to their hearts' content (and get a Union Bagel) before boarding. Coming home was just heavenly. Most of my trips to Union Station when I was a kid were to pick-up out-of-town house guests. As our house was right on the beach, we got plenty of those.
Nice color view of the outdoor waiting room fountain. Do you remember when it was planted with scruffy looking plants 15 or 20 years ago? I'm so grateful they got it working again. Makes a big difference.
big orange landmarks
Quote:
Originally Posted by BifRayRock
Western view of Wilshire Boulevard looking toward Wilshire Boulevard Christian Church.
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usc digital( detail).
Cool, you caught them widening Wilshire. Up one side and down the other.
Here this section finished in 1928. The unsightly telephone poles are gone. The Wilshire Specials have sprung fully-growed outta the ground, but, Yikes!, no lane lines yet:
hollywoodphotographs.com
Quote:
Originally Posted by GaylordWilshire
Do tell, Sarah...
The Daily Trojan, 12-8-1927; USCDL
In Material Dreams Kevin Starr notes, refreshingly, that "[Sarah Bixby Smith] refused to be bitter over this abandonment by the man whose children she had supported and whom she had kept in such comfortable circumstances for these many years." It seems to me that she wouldn't have considered herself morally superior to her husbands and that she was intelligent enough to consider herself their equal in terms of being self-determining--that she would not have considered herself a victim, but a fully aware, self-determining participant in her own life. I hadn't thought that she was so weak-willed that she just couldn't say no to duplicitousness or to hopping into the sack with Paul Smith while she was still married to her first husband, or to any of their "caddish" behavior, or that she would have preferred to be considered as something other than a saint if her life were to be discussed 100 years later.
Per Artful Lives by Beth Gates Warren, "...[Paul Jordan] Smith was...offered a teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley, and because he was in the midst of a rather scandalous divorce (his second), he gladly seized the opportunity to escape [his previous post]. In due course, however, Smith's personal conduct once again provoked the public's ire. This time it was because of an affair he was conducting with the wife [Sarah] of the minister in whose Berkeley pulpit he had been substitute preaching. Smith, who indignantly maintained that the whole incident was a case of mistaken identity, took the opportunity to hyphenate his name.... However, the administrators at the University, unconvinced of his moral rectitude [which didn't seem to bother his new lover, Sarah, Mrs. Arthur Maxson Smith], insisted he forfeit his career as an academic. Jordan-Smith reluctantly complied, and as soon as his latest lover [Sarah] could obtain a divorce, the couple married and moved south to Claremont."
And according to Starr, "... the San Francisco newspapers spread the story of the two Reverend Smiths and the one Mrs. Smith across the front pages...". All of which is readily available to anyone who wants to find a fuller picture of the great, though not inhuman, lady. Little digging required.
There are quite a few pages describing Sarah marital exploits in Starr's book,
which can be read online here.
I do wish I had a picture of Kevin Starr's description "of an evening on Los Feliz Boulevard: over pasta and red wine, with everyone, including the plumpish Sarah, dancing Nijinsky-like at the end of the evening, Jake Zeitlin leading the dance like an Hebraic satyr cavorting on a Samarian hillside to the cymbals and lyre of a passing caravan."
Now if I had called you "hysterical"....
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When not jousting with straw men ("she wouldn't have considered herself a victim"...an argument I didn't make), Bixby Smith continues to be trivialized as "Sarah" (men are referred to by their last names, but Bixby Smith is forever just "Sarah"), not much more than a bed mate: "his latest lover [Sarah]", "Sarah (sic) marital exploits", "his new lover, Sarah" or a buffoon, "the plumpish Sarah, dancing Nijinsky-like". "Do tell, Sarah".
BTW, "as soon as his latest lover [Sarah] could obtain a divorce, the couple married", rather finesses the situation. Bixbey Smith had her divorce, she was waiting for the final decree when she met her second husband in Berkeley (a weird legal lull that's been mercifully shortened these days). Is that the only point all this giggling prurience has been about? A bit slim and far from your usual standard. Man, if that's "LA's dark side" we haven't got one.
Kevin Starr cannot provide you with the wished-for photo, he wasn't there to take one. I'd take him with a big grain of salt anyway as he refers to Bixby Smith as "apolitical". She was very proud of being the granddaughter of Reverend George Hathaway, abolitionist, firm friend of suffragist Lucy Stone and a "conductor" on the Undeground Railway back in Skohegan Maine. As an active member of her Progressive political circle Bixby Smith seems to have born with good grace the harassment by the authorities, including the Feds (plenty of
noir there if you care to look).
Anyway, you haven't provided us with anything yet that would cause Bixby Smith to be remembered as even a minor poster child for sexual profligacy, rather than (or even in addition to) her actual and considerable accomplishments (no offense to anyone here, but I doubt we'll still be widely read 75 years after our deaths) or your reasons for trying to. There seems to be something about Bixby Smith that really pushes your buttons. What's going on? Is it Bixby Smith's politics? Echos of Charles Mills Gayley's famously-deplored priggishness?
And LOL, you're more than welcome to call me "hysterical"
GW, but until I exhibit some hysteria it won't mean much. But do it anyway, if you like, just please don't call me pigeon pie and eat me up (as my gran used to say). You've already labeled me a pendant, a buzzkill, ridiculous, a hagiographer and patronizing. Since you've been so generous, you lovable old codger, maybe I'll toss them all in a hat and pick a new username.
A note on the Bixby money: Bixby Smith was an heir to the Bixby fortune, but it seems a very minor part of it. She was the daughter of Llwellyn Bixby (not George, as one of your sources states). I seem to remember it was the Long Beach Bixbys who ended up with the the big bucks. The Llwellyn Bixby house at Court and Hill is indicative of their place in the scheme of things. Bixby Smith seems to have had enough to maintain her childhood middle to upper-middle-class lifestyle without too much worry. Her houses in Claremont and Los Feliz, while certainly comfortable homes, do not qualify as "mansions" by any definition used in LA then or now, no matter how Starr cares to spin it.