How many times do I say it? The last good day. I mean it, though. It’s been 50+ the last few days, but we’re due for cold and sleet and snow. The hammer. Sitting outside now in the gazebo at night, and not cold. Never happen again. Birch is here too, curled up in his usual chair.

Four days without the big twitch. Completely normal dog. What if it never happens again? Then it never happens again. And it’s something else, alas, but it’s always something. I just want him to be an old dog, not with any achy joints or pain he can’t tell us about, but old and slow and content. He still has a young dog’s energy; practically pulls me into the creek every morning. When EFTB (M) comes home he will leap and bark.

She always says “I wonder what’s going on in that little head” and I usually say “not a lot,” but maybe so. Maybe so.

It’s going to be a scant week, because . . . Holidays! I’ll have comments open, but I think you can understand why I want to step away for a bit and just let the site sit for a while. It’s been a month. It’s been a couple of months. It’s been many months. It’s been a year. I don’t buy into “new year new you” or think that anything changes when the year turns over, but for once I am absolutely certain it will, so.

But not yet. First, the Holidays.

Revised.

(SODS) OKAY let's look at LOTS OF TV SCREEN GRABS

Today we have a The Big Collection of inadvertant documentary.

Get it? Huh?

No?

It's Dragnet! Get it now?

Sigh

Dragnet episodes were titled "The Big (Noun) for years, a holdover from 40s nomenclature. This is from the old B&W eps, which are much different from the color series my generation remembers. They're damned good, better directed, and often quite grim. But this one began with a tour of LA restaurants. Shot at night.

Huddle:

Nothing consequential there now.

Ahoy:

Shatner supposedly hated the place.

Home of the famous Seasoning:

Some history:

In 1922 Lawrence "Lawry" Frank and Van de Kamp founded the Lawry's company and created the Tam O'Shanter Inn restaurant in the Atwater Village district of Los Angeles, California, which claims to be the oldest restaurant in Los Angeles still operated by the same family in the same location.

In 1938, the two opened Lawry's The Prime Rib on La Cienega Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

Holllld on. Wait a minute. Van de Kamp? Yes, you are correct! It's the name on the fish food packages.

They had to know they'd get sniggering jokes.

Cock as in "cocktails," apparently. "An awful lot of Hollywood deals were consummated there over martinis.  It was where a voice actress named June Foray met with two animation producers — Jay Ward and Bill Scott — and they told her they wanted her to play a new character named Rocky the Flying Squirrel."

A manly place, no doubt:

Nothing much there now.

Well, say no more:

Lita Baron sung for Cugat, among others. George DeWitt was known for hosting Name That Tune.

I always think this thing was ugly and looked battered.

Ah, the Pines.

Odd name for a Modernistic California eatery, but who cares.

The roll-call ended here, in this underwhelming cafeteria.

But an LA staple. Scraber's, if you can't make it out.

When I was younger, "cafeteria" had a bad rep. Institutional, brightly lit, Jell-o in little dishes in a tub of ice. Glop. I wish I'd seen the age of the Automat, and to be honest I'd love to wander into Scraber's for a cup of coffee and a piece of pie.

I'll bet everyone thought there'd always be cafeterias.

It’s 1946.

Again, the Los Angeles Times ads, because they’re so interesting. To me, anyway. And it’s MY SITE. So there.

The front page of the paper had an enormous photo of a mushroom cloud in the Pacific. Atoms were the future! Atomic everything! Even hearing aids.

And of course what goes well with an Olde Towne Crier, but Atoms?

“Let’s go down to the jewelry store and buy a record player.”

What the hell is that thing? “Does not connect to a radio.” So some of them did?

This is remarkable: a big apology for poor service.

WE SCREWED UP SORRY

It has always been a policy of United Air Lines to keep the people fully informed of what United is doing and planning to do.

Before the war, United talked about its fine service. It was fine service. We were proud of it. And our passengers appreciated it. They told us so!

Today, while our service aloft continues to merit approval, United's handling of its passengers -on the ground-—is not what it should be.

You probably have found it difficult to reach our offices by telephone, or if you have called in person you have found long lines of passengers waiting to be served. Often you may have found it impossible to get a seat on a United Mainliner, unless you have made a reservation well in advance.

We want you to know why... what we have done... and what we are doing about it.

Now we're all suspicious.

Something else you don’t see in modern papers, or anywhere else for that matter: ads for backyard poultry homes.

Of course, you put it together. Shingles extra.

What, am I supposed to go down to the Plane Store and buy one?

I understand the simple need to get the brand across, and get your name out there as a vanguard of high-tech and American know-how. I suppose it gave fliers a feeling of ultra-modernity, knowing they were on the 4. But was it really that important to advertise? This can’t be aimed at the airlines, because it looks as if they’d all signed up.

There were four civilian crashes of DSC-4s in 1946. FOUR. All but one had fatalities.

Kids today, they have no idea.

And they have no idea how much most merchants hated them. Hotels, they were used to it. Stores, restaurants, not so much. Unless it was a place that catered to tourists, you got a hard look.

“Yes, hello? I’m calling from the FTC.”

As it turns out, no, you don’t drink it.

It was a dye, but it didn’t look like a dye. How many people chugged it on a hot day I can only imagine.

Page-turners for the ladies:

About the first:

Around the corner from the elegant townhouses on Albion Place is Britannia Mews, a squalid neighborhood where servants and coachmen live. In 1875, it’s no place for a young girl of fine breeding, but independent-minded Adelaide Culver is fascinated by what goes on there. Years later, Adelaide shocks her family when she falls in love with an impoverished artist and moves into the mews. But violence shatters Adelaide’s dreams. In a dangerous new world, she must fend for herself—until she meets a charismatic stranger and her life takes a turn she never expected.

As for the other:

On June 28, 1946, Goodin published Clementine with Dutton. The novel is a coming-of-age story about a red-haired tomboy named Clementine. In a starred review, Kirkus Reviews called it "a chronology with funny, tender highspots, that manages growing pains without parody or maudlinity," concluding that it was a "very pleasant, lightly subsurface tale of adolescence, which sneaks up on you."[8] The novel was adapted into the film Mickey in 1948.

She was 23. She’d write four novels in total.

The Lie, about a mother who must pass her daughter off as her sister,[was Dutton's top fiction title for the fall of 1953. However, Kirkus reviewed it with much less enthusiasm. Goodin's final novel, Dede O'Shea, was released by Dutton on May 29, 1957. Of its eponymous heroine, Kirkus wrote, "A ragingly young Californian makes a pleasant heroine with an addiction to truth -- and consequences.”

Died in 1983, at 60.

Mickey:

That'll do. Thank you for your patience, and don't forget: there was a free Substack yesterday. Consider a paying subscription, as they say.