Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Time Travelling in Mar Vista
The faces, the clothes, the haircuts, the buildings and the landscape are both familiar and strange.
What is it with old black and white photographs? No matter how mundane, they seem to cross our senses of memory and history to place us smack-dab in that moment.
Those who enjoy such time travel, should visit sites like Shorpy and Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog.
The images below come from USC Digital Archives which I found thanks to Mark Crawford of the Marvista Historical Society.
How we have changed...
___________________________________________________________
The images above depict a mock bomb attack exercise in Mar Vista, taken by a Los Angeles Examiner photographer in the summer of 1951.
The last photograph, with the radio equipment, features Los Angeles City Councilman Harold Harby 1943-56 (standing with his bespectacled face turned away from the camera).
An ultra-conservative Democrat obsessed with the communist threat, Harby started and chaired the Harby Committee bent on "investigating" how Communism uses "modern" art to brainwash Americans.
A press-hungry sensationalist, Harby called modern art "stinkweed stuff" and attacked the whole idea of public housing as a "creeping cancer of socialism," helping to turn the LA city council into a right-wing cabal of sorts.
In fact, Harby was an instigator of the Los Angeles public housing war, one of the most vicious Red Scares of the domestic cold war. The Red Scare was used to cancel the ten-thousand-unit public housing contract with the federal government and to reverse city policy by toppling the pro–public-housing mayoral regime. Public housing's local defeats were circulated back to the national level, resulting in the demise of the program.
But Harby was much more than LA'a own McCarthy--he was also an inventor.
Oddly enough, there is an uncanny connection between his love of authoritarianism and censorship and his notions of animal husbandry.
Times Magazine reported that "In Los Angeles, Councilman Harold Harby invented a device to keep roosters from crowing by making it impossible for them to stretch their necks; when he tried it on a rooster, he found that it changed the crowing into a wail."
Little did Harby know that, despite the relentless attempts of folks like him to muzzle dissent and progress, the "wail" of the 60s and the subsequent revolution in American politics and culture were just around the corner.
________________________________________
Los Angeles Examiner Headline: "More than 500 Boy Scouts from Culver City, Palms, Mar Vista and Venice will clean debris from 10 miles of abandoned Pacific Electric right-of-way between La Cienega Blvd. and the ocean next Sat. Nov. 2"
Litterbug feature (Clean Community Crusade), 1957 Litterbug feature (Clean Community Crusade), 31 October 1957. Jimmy Kellogg -- 12 years; William Grissom -- 14 years; Larry Johnson -- 11 years; Karl Rundberg -- 11 years; John Davis -- 11 years; H.R. Garman.Caption slip reads: "Examiner. Date: 1957-10-31. Assignment: Clean Community Crusade. #7: More than 500 Boy Scouts from Culver City, Palms, Mar Vista and Venice will clean debris from 10 miles of abandoned Pacific Electric right-of-way between La Cienega Blvd. and the ocean next Sat. Nov. 2. Starting early in this phase of Los Angeles Beautiful's 'Clean Community Crusade,' are, l-r: Scouts William Grissom, 14; Jimmy Kellogg, 12; John Davis, 11; Scoutmaster H.R. Garman, and Scout Larry Johnson, 11".Caption slip reads: "Examiner. Date: 1951-10-31. Assignment: Clean Community Crusade. #61: More than 500 Boy Scouts from Culver City, Palms, Mar Vista and Venice will clean debris from 10 miles of abandoned Pacific Electric right-of-way between La Cienega Blvd. and the ocean next Sat. Nov. 2. Getting a head start on this phase of Los Angeles Beautiful's 'Clean Community Crusade,' are, l-r: Jimmy Kellogg, 12; William Grissom, 14; Larry Johnson, 11; City Councilman Karl Rundberg, and John Davis, 11".
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
