Portland Ford Building

Portland Ford Building
2505 SE 11th Avenue at Division

My post about the Ford V-8 prompted Posthip Scott to point out that there is a Ford Building in Portland as well (Ford built assembly plants all over the country. There's probably one near you). This one was built in 1914 to build Model-T's. This was just 4 years after the Model-T started production. It operated for 20 years until the Model-A and the Great Depression came along.

It's been converted to office / retail space, which to my mind is a much better use of an old building than public storage, which is what the Ford building in Seattle has been reduced to.

Alicia Nagel Creative has a blog post about their new digs here.

Google Streetview via Posthip Scott.

1932 Ford V-8

How traffic tickets were handled. Excerpt from: 1932 - The Invention of the Ford V8 Engine
This excerpt is only a couple of minutes long and is a bit curious. The whole video is an hour and while it is enjoyable enough, it doesn't give any insight into the business of casting the engine block.
    Ford did spend better than 600 million dollars to build a new factory to build the Model A with its V-8 engine. And here I thought the billion dollars being spent on automobile factories these days was big money. If Ford built his factory today it would cost over 8 billion dollars, which is as much as is being spent to build the biggest computer chip factories now.

Old Ford Assembly Plant in Seattle

Ford also built an assembly plant in Seattle, but the depression was even worse on the West Coast than it was back East. It closed almost immediately. I'm not sure they even built any cars there. The building is still there. It is a public storage facility now.

Previous post about building V-8 engines.

FDR on Communism

FDR

 "Only at the end of September, at the New York state Democratic convention in Syracuse, did Roosevelt formally open his pursuit of re-election. He called communism the campaign's red herring, pointing to his long record of public service as evidence of his devotion to he American form of government. Noting that communism thrived on widespread economic maladjustment, he blamed Republican mismanagement for the economic disasters of 1929-1933. "Conditions congenial to communism were being bred and fostered throughout this nation up to the very day of March 4, 1933," the president said. "Discontent and fear were spreading throughout the country. The previous national administration, bewildered, did nothing." The rest of the Syracuse speech prefigured his campaign theme: the Republicans had caused the Depression and brought misery and danger to the nation, and he, his party, and the New Deal had come to the rescue. Roosevelt never mentioned communism again that fall. - Landslide, American History magazine, August 2016

FDR was inaugurated on March 4, 1933. Doesn't sound like much has changed.

Truck of the Day

Fageol heavy truck assembly -- Oakland, California, factory, 1918.
Looks like we have a three cylinder gasoline engine driving an electrical generator.
I like the locomotive style cab.

Tesla isn't the first American company to build cars in California. The Fageol brothers started building cars in Oakland in 1916, but their supply of engines was diverted to the war effort. The depression killed the company, but Peterbilt emerged from the ashes. Wikipedia has the story.

Via Posthip Scott.

Baseball, been berry, berry, good-to-me.

Doubleday Field in Cooperstown, N.Y., home of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Somehow I expected more than just a baseball diamond in a sleepy little town, but just what there should be more of I can't say. Click to Embiggenate.

If you are like me you know that the Baseball Hall of Fame is in Cooperstown somewhere back east. I thought it was in Pennsylvania, which is wrong, but at least I was in the same neck of the woods.

    You also know that Roberto Clemente was a famous baseball player. Kevin Guilfoile has a very good story about Roberto, or rather his bat. As stories go it is of little or no importance, and it doesn't really give you any new information. It's not about much at all, but it's very entertaining. I recommend it to your attention, even if you don't give a fig about baseball. Be warned however, the web page has four (4!) videos that start playing automagically.

Via Dustbury, Roger Green and Kevin Guilfoile.

P.S. Wikipedia provides us with this little tidbit: "The Hall of Fame was founded in 1939 by Stephen Carlton Clark, the owner of a local hotel. Clark sought to bring tourists to a city hurt by the Great Depression, which reduced the local tourist trade, and Prohibition, which devastated the local hops industry.", emphasis mine.

P.P.S. Why is it called a baseball diamond when it is obviously a square?

Soldiers

A few weeks ago, Brittany Crippen said she tried to enlist in the Army, only to learn that a tattoo of a fish on the back of her neck disqualified her. Determined to join, the 19-year-old college student visited a second recruiting center in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and was rejected again.  -  Recruits' Ineligibility Tests the Military - Wall Street Journal

I don't really understand why people get tattoos, and ear gauges are totally alien. Of course, I don't understand why people wear jewelry either. I mean, I guess people have reasons for doing these things, I've just never had the slightest interest.

There was some discussion on an internet forum, and then I come across a post from LineDoggie that had a couple of interesting observations:

... when the 1940 Draft was started very large numbers of potential soldiers were turned away as physically unfit, in most cases having suffered from years of malnutrition during the depression.

 ... if Audie Murphy were an 18 year old today he could not enlist due to only a 4th grade education.

Bonus Army, Part 1

William Randolph Hearst & Marion Davies

Posthip Scott sent me a story about the Depression Era Bonus Army, which got a couple of thoughts going in my head, which means I'm gonna write a post, which means I'm gonna need a picture, so I ask Google and this picture turns up.
    I've heard of William Randolph Hearst. He was a very famous and very wealthy newspaper publisher. He's famous for the Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California, and for his granddaughter Patricia of the Symbionese Liberation Front kidnapping and conversion.
    I didn't recognize Marion Davies. Turns out she was an actress and Willy's heartthrob. Also turns out she had a couple of bucks of her own:

In Hearst's declining years, Davies provided financial as well as emotional support until his death in 1951.

Waaaa? Multi-zillionaire Willy Hearst needed financial support? Oh, well, not my problem. Not sure what the connection is to the Bonus Army is, but maybe that will turn up if I pursue this subject.

Update October 2023 replaced missing link to Bonus Army story.

Economic Confusion, Part 2

There's a lot of flack in the air about how the rich are getting richer and everyone else is getting poorer. People are quoting all kinds of numbers and blaming all sorts of people for all the troubles we are having.

I think we are looking at the situation all wrong.

Back in the early 20th Century we had the stock market crash of 1929, followed by the Great Depression, followed by World War Two. During the great depression there were some make-work programs run by the government to try and put people back to work. The Civilian Conservation Corps was one of these programs and they built some marvelous structures, things that are still with us and still impressive. However, from what I hear it seems that all those make-work programs had no discernible effect on the economy. If continued to be stumble along as if nothing had changed.

It wasn't until World War Two came along that things started to improve, economically speaking. This does not make a great deal of sense. Here we have the government borrowing tons of money, more than they ever borrowed before, and spending it on stuff that was going to get used up and or destroyed. There were tremendous capital investments in the factories for making war machinery, but they were really only good for that one purpose, and only for the duration of the war.

However, after the war, the economy boomed for a good long time. What was the deal then? The government was in debt up their eyeballs. There was quite a bit of new technology available that was developed during the war. There was the thrill of victory. There was pent up demand from years of deprivation. There was a huge number of men entering the workforce. Why did the economy boom?

It kept booming up until about twenty years ago or so, when things started slowing down. We have many of the some things in play now that we had at the end of World War Two: lots of debt, lots of new technology, some men returning from war. We don't have the thrill of victory. The majority has not been suffering deprivation. But our economy is in the dumper.

What happened? What changed? Is it really due to some mystery numbers some pundits are throwing around? Or is there something else going on?

Maybe we are running into the limits of what we can do with our current model of civilized society.

Maybe our system needs a shock.

Could it just be that our attitude is different? We don't have an external enemy to fight, not one that is any kind of real threat anyway, so we start squabbling amongst ourselves. For all our mushy talk about peace, I wonder if we aren't really happier when we are fighting a war. Since World War Two we've had the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, two Gulf Wars, and the War in Afghanistan. But none of those was on the scale of World War Two, none involved the entire country down to the sugar and salt on your table.

I wonder if this wasn't what prompted the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt to build the pyramids, a massive project that consume the entire country, something everyone could focus on. Maybe that's what we need.

Maybe that's what we need if that's what we want. If we want a booming economy that tramples over everything that gets in it's way, then we need a single focus for the entire nation, and war may be the only thing we can get the majority to get behind.

Ah, if only there were a state religion, then the head of church and state could declare a holy mission to . . . to do something, pave the streets with gold or something. Then we would be all be busy. There might be some shortages here and there, but we would have a purpose, a glorious purpose, a god-given purpose. Something to do besides hang out down on the corner and complain about the way things are.