The SS Yale and SS Harvard became known as “white Flyers of the Pacific”! The sister ships each made four sailings a week, carrying 565 First Class passengers at an average speed of 23 knots between the two major California cities. The fast coastal ships provided an overnight cruise on the Pacific. They were a very popular way for traveling between ... Read More »
Matson Lines SS Lurline was half way from Honolulu to San Francisco on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The SS Lurline missed the Pearl Harbor attack and made her destination safely, cruising at maximum speed, and soon returned to Hawaii with her Matson sisters SS Mariposa and SS Monterey in a convoy laden with troops and ... Read More »
Benjamin Gaines, 93, worked as a Pullman porter from 1945 to 1954. “The porters, believe it or not, we had a celebrity status,” he said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune. (Cover Photo: CW: Janet Leigh, star of Hitchcock’s PSYCHO boarding the Super Chief in fashion layout; Porter during the 1960s looking out at the Kansas prairie: Pullman Porter’s ... Read More »
Murder, suspicious deaths and disappearing at sea aboard liners from Cunard to Union-Castle have made cruise history. The romantic decks of “The Love Boat” can be a very dangerous place. As for cruising the past, history finds there were two or three murders supposedly linked to Cunard Line’s RMS Queen Mary before WW 2. Another murder during the winter of ... Read More »
Until about 30 years ago, bon voyage blasts were a standard part of sea travel. They provided a great sales tool for the Steamship and Cruise lines. Visitors could get a first-hand glimpse of the ship and imagine themselves sailing away. The concept was simple: invite as many friends as possible to visit you in your stateroom/cabin in the hours ... Read More »
When the Fox Theater was built in 1929, it seemed as if there weren’t enough adjectives to describe the movie theater’s magnificence. The San Francisco Chronicle called the opening “a spectacle of such beauty and magnitude that it seemed rather a fancy of one’s mind rather than the inaugural night of another commercial enterprise.” OPENING NIGHT But the life of ... Read More »
Connecting Israel with Mediterranean ports began after the State of Israel was established in 1948 and for 20 years Zim Lines operated an excellent fleet of passenger ships. Zim provided regular trans-Atlantic, the Caribbean, and Israel/Europe cruise and liner services. The company quickly built a fleet of modern passenger ships. In the early 1950s, Zim became a member of the ... Read More »
The streamliner California Zephyr was featured in Columbia Pictures 1952 thriller SUDDEN FEAR starring Joan Crawford and Jack Palance. Included were exterior and interior scenes aboard the train. Grand Central Station and the Oakland Mole were highlighted where Crawford respectively boards and disembarks to head across the bay to San Francisco by ferry boat. After playwright and wealthy heiress, Myra ... Read More »
Enjoying a long and colorful history, Incres Line’s MS VICTORIA offered Caribbean and Mediterranean cruises with first class service to 600 passengers. The VICTORIA was built by Harland and Wolff of Belfast in 1936 for Union-Castle Line as the DUNNOTTAR CASTLE for the company’s round Africa service from London. She operated as a passenger-cargo liner into the early 1950s, except ... Read More »
Billionaire Clive Palmer’s pitch about Titanic II – the ship he is funding to be built before a maiden 2020 voyage – hardly had the imagined grandeur and prestige of the original ship’s build in the early 1900s. The mining magnate and former federal Australian MP featured in a bizarre promotional video last week for Blue Star Line, the company ... Read More »
While being tops in your field can be exciting, an ambitious or intellectually curious person always looks for new ways to grow. This was particularly true for stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. A national star for years for her creative striptease act, Lee hoped to spread her wings into more respectable and challenging fields. Born January 9, 1911, in Seattle to ... Read More »
By the mid-1960s, when jets had killed off all but the stragglers on the North Atlantic, Home Lines introduced the OCEANIC. Home Lines proudly proclaimed that their 39,000 tonner was “the largest ship built exclusively for cruising.” By the mid-1960s, when jets had killed off all but the stragglers on the North Atlantic, Home Lines introduced the OCEANIC. Once it ... Read More »
Far away from the Trans-Atlantic services – “Down Under” – Union Steam Ship Company operated a fleet of excellent passenger ships between Australia and New Zealand until 1960. In her day the Awatea was regarded as one of the most luxurious and fastest liners of the period. Her history was brief and she was destroyed in World War2 like so ... Read More »
In Oscar-winning It Happened One Night, Neal Dodd is just being himself as he prepares to officiate at Claudette Colbert’s garden wedding – even though Colbert jilts her fiancée at the altar to run away with Clark Gable. Dodd was acting in the 1934 film, as he did in dozens of movies, and was also an Episcopal priest in charge ... Read More »
Operating passenger service between Chile and New York, the Chilean Line offered First and Tourist Class passenger service from the West Coast of South America and New York during the 1930s. Chilean Line competed with Grace Line with passengers service from New York to Chile and return. In the mid-1930s trade started to recover from the Great Depression, so in ... Read More »
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CRUISING THE PAST Travel and Social History
