Travel the past: The first SS Volendam served the trans-Atlantic route for Holland America Line HAL from the 1920s until the early 1950s. Travel the now: Peter Kengo, the travel critic, and historian take us on a tour of the third MS Volendam. We link to Peter’s article in USA Today with a complete picture t0ur of Holland America Line’s ... Read More »
The RMS Aquitania was the longest serving Cunard liner built in the 20th century and to survive service in both World Wars. The contract to build the ship went to John Brown & Co, and great publicity was given to the fact that it would be the largest liner in the world. The Aquitania was launched on 21 April by ... Read More »
Judy Garland is on the passenger list and its the Captain’s Dinner Night on the SS United States… And it is the one night that Judy Garland left her stateroom. Pictured: Sid Luff and his wife Judy Garland with a friend John Carlyle at right. 1956 1st Class Dining Room – the SS UNITED STATES… Cunard Line Passenger Lists Cruise History: ... Read More »
Eastern Steamship Lines operated coastwise overnight passenger services along the Long Island Sound between New York and Boston and to other Northeast Coast ports including Portland, Maine, along with services to Canada and cruises. VIDEO OF EASTERN STEAMSHIP LINE CRUISE 1937 CRUISE – NEW YORK TO NOVA SCOTIA ABOARD EASTERN STEAMSHIP COMPANY The vessel at the beginning of the movie ... Read More »
The Cunard Line celebrates Christmas with a long and fascinating history. The company was created in 1839 when Samuel Cunard won the Admiralty’s tender to provide a transatlantic mail service to be carried by steamships between Great Britain and North America. The service was inaugurated in 1840 when the steamship Britannia made the first crossing to Halifax and then Boston. Video ... Read More »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
The first of Ritz-Carlton’s Yacht Collection ships hit the water for the first time recently at a shipyard in Vigo, Spain. Cruises don’t begin until February 2020, but reservations are open for one of the newest luxury cruise lines around. They will be newest and finest small cruising vessels afloat. The new ships will be customized, in keeping with the ... Read More »
The German shipping magnate was responsible for turning Germany into a world leader in ocean travel prior to World War I. With 25,000 employees, Hapag was the largest shipping line in the world for both freight and people (464,000 passengers in 1913). It was Albert Ballin who also invented the pleasure cruise in 1891. The first Pleasure Cruise The world’s ... Read More »
The North Shore Line’s Electroliners streamline interurban trains operated from the 1940s into the early 1960s. For most street railway and interurban lines the coming of the automobile put an end to an industry that was just a few decades old. The 1920s and the Great Depression later that decade bankrupted and shutdown many intermediate lines while the strongest companies ... Read More »
Chewing gum magnate William Wrigley Jr.’s twin interests in baseball and Catalina Island – he bought Catalina in 1919 and gained a controlling interest in the Chicago Cubs in 1921 – dovetailed nicely when he made the decision to have the Cubs train on Catalina starting in 1921. In doing so, he became the first baseball owner to bring a ... Read More »
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