1950s

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 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 »

When Ernie Byfield opened The Pump Room in the Ambassador East Hotel on October 1, 1938, he undoubtedly had little idea that he was beginning an enterprise that would still be thriving to this day. Today, The Pump Room remains highly acclaimed restaurant and Chicago landmark. Located in Chicago’s Gold Coast inside the Ambassador East Hotel, the Pump Room’s traditional ... 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 »

Larry Driscoll’s book “The Last Great Race”  fascination with ships started as a 7-year-old, when he, his mother and two siblings boarded the S.S. America to cross the Atlantic to join his father in Paris, who worked for the Voice of America. Driscoll recalls how the ship — in the age before stabilizers — rode the waves like a roller ... Read More »