The Retro World of Robert LaDuke

Robert LaDuke (born 1961) paints small acrylics that, for some reason, I find both quirky and charming. Actually, that "some reason" probably has to do with the fact that the 1920s and 1930s greatly interest me. LaDuke states that his interests lie in the 30s and the 1940s and the objects he depicts are largely derived from toys of the 1930s.

There isn't much information about LaDuke on the Internet. A snippet is here, and a brief interview is here (scroll down). Read them to get a notion of where (he says) he's coming from.

A number of images of his paintings can be found in this Dieselpunk link. A few others are below:

Gallery

Northbound
The airplane is a Gee Bee racer from the early 1930s. We'll be seeing more of it.

Diver

Swan

Swimming
LaDuke, like the composer Jacques Offenbach, does not hesitate to recycle his own material.

Clipper

Mercury

Solitude

1930s Spaceships

What should a spaceship look like?

Back in the Moon exploration era, they came in two types. One was a conical re-entry vehicle, the other a boxy arrangement with spindly bits attached. The latter didn't need to be streamlined because it wasn't intended to enter the atmosphere. The space shuttle had to operate both in the atmosphere and in airless space, so its design had to be keyed to the former environment. The same can be said for shuttle-like vehicles currently in the planning and testing stage.

So following a period when spaceships were often portrayed as the space-only style, we seem to be returning to the science-fiction spaceships of newspaper comic strips and pulp magazine covers. Not precisely so, of course, but in the spirit of being able to rocket away from Earth to land on Mars or wherever using the same vehicle.

The early Sci-Fi magazines did their best to emphasize or at least incorporate science in their stories. I've been reading some books (originally appearing in Amazing Stories magazine) by Philip Nowlan that served as the basis for the Buck Rogers comic strip that was launched in 1929. The second of these, "The Airlords of Han," goes into enough detail regarding anti-gravity and other 25th century technology that the flow of the story suffers greatly.

Once Sci-Fi comic strips appeared, scientific pretensions were at best subliminal and gee-whiz adventuring was what such strips featured. Nevertheless, if the characters needed to dash around the solar system, they had to have spaceships and cartoonists had to come up with what they looked like. Here are some examples from the 1930s along with a few from the 1940s.

Gallery

Amazing Stories cover by Frank R. Paul - 1928
Paul was a pioneer Sci-Fi illustrator, so his spaceship concepts surely influenced Dick Calkins, the original Buck Rogers comic strip artist.  I'll guess that those yellow dots along the side of the ship represent portholes for passenger cabins.  If so, then where is the space for the motor and its fuel needed to generate that huge blast of flame rushing out the stern?

Buck Rogers aerial taxi - October 1930
Yes, it isn't a spaceship. But the Buck Rogers strip includes all sorts of futuristic conveyances ranging from this taxi to aircraft to interplanetary vehicles.

Buck Rogers - June 1931

Buck Rogers - March 1932

Buck Rogers - 1932

Flash Gordon - 1938
Five years after the Buck Rogers strip was launched, Flash Gordon appeared. Alex Raymond, with both arms tied behind his back, could out-draw Calkins, so it's no surprise that his spaceships look sleeker. Calkins' late 30s spaceships still look clunky.

Flash Gordon - 1939

Brick Bradford - 1944
Brick Bradford, drawn by Clarence Gray, was 1930s Sci-Fi strip that lasted many years while never attaining the popularity of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. I had a great deal of trouble finding examples of Gray's spaceships on the Internet, the example above being the only one.

Buck Rogers c.1948-49
Rick Yager began drawing Buck Rogers Sunday strips in the 1930s and by the mid-1940s was the sole artist. Shown above is a sleek spaceship from a Sunday strip.

World's Fair Symbol Structures

The fact that Seattle's Space Needle had reached its half-century mark prompted me to write this post. It also got me to thinking about world's fairs and structures that came to symbolize them, intentionally or not.

If you are interested in delving into those expositions, Wikipedia kindly provides two useful listings. Here is a list of fairs that includes important structures and other relevant items associated with them. And here is a list of BIE sanctioned expositions, the BIE being an international fair-sanctioning organization founded in the 1920s. Not all major fairs since them have had BIE approval, the most important instance being the New York World's Fair of 1964-65.

The idea of a structure intended to symbolize a fair is a fairly recent development, as these things go. First, consider first great fair in London in 1851. Joseph Paxton designed an iron and glass structure called the Crystal Palace that served as the fair's symbol by default: it was the fair's only structure.

For a while other fairs followed suit, but eventually became collections of pavilions, each focusing on a different country, industry or other theme. Architecturally, there might be a focus building such as the 1893 Chicago fair's Administration Building with its large dome situated at one end of a rectangular reflecting pool. Although that building was prominent, I'm not sure how symbolic it was given that the fair's overall appearance was a kind of mega-symbol.

Explicit symbol structures didn't come into play at top-level fairs until the end of the 1930s. Since then, other fairs have used them (or not) to varying degree of success. Let's take a look at the famous ones, plus a wannabe:

Gallery

Eiffel Tower (1889) in 1937
The Eiffel tower was erected for a 1889 exposition to mixed reviews. But it proved so popular that it now is the symbol for Paris itself. The photo above was taken at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne of 1937, best known to art junkies as the place Picasso's Guernica was first displayed. The Eiffel Tower probably wasn't the symbol of this fair: it just happened to be on the Champ-de-Mars, the largest chunk of unobstructed Paris land available for such events. Otherwise, the two dominant structures besides the tower are seen framing it in the photo. At the left is National Socialist Germany's pavilion and to the right is the pavilion of the Soviet Union, ideological antagonists until the countries signed a pact two years later that signaled the start of World War 2.

Palace of the Fine Arts - San Francisco, 1915
I'm not up to speed on the Panama Pacific International Exposition, so I'm not sure if the Palace of the Fine Arts was considered the fair's symbol at the time. But it soon came to be so loved by the public that it avoided destruction once the fair ended. It still stands today, having gone through at least one major restoration.

Trylon and Perisphere - New York, 1939
Now we come to structures intended to be symbolic from the outset. The Trylon, a three-side pyramid, stood 610 feet (190 meters) tall and had no function other than being somehow symbolic of the future. Its mate, the Perisphere, contained an exhibit.

Tower of the Sun - San Francisco Bay, 1939
The Golden Gate International Exposition was held on an island dredged from the bottom of San Francisco Bay that was intended to be used as an airport after the fair closed. The 400-foot tower was the fair's symbol. It seems that all such symbol-structures attract both fans and detractors. This book offers the following observation (p. 82): "As for the Tower of the Sun, the 400-foot campanile sticking up from the low horizon, hardly anyone could tolerate it." The anyones quoted included columnist Herb Caen and sculptors Beniamino Buffano and Ralph Stackpole. Contrarian me? I think it was just swell.

Unisphere - New York, 1964
Sitting where the Trylon and Perisphere once stood, the Unisphere arrived to symbolize New York's fair of the mid-1960s. I've always thought that the Unisphere was a triumph of cliché and imagination-failure. Regrettably, it still stands.

Atomium - Brussels, 1958
The Exposition Universelle et venti Internationale de Bruxelles had the Atomium as its symbolic centerpiece. It is supposed to represent a scaled-up atom, and people can actually climb through the thing. It, too, is still with us for some inexplicable reason. (Unlike the Unisphere's failing, I find the Atomium simply silly.)

Space Needle - Seattle, 1962
I end this rogue's gallery with the beloved Space Needle from Seattle's Century 21 fair. It can seem a little awkward if you view it from the wrong angle, but it's distinctive in a graceful way. Or, to put it another way, it coulda been a lot, lot worse.

Traveling "Victorian" in the 1960s

Even 50 years ago rail-based passenger conveyances tended to look sleek and sometimes even streamlined and racy.

But there was an exception that I stumbled across in the bowels of New York City in the early 1960s -- the Hudson & Manhattan rail line colloquially known as the "Hudson Tubes." During the 60s the New York - New Jersey Port Authority took over the H&M, re-equipped it and renamed it PATH (Port Authority Trans-Hudson), in which guise it exists today.

For a while during my three-year Army career I was stationed near New York City and got into town on pass every weekend. Some weekends I'd sleep over in Hoboken, New Jersey at the Stevens Tech chapter of my college fraternity. Normally when getting there I'd catch the Hoboken bus at the west side Port Authority terminal. But occasionally I'd ride the Hudson Tubes. There was a Tubes station at 33rd Street not far from Pennsylvania Station (the original building was still standing then) and I would work my way down stairs and through tunnels to that Midtown terminus of the H&M.

Once there, I beheld archaic train coaches whose design dated from more than 50 years previously. It was almost like stepping into a time machine. I hope the illustrations below give you at least a slight feeling of what I experienced.

(For a general history of the H&M and PATH, click here. More detailed information regarding the Hudson Tubes can be found here and here.)

Old Hudson & Manhattan route map

Crossover at 9th Street in Manhattan - photo from 1907

"Class B" coach
Such coaches were built from 1909 until 1928. They were still in service in the early 1960s.

H&M train as seen in New Jersey where the line ran mostly above-ground
This is how I remembered them. Dark, sooty-looking exterior; probably due to the paint-job, but a dirty appearance nevertheless. In a station all you'd see of the coach was the part above the bottom of the doors. This made the arched window and door shapes stand out -- very static looking, actually, and not at all the speed-style for transportation conveyances the began to appear in the 1930s. Another impression I had was that the H&M coaches were noticeably smaller than New York City subway cars, and this added to the quaintness of the Hudson Tubes experience in those days.

Costumed in Carmel-by-the-Sea

It was a typical foggy morning as we lined up outside the mess-hall door waiting our turn for breakfast. A newsboy hawking San Jose papers moved along the line but got few takers, as usual.

I'm normally a news junkie, but the rigors of Basic Training seem to have killed most of my interest; the Army kept me too occupied to spare the time and effort. But I did scan the headlines if they were large enough. Not long ago there were huge ones about Russia testing a 50-megaton H-bomb.

But today was going to be special. We were more than halfway through the eight-week training cycle, it was Sunday, and this afternoon we were to get our first pass. We could do as we pleased, provided it was legal, from noon till 10 that evening.

Many guys planned to head for the Soldiers' Club, a large, wooden structure near the beach where one might order a real hamburger and down some beer. Others, me included, opted to go off-post for the afternoon. Of course we had to wear uniforms -- our green "bus-driver" style Class-A kit complete with no rank or unit indicators, we being of the lowest class of Private and too temporary to bother having a Sixth Army shoulder patch sewn on.

Where to go? Perhaps to Seaside or Marina, in those days off-post purveyors of booze and other imagined necessities for those who found Fort Ord's Soldiers' or NCO clubs too tame. But we might have been told to keep away from Seaside and Marina; I don't remember, perhaps because they didn't appeal to me in the first place. Otherwise, given that we had to take a bus, the only real possibilities were Monterey and Carmel. I went with the Carmel-bound group, which was a pretty small share of our training company: let's say six of us.

Since then, I've visited Carmel quite a few times and have a rough feel for the place. It's a former art colony that remained pretty arty. Immediately to the northwest is the famous Seventeen-Mile Drive part of the peninsula. It has a number a well-known golf courses including Pebble Beach, Spanish Bay, Spyglass and Cypress Point. Some housing near the north part of the Drive was originally modest, middle-class, but near the west and, especially, the south there are plenty of ritzy digs. To put it another way, the area in and near Carmel is crawling with money. And it probably was when our bus finally dropped us off near Ocean Avenue.

The "downtown" (business district) part of Carmel is small now and about the same size when we set off to explore it. Even the buildings are pretty much the same. Nowadays, there's a small, three-floor open mall at the top end of the Ocean Avenue commercial strip and here and there are other buildings that were added since that Sunday when the Army invaded. One thing that definitely has changed is that Fort Ord is now essentially closed. There are no more young men going through Basic and I haven't seen anyone wearing an army uniform in Carmel in years. The closest I came was when I was chatting with a retired Navy Rear Admiral at my wife's college sorority alumnae club Christmas party in a house near the number two green at Spyglass, and that's not close at all.

Anyway, since we had little money and virtually no place to store any purchases, we simply wandered around, gazing at the storefronts, Spanish-style buildings and the occasional odd Storybook Style structures that can still be found there.

Perhaps we had something to eat and maybe drank a Coke or Pepsi someplace. But after two or three hours, we'd wrung the place dry several times over and caught the bus back to Ord. Once there, we checked out the Soldiers' Club. It featured a big, smokey hall where beer was served, but I'm not sure if I bothered to wait in line to buy a glass. The next day we'd be back to training, so we hiked back to the barracks to get our gear in shape and have some sleep.

Besides the lack of money and storage places, our visit to Carmel was limited psychologically. Yes, were were on pass and off-post, but we weren't really free from the Army thanks to the pass' deadline and the possibility that Military Police might flag us down and offer some hassle (one reason I passed up seeing Monterey, a less classy place than Carmel). We were guys about 20 years old wearing "Army Green" -- not a bit like the older, much richer and better-dressed locals. We eyed them and they eyed us, quite likely gazing down their mental noses in the process.

In a nutshell, I felt out of place and distinctly uncomfortable. I had pretty much the same reactions two years later by the beach at Waikiki on a short pass while our troop ship paused in Pearl Harbor on its way to the Far East.