Not to cross-promote or anything, but if you’re not a subscriber (paid) to the (cheap) substack, you missed a trip through the back alleys of Naples via Google Street View. I mentioned retracing my steps from a pizza restaurant to an alley where I declined to go, suspecting that the hand-posted Coral Jewelry Store signs were a trap. How did I find it? Simple: I knew I had this picture from 2011, taken en route to the pizza place.
From there I found the pizza restaurant, then checked the Google Maps for the proper pizza-place. It took all of 15 seconds. That’s what we’re used to, and have come to expect: the ability to find a picture and location a pizza restaurant we visited in 2011 in another country on another continent. Why, you get peeved if you can’t, or it takes a whole minute.
I suppose we’re all used to this. And we’re used to things like this: leaving the grocery store, I saw an unusual aircraft, in an usual take-off pattern, flying low.
As soon as I stopped filming I called up the flight tracker app, and there it was.
As soon as I stopped filming I called up the flight tracker app, and there it was. Another site told me where it was going: Jackson, Mississippi. All in a trice! All questions answered!
But no, there are more questions. Every day there are questions. Later I was watching a documentary, and it mentioned that the subjects moved to Ralston, OK. There was a picture of Main Street:
When I went to Ralston on Google Maps, it looked nothing like this. They lied! THE DOCUMENTARY LIED TO ME! So where was this? Can we find out? Clicketyclickety select image view scroll annnnnnd . . .
It's Shawnee OK, which is nowhere near the documentary location.
It's now 7:59 PM and I am out of questions. I'll update as circumstances change.
10:30 Oh I have questions.
What happened at DCA, of course. What is the matter with people, of course. The reactions are predictable, though - if you're steeped in the lingo and dead-souled character of the terminally online partisan ghouls you could guess how they would respond. Tragedy and death are just sticks for the fire around which they love to dance.
Twitter - okay OKAY, X is a place where one person who makes their living Saying Things takes the microphone and makes a ludicrous accusation, and then passes the mike to someone who expresses shock and sympathy, then passes the mike to someone who DUNKS or OWNS the hated other ones, then passes the mike to someone who has a self-professed level of expertise on the subject and makes a reasonable conjecture based on data, then passes the mike to someone who smears feces on himself, and then someone who accuses him of being a fascist because feces sounds loike fasces, then someone comes along and says the same thing the sensible person says word for word but passes it off as their own, and so on.
There's more instant information but oy, the signal and the noise and the relationship between the two.
Anyway, every day is a series of questions, and it keeps you lively. But thinking we should have instant answers breeds a peculiarly modern mindset. In the absence of answers we make our own, and find them terribly convincing.
We now begin this year's account of meaningless, random clickings on the internet, following one link from here to there, learning some interesting things along the way. You know, the rabbit hole.
So! What's the journey that takes us from this image . . .
. . . to this one?
One of the oldest surviving radio shows is Calling All Cars. It ran from 1933 to 1939. It was a reasonably straightforward procedural, without the melodrama and sneering crooks of Gangbusters. It usually began with the dispatcher calling all cars.
He ended each broadcast with the same phrase and intonation. ROSE-n-quist
Jesse Rosenquist (26 August 1899 in Martin, Tennessee, United States – June 1966 in Los Angeles, California, United States)[1] was one of the world's first police radio dispatchers.
A sergeant with the Los Angeles Police Department, he achieved unexpected fame due to the early police radio frequencies being tuned in on home radios, which were hundreds or even thousands of miles away. Furthermore, procedures at the time included an announcement of the dispatcher's name at the end of each broadcast. His offhanded "ROSE-n-quist!" told listeners who he was.
When the CBS Radio Network started their Calling All Cars series (heard in the western United States from 1933 to 1939), Jesse Rosenquist was the voice that producers sought, to add authenticity to their programs. The only surviving audio examples of his dispatching style are the recordings of those shows, but generations of radio, movie and television "dispatchers" were trying to copy Rosenquist's voice and pronunciation.
Due to his having become a household name in the 1930s and 1940s—before LAPD radio moved to newer equipment and frequencies—a public safety bulletin in the 1940s or 1950s was often referred to as a Rosenquist.
Not any more. There’s a reference lost to time. Someone was the last person to ever say “ROSE-n-quist” as he left the diner to the chuckles of the other patrons.
But then there’s this.
Hoooooollllllld on here.
Ray Pinker? That’s a name from Dragnet. Did Webb swipe it from Calling All Cars? No: Ray Pinker was a real LA police forensic scientist. He worked the Black Dahlia case. The shows used his name and didn’t pay him a dime.
He shows up in video game:
When Webb revived Dragnet for color TV, he changed the name to Ray Murray, and cast Olan Soule, one of the radio stable regulars who’d played the Pinker character in the radio version. Soule was also the first person to voice Batman in an animated series. Kids who watched both Dragnet and the crap animated Batman - did we know it was the same guy? Of course not.
To my surprise, Dragnet was a newspaper comic. I mean “surprise” because I never came across it during my peregrinations, but once I went looking for it, I found it.
Not that hot.
This is an interesting array. Dragnet, then Twin Earths, then Pogo. Twin Earths credits O. Lebeck, which would be Oskar Lebeck, founder of Dell Comics. And:
In 1938 Western Publishing hired him as an art director/managing editor to help launch its line of comic books, financed and distributed by Dell. Lebeck oversaw Western's New York editorial office. Notably he hired Walt Kelly who became one of the star creators of the line, best known for originating Pogo while there.
So that’s how we got from Police to Pogo, via Batman.
We continue to study the decay and abandonment of a once-prosperous, typical, middle-class neighborhood. Maybe a bit upper-middle. Last entry.
An anomaly in most places. Common here.
The other side of the building:
2009:
2013:
I suppose that's better.
Let’s take a look at another block. Something could be done with this.
And, I suppose, something was.
The ornamentation survived for the duration of the builing:
There aren't any stories in a vacant lot.
A survivor: intact and clean and useful!
Aston Singer? Wonder who he was. Or they.
You think this might be rehabbed and brought back to life, but . . .
No.
The ads at the time said
Finest hotel in Highland Park: newly decorated. Beautifully furnished. Bath and telephone in every room: valet services, coffee shop, cozy lobby: reasonable rates.
Let us end here:
Even the worst of streets have light and glory.
That will do! We end this year's installments of Main Street postcards today, and paid subscribers get a Menucard. Thank you for your patronage, and I'll see you around.
We continue to study the decay and abandonment of a once-prosperous, typical, middle-class neighborhood. Maybe a bit upper-middle. Last entry. 
Let’s take a look at another block. Something could be done with this.
