A Rare 78 rpm Record About the St. Francis Dam Disaster

st-francis-dam

          To play the song click on the link above.     

 

It’s the 80th anniversary of the St. Francis Dam Disaster.  Every 5 years I dust of my collection and mount an exhibit on the disaster.  It’s now at the California Oil Museum as is has been for several incarnations.  I’m amazed that after 80 years and several museum exhibits that new material keeps coming to me.  A couple of weeks ago Ron Riley was visiting Santa Paula.  His father, Tom Riley, was a survivor and the family provided me with lots of historic material over the years  On this trip he brought with him the above 78 rpm record.  

    Not only do I collect all things related to the St. Francis Dam Disaster but I also collect 78 records.  I have shelves of them in my garage.  A year or so ago I purchased a turntable that hooks up to the computer with a USB cable.  I’m using a program called Audicity.  The turntable sat there for a year gathering dust until the proper time.  Once the St. Francis Dam Disaster song arrived and student went into action.  I recorded it at 45 and then converted that file to 78. Then I had to get a LAME program to save it as an MP3.  I also got a pop and hiss filter for you listening pleasure.  Then I could email the song to friends.  It worked.  

  The only thing left to do was to post it to my blog.  To do that I had to upgrade for a mere $20 a year.  If you decide to download this song, if that’s even possible, you could pay me 99 cents through Paypal.  Details upon request.  

   Hope there are some comments on this.  I Googled the record and only found scant mention.  Now it will be famous.

 

 

Committee for the Defense of the Vernacular

While on my recent trip to Cuba I brought gifts for the people I met.  I thought a lot about what gift would be suitable.  Should I give money?  Or soap?  I heard the Cubans always need soap.  I finally decided to give something that means a lot to me and turned out to mean a lot to the people I gave them to. I brought a couple of hundred American snapshots with me to pass out.  I put a sticker with my name and address on the back of each one.

   Whenever I would meet a new person I’d reach into my oversize pocket and pull out my stack of Vernacular.  I’d fan them out like a magician performing a card trick. Most people got the idea immediately and picked one.  Then the questions began and a conversation was started.  Human to human contact was made through the vehicle of the vernacular.  

  Occasionally I asked the receiver of the snapshots to hold them up so I could take a photo.  That was a very easy way to ask to take a person’s photo.  I was taking a photo of their snapshot and not them so they posed very unselfconsciously.  

   I also like the idea that hardly anyone ever throws away a snapshot.  The mysterious snapshots I gave away in Cuba will probably be put up on the walls of homes there for years to come.  Maybe some day the owner will notice my name and address on the reverse of the snapshot and have the means and the interest to contact me.  

  As I walked around Havana I would occasionally see signs on buildings saying “Committee for the Defense of the Revolution”.  They were in Spanish though.  It means that you are being watched for disloyalty at all times.  Sort of like under the Bush administration.  I titled the photo above “The Committee for the Defense of the Vernacular”.  Maybe the two bicycle mechanics do not know what the vernacular is but I think that they are now in defense of it.

Vintage Che Collecting in Cuba

I have just returned from a week in Cuba.  I was there with a group through Ventura College.  I was there to not only take photographs but also to collect art and photographs.  There were not many vintage photographs of the kind I like available.  About 10 p.m. one night I was walking home to our hotel with photographer Sky Bergman when I spotted a used book store that was open.  I went in and started talking in all the Spanish I had and asked to see photographs.  They brought out piles of them and I sat down and sorted through them and made a pile of “keepers”. One that I acquired is the one above of Che smoking a cigar.  

  After I arrived back home to Santa Paula I Googled for images of “Che smoking cigar”.  I was not able to find this particular image anywhere on the web.  Someone out there might know about it.  I’m also curious about the signature.  It was signed in pencil in the lower right and it looks like Rey or Ray to me.  I do not have the resources on the history of Cuban photography that I have on the rest of the world.  This might be a challenge to track down the photographer or when and where it was taken.  I do like the casual pose.

 

  I’m processing a few thousand images that I took digitally on the trip.  I’ll post some of my shots when time allows.