DISNEYLAND IN ANAHEIM, LAND OF HOPE AND DREAMS

Today, The Grandma has been remembering when she visited Disneyland, when it was opened by Walt Disney in Anaheim, California on a day like today in 1955.

 

Disneyland is a world of dreams and fantasy that you must visit at least once in your life, a place where all is possible and where good always beats evil.

Disneyland Park, originally Disneyland, is the first of two theme parks built at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California, opened on July 17, 1955.

It is the only theme park designed and built to completion under the direct supervision of Walt Disney. It was originally the only attraction on the property; its official name was changed to Disneyland Park to distinguish it from the expanding complex in the 1990s. It was the first Disney theme park.

Walt Disney came up with the concept of Disneyland after visiting various amusement parks with his daughters in the 1930s and 1940s. He initially envisioned building a tourist attraction adjacent to his studios in Burbank to entertain fans who wished to visit; however, he soon realized that the proposed site was too small. After hiring a consultant to help him determine an appropriate site for his project, Disney bought a 65 ha site near Anaheim in 1953. Construction began in 1954 and the park was unveiled during a special televised press event on the ABC Television Network on July 17, 1955.

Since its opening, Disneyland has undergone expansions and major renovations, including the addition of New Orleans Square in 1966, Bear Country (now Critter Country) in 1972, Mickey's Toontown in 1993, and Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge in 2019. Opened in 2001, Disney California Adventure Park was built on the site of Disneyland's original car park.

Disneyland has a larger cumulative attendance than any other theme park in the world, with 726 million visits since it opened, as of December 2018.

In 2018, the park had approximately 18.6 million visits, making it the second most visited amusement park in the world that year, behind only Magic Kingdom, the very park it inspired. According to a March 2005 Disney report, 65,700 jobs are supported by the Disneyland Resort, including about 20,000 direct Disney employees and 3,800 third-party employees (independent contractors or their employees).

Disney announced Project Stardust in 2019, which included major structural renovations to the park to account for higher attendance numbers.

More information: Disneyland

The United States Federal Aviation Administration has declared a zone of prohibited airspace around both Disneyland and some surrounding areas centred at Sleeping Beauty Castle. No aircraft, including recreational and commercial drones, are permitted to fly within this zone; this level is only shared with Walt Disney World, other pieces of critical infrastructure (military bases, Pantex) in the United States and whenever the President of the United States travels outside of Washington, D.C.

The concept for Disneyland began when Walt Disney was visiting Griffith Park in Los Angeles with his daughters Diane and Sharon. While watching them ride the merry-go-round, he came up with the idea of a place where adults and their children could go and have fun together, though his dream lay dormant for many years.

The earliest documented draft of Disney's plans was sent as a memo to studio production designer Dick Kelsey on August 31, 1948, where it was referred to as a Mickey Mouse Park, based on notes Disney made during his and Ward Kimball's trip to the Chicago Railroad Fair the same month, with a two-day stop in Henry Ford's Museum and Greenfield Village, a place with attractions like a Main Street and steamboat rides, which he had visited eight years earlier.

When people wrote letters to Disney to inquire about visiting the Walt Disney Studios, he realized that a functional film studio had little to offer to visiting fans, and began to foster various ideas about building a site near the Burbank studios for tourists to visit. His ideas evolved to a small play park with a boat ride and other themed areas. The initial park concept, the Mickey Mouse Park, was originally planned for a 3.2 ha plot to the south, across Riverside Drive from the studio. Besides Greenfield Village and the Chicago Railroad Fair, Disney was also inspired by Tivoli Gardens in Denmark, Knott's Berry Farm, Colonial Williamsburg, the Century of Progress in Chicago, and the New York's World Fair of 1939.

More information: History

His designers began working on concepts, though the project grew much larger than the land could hold. Disney hired Harrison Price from Stanford Research Institute to identify the proper area in which to position the planned theme park based on expected future growth. Based on Price's analysis, for which he would be recognized as a Disney Legend in 2003, Disney acquired 65 ha of orange groves and walnut trees in Anaheim, southeast of Los Angeles in neighbouring Orange County. The small Burbank site originally considered by Disney is now home to Walt Disney Animation Studios and ABC Studios.

Difficulties in obtaining funding prompted Disney to investigate new methods of fundraising, and he decided to create a show named Disneyland. It was broadcast on then-fledgling ABC. In return, the network agreed to help finance the park. For its first five years of operation, Disneyland was owned by Disneyland, Inc., which was jointly owned by Walt Disney Productions, Walt Disney, Western Publishing and ABC. In addition, Disney rented out many of the shops on Main Street, U.S.A. to outside companies.

By 1960, Walt Disney Productions bought out all other shares, a partnership which would eventually lead to the Walt Disney Corporation's acquisition of ABC in the mid-1990s. Construction began on July 16, 1954, and cost $17 million to complete, equivalent to $131 million in 2019. The park was opened one year and one day later. U.S. Route 101, later Interstate 5, was under construction at the same time just north of the site; in preparation for the traffic Disneyland was expected to bring, two more lanes were added to the free way before the park was finished.

Disneyland was dedicated at an International Press Preview event held on Sunday, July 17, 1955, which was open only to invited guests and the media. Although 28,000 people attended the event, only about half of those were invitees, the rest having purchased counterfeit tickets, or even sneaked into the park by climbing over the fence.

Disneyland Park consists of nine themed lands and a number of concealed backstage areas, and occupies over 40 ha with the new addition of Mickey and Minnie's Runaway Railway that's coming to Mickeys Toontown in 2022. The park opened with Main Street, U.S.A., Adventureland, Frontierland, Fantasyland, and Tomorrowland, and has since added New Orleans Square in 1966, Bear Country (now known as Critter Country) in 1972, and Mickey's Toontown in 1993, and Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge in 2019.

In 1957, Holidayland opened to the public with 3.6 ha recreation area including a circus and baseball diamond, but was closed in late 1961. It is often referred to as the lost land of Disneyland. Throughout the park are Hidden Mickeys, representations of Mickey Mouse heads inserted subtly into the design of attractions and environmental decor. An elevated berm supports the 914 mm narrow gauge Disneyland Railroad that circumnavigates the park.

More information: A Day in LA Tours

 All our dreams can come true,
if we have the courage to pursue them.

Walt Disney

PARAMOUNT PICTURES IS FOUNDED IN LOS ANGELES

Today, The Grandma is still relaxing at home. She has decided to watch some films, and she has chosen some masterpieces produced by Paramount Pictures Corporation, the American film and television production and distribution company that was founded on a day like today in 1912.

Paramount Pictures Corporation, commonly known as Paramount Pictures or simply Paramount, is an American film and television production and distribution company and a subsidiary of ViacomCBS.

It is the fifth-oldest film studio in the world, the second-oldest film studio in the United States (behind Universal Pictures), and the sole member of the Big Five film studios still located in the city limits of Los Angeles.

In 1916, film producer Adolph Zukor put 22 actors and actresses under contract and honoured each with a star on the logo.

In 2014, Paramount Pictures became the first major Hollywood studio to distribute all of its films in digital form only.

The company's headquarters and studios are located at 5555 Melrose Avenue, Hollywood, California.

Paramount Pictures is a member of the Motion Picture Association (MPA).

Paramount is the fifth oldest surviving film studio in the world after the French studios Gaumont Film Company (1895) and Pathé (1896), followed by the Nordisk Film company (1906), and Universal Studios (1912). It is the last major film studio still headquartered in the Hollywood district of Los Angeles.

More information: Paramount

Paramount Pictures dates its existence from the 1912 founding date of the Famous Players Film Company.

Hungarian-born founder Adolph Zukor, who had been an early investor in Nickelodeon, saw that movies appealed mainly to working-class immigrants. With partners Daniel Frohman and Charles Frohman he planned to offer feature-length films that would appeal to the middle class by featuring the leading theatrical players of the time, leading to the slogan Famous Players in Famous Plays.

By mid-1913, Famous Players had completed five films, and Zukor was on his way to success. Its first film was Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth, which starred Sarah Bernhardt.

That same year, another aspiring producer, Jesse L. Lasky, opened his Lasky Feature Play Company with money borrowed from his brother-in-law, Samuel Goldfish, later known as Samuel Goldwyn. The Lasky company hired as their first employee a stage director with virtually no film experience, Cecil B. DeMille, who would find a suitable site in Hollywood, near Los Angeles, for his first feature film, The Squaw Man.

Starting in 1914, both Lasky and Famous Players released their films through a start-up company, Paramount Pictures Corporation, organized early that year by a Utah theatre owner, W. W. Hodkinson, who had bought and merged several smaller firms. Hodkinson and actor, director, producer Hobart Bosworth had started production of a series of Jack London movies.

Paramount was the first successful nationwide distributor; until this time, films were sold on a statewide or regional basis which had proved costly to film producers. Also, Famous Players and Lasky were privately owned while Paramount was a corporation.

In February 1994, Viacom acquired 50.1% of Paramount Communications Inc. shares for $9.75 billion, following a five-month battle with QVC, and completed the merger in July.

At the time, Paramount's holdings included Paramount Pictures, Madison Square Garden, the New York Rangers, the New York Knicks, and the Simon & Schuster publishing house. The deal had been planned as early as 1989, when the company was still known as Gulf and Western.

More information: Paramount Studios

 I cannot permit you to disrupt the Paramount schedule.

David O. Selznick

LEVI STRAUSS MANUFACTURES THE FIRST BLUE JEANS

Today, The Grandma has gone to the library to search information about Levi Strauss, the American businessman, who founded the first company to manufacture blue jeans and who was born on a day like today in 1829.

Levi Strauss (February 26, 1829-September 26, 1902) was an American businessman, who founded the first company to manufacture blue jeans. 

His firm of Levi Strauss & Co. (Levi's) began in 1853 in San Francisco, California.

Levi Strauss was born to an Ashkenazi Jewish family in Buttenheim on February 26, 1829, in the Franconia region of the Kingdom of Bavaria in the German Confederation. He was the son of Hirsch Strauss and his second wife Rebecca Strauss.

At age 18, Strauss travelled with his mother and two sisters to the United States to join his brothers Jonas and Louis, who had begun a wholesale dry goods business in New York City called J. Strauss Brother & Co.

Levi's sister Fanny and her husband David Stern moved to St. Louis, Missouri, while Levi went to live in Louisville, Kentucky and sold his brothers' supplies there. Levi became an American citizen in January 1853.

The family decided to open a West Coast branch of their dry goods business in San Francisco, which was the commercial hub of the California Gold Rush. Levi was chosen to represent them, and he took a steamship for San Francisco, where he arrived in early March 1854 and joined his sister's family.

More information: Levi's

Strauss opened his wholesale business as Levi Strauss & Co. and imported fine dry goods from his brothers in New York, including clothing, bedding, combs, purses, and handkerchiefs. He made tents and later jeans while he lived with Fanny's growing family.

Jacob W. Davis was one of his customers and one of the inventors of riveted denim pants, and in 1871, and he went into business with Strauss to produce blue jeans. The two men patented the new style of work pants in 1873.

Levi Strauss died on September 26, 1902, and was buried in the Home of Peace Cemetery and Emanu-El Mausoleum in Colma, California. He left his company to his four nephews, Jacob, Sigmund, Louis, and Abraham Stern, the sons of his sister Fanny and her husband David Stern.

Levi Strauss, a member of the Reform branch of Judaism, helped establish Congregation Emanu-El, the first Jewish synagogue in the city of San Francisco. He also gave money to several charities, including special funds for orphans. The Levi Strauss Foundation started with an 1897 donation to the University of California, Berkeley that provided the funds for 28 scholarships.

The Levi Strauss museum is located in the 1687 house where Strauss was born Buttenheim, Germany. There is also a visitors centre at Levi Strauss & Co. headquarters in San Francisco, which features historical exhibits.

In 1994, he was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

More information: Levi Strauss Museum

 Objects are what matter.
Only they carry the evidence that throughout
the centuries something really happened
among human beings.

Levi Strauss

THE HALE TELESCOPE SEES FIRST LIGHT AT PALOMAR

Today, The Grandma is still relaxing at home. She has been watching TV Series, and she has chosen The X Files, one of her three top ones. 

 

She has been watching some episodes, and she has enjoyed a lot with the first episode of the second season titled Little Green Men where Fox Mulder, one of the main characters of the series, talks about the Hale Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego, a telescope that saw first light on a day like today in 1949. The Grandma has remembered when she visited Palomar Observatory, some years ago, with her closer friend Joseph de Ca'th Lon, who likes Astronomy a lot.

The Hale Telescope is a 5.1 m, f/3.3 reflecting telescope at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California named after astronomer George Ellery Hale.

With funding from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1928, he orchestrated the planning, design, and construction of the observatory, but with the project ending up taking 20 years he did not live to see its commissioning. 

The Hale was groundbreaking for its time, with double the diameter of the second-largest telescope, and pioneered many new technologies in telescope mount design and in the design and fabrication of its large aluminium coated honeycomb low thermal expansion Pyrex mirror. It was completed in 1949 and is still in active use.

More information: Palomar Observatory

The Hale Telescope represented the technological limit in building large optical telescopes for over 30 years.

It was the largest telescope in the world from its construction in 1949 until the Soviet BTA-6 was built in 1976, and the second largest until the construction of the Keck Observatory Keck 1 in Hawaii in 1993.

Hale supervised the building of the telescopes at the Mount Wilson Observatory with grants from the Carnegie Institution of Washington: the 1.5 m telescope in 1908 and the 2.5 m telescope in 1917. These telescopes were very successful, leading to the rapid advance in understanding of the scale of the Universe through the 1920s, and demonstrating to visionaries like Hale the need for even larger collectors.

The chief optical designer for Hale's previous telescope was George Willis Ritchey, who intended the new telescope to be of Ritchey–Chrétien design. Compared to the usual parabolic primary, this design would have provided sharper images over a larger usable field of view. However, Ritchey and Hale had a falling-out. With the project already late and over budget, Hale refused to adopt the new design, with its complex curvatures, and Ritchey left the project. The Mount Palomar Hale Telescope turned out to be the last world-leading telescope to have a parabolic primary mirror.

In 1928 Hale secured a grant of $6 million from the Rockefeller Foundation for the construction of an observatory, including a reflecting telescope to be administered by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), of which Hale was a founding member.

In the early 1930s, Hale selected a site at 1,700 m on Palomar Mountain in San Diego County, California, as the best site, and less likely to be affected by the growing light pollution problem in urban centres like Los Angeles.

The Corning Glass Works was assigned the task of making a 5.1 m primary mirror. Construction of the observatory facilities and dome started in 1936, but because of interruptions caused by World War II, the telescope was not completed until 1948 when it was dedicated. Due to slight distortions of images, corrections were made to the telescope throughout 1949. It became available for research in 1950.

A functioning one tenth scale model of the telescope was also made at Corning.

The 510 cm telescope saw first light on January 26, 1949, at 10:06 pm PST under the direction of American astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble, targeting NGC 2261, an object also known as Hubble's Variable Nebula. The photographs made then were published in the astronomical literature and in the May 7, 1949 issue of Collier's Magazine.

The telescope continues to be used every clear night for scientific research by astronomers from Caltech and their operating partners, Cornell University, the University of California, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It is equipped with modern optical and infrared array imagers, spectrographs, and an adaptive optics system. It has also used lucky cam imaging, which in combination with adaptive optics pushed the mirror close to its theoretical resolution for certain types of viewing.

One of the Corning Labs' glass test blanks for the Hale was used for the C. Donald Shane telescope's 300 cm primary mirror. The collecting area of the mirror is about 20 square meters.

More information: Space

The first observation of the Hale telescope was of NGC 2261 on January 26, 1949.

Halley's Comet (1P) upcoming 1986 approach to the Sun was first detected by astronomers David C. Jewitt and G. Edward Danielson on 16 October 1982 using the Hale telescope equipped with a CCD camera.

Two moons of the planet Uranus were discovered in September 1997, bringing the planet's total known moons to 17 at that time. One was Caliban (S/1997 U 1), which was discovered on 6 September 1997 by Brett J. Gladman, Philip D. Nicholson, Joseph A. Burns, and John J. Kavelaars using the Hale telescope. The other Uranian moon discovered then is Sycorax (initial designation S/1997 U 2) and was also discovered using the Hale telescope.

In 1999, astronomers used a near-infrared camera and adaptive optics to take some of the best Earth-surface based images of planet Neptune up to that time. The images were sharp enough to identify clouds in the ice giant's atmosphere.

The Cornell Mid-Infrared Asteroid Spectroscopy (MIDAS) survey used the Hale Telescope with a spectrograph to study spectra from 29 asteroids. An example of a result from that study, is that the asteroid 3 Juno was determined to have an average radius of 135.7±11 km using the infrared data.

In 2009, using a coronagraph, the Hale Telescope was used to discover the star Alcor B, which is a companion to Alcor in the famous Big Dipper constellation.

In 2010, a new satellite of planet Jupiter was discovered with the Hale Telescope, called S/2010 J 1 and later named Jupiter LI.

In October 2017 the Hale Telescope was able to record the spectrum of the first recognized interstellar object, 1I/2017 U1 ʻOumuamua; while no specific mineral was identified it showed the visitor had a reddish surface colour.

More information: NASA

Like buried treasures,
the outposts of the universe have beckoned
to the adventurous from immemorial times...

George Ellery Hale

APPLE COMPUTER IS INCORPORATED IN CALIFORNIA, USA

Today, The Grandma has received the wonderful visit of one of her closest friends, Claire Fontaine.

 

Claire loves design and computing and they have been talking about Apple Computer, the enterprise that was incorporated on a day like today in 1977.

 

Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, that designs, develops and sells consumer electronics, computer software, and online services. It is considered one of the Big Five companies in the U.S. information technology industry, along with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook.

The company's hardware products include the iPhone smartphone, the iPad tablet computer, the Mac personal computer, the iPod portable media player, the Apple Watch smartwatch, the Apple TV digital media player, the AirPods wireless earbuds and the HomePod smart speaker line.

Apple's software includes macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS operating systems, the iTunes media player, the Safari web browser, the Shazam music identifier, and the iLife and iWork creativity and productivity suites, as well as professional applications like Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Xcode. Its online services include the iTunes Store, the iOS App Store, Mac App Store, Apple Arcade, Apple Music, Apple TV+, iMessage, and iCloud. Other services include Apple Store, Genius Bar, AppleCare, Apple Pay, Apple Pay Cash, and Apple Card.

Apple was founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne in April 1976 to develop and sell Wozniak's Apple I personal computer, though Wayne sold his share back within 12 days.

It was incorporated as Apple Computer, Inc., in January 3 1977, and sales of its computers, including the Apple II, grew quickly. Within a few years, Jobs and Wozniak had hired a staff of computer designers and had a production line.

More information: Apple

Apple went public in 1980 to instant financial success. Over the next few years, Apple shipped new computers featuring innovative graphical user interfaces, such as the original Macintosh in 1984, and Apple's marketing advertisements for its products received widespread critical acclaim. However, the high price of its products and limited application library caused problems, as did power struggles between executives. In 1985, Wozniak departed Apple amicably and remained an honorary employee, while Jobs and others resigned to found NeXT.

As the market for personal computers expanded and evolved through the 1990s, Apple lost market share to the lower-priced duopoly of Microsoft Windows on Intel PC clones. The board recruited CEO Gil Amelio to what would be a 500-day charge for him to rehabilitate the financially troubled company -reshaping it with layoffs, executive restructuring, and product focus.

In 1997, he led Apple to buy NeXT, solving the desperately failed operating system strategy and bringing Jobs back. Jobs regained leadership status, becoming CEO in 2000. Apple swiftly returned to profitability under the revitalizing Think different campaign, as he rebuilt Apple's status by launching the iMac in 1998, opening the retail chain of Apple Stores in 2001, and acquiring numerous companies to broaden the software portfolio.

In January 2007, Jobs renamed the company Apple Inc., reflecting its shifted focus toward consumer electronics, and launched the iPhone to great critical acclaim and financial success.

In August 2011, Jobs resigned as CEO due to health complications, and Tim Cook became the new CEO. Two months later, Jobs died, marking the end of an era for the company.

In June 2019, Jony Ive, Apple's CDO, left the company to start his own firm, but stated he would work with Apple as its primary client.

Apple's worldwide annual revenue totaled $274.5 billion for the 2020 fiscal year. Apple is the world's largest technology company by revenue and one of the world's most valuable companies. It is also the world's third-largest mobile phone manufacturer after Samsung and Huawei.

More information: Infographic Journal

In August 2018, Apple became the first publicly traded U.S. company to be valued at over $1 trillion and just two years later in August 2020 became the first $2 trillion U.S. company. The company employs 137,000 full-time employees and maintains 510 retail stores in 25 countries as of 2020. It operates the iTunes Store, which is the world's largest music retailer.

As of January 2020, more than 1.5 billion Apple products are actively in use worldwide. The company also has a high level of brand loyalty and is ranked as the world's most valuable brand. However, Apple receives significant criticism regarding the labor practices of its contractors, its environmental practices and unethical business practices, including anti-competitive behavior, as well as the origins of source materials.

Apple Computer Company was founded on April 1, 1976, by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne as a business partnership.

The company's first product is the Apple I, a computer designed and hand-built entirely by Wozniak. To finance its creation, Jobs sold his only motorized means of transportation, a VW Microbus, for a few hundred dollars, and Wozniak sold his HP-65 calculator for US$500, equivalent to $2,246 in 2019.

Wozniak debuted the first prototype at the Homebrew Computer Club in July 1976. The Apple I was sold as a motherboard with CPU, RAM, and basic textual-video chips -a base kit concept which would not yet be marketed as a complete personal computer. It went on sale soon after debut for US$666.66, equivalent to $2,995 in 2019. Wozniak later said he was unaware of the coincidental mark of the beast in the number 666, and that he came up with the price because he liked repeating digits.

Apple Computer, Inc. was incorporated on January 3, 1977, without Wayne, who had left and sold his share of the company back to Jobs and Wozniak for $800 only twelve days after having co-founded Apple.

Multimillionaire Mike Markkula provided essential business expertise and funding of US$250,000, equivalent to $1,054,778 in 2019, to Jobs and Wozniak during the incorporation of Apple.

More information: Business Insider

Great things in business are never done by one person.
They're done by a team of people.

Steve Jobs

THE FIRST EDITION OF LOS ANGELES TIMES IS PUBLISHED

Today, The Grandma continues her Communication Skills course with The Tintorers in Gavà. They have been talking about press, communication and fake news.

The Grandma has talked about the Los Angeles Times, one of the most historical American newspapers, based in El Segundo, California, whose first edition was published on a day like today in 1881.

 

The Los Angeles Times (sometimes abbreviated as LA Times or L.A. Times) is a daily newspaper based in El Segundo, California, which has been published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881.

It has the fifth-largest circulation in the U.S., and is the largest American newspaper not headquartered on the East Coast. The paper focuses its coverage of issues particularly salient to the West Coast, such as immigration trends and natural disasters. It has won more than 40 Pulitzer Prizes for its coverage of these and other issues. As of June 18, 2018, ownership of the paper is controlled by Patrick Soon-Shiong, and the executive editor is Norman Pearlstine.

In the 19th century, the paper developed a reputation for civic boosterism and opposition to labor unions, the latter of which led to the bombing of its headquarters in 1910.

The paper's profile grew substantially in the 1960s under publisher Otis Chandler, who adopted a more national focus. In recent decades the paper's readership has declined, and it has been beset by a series of ownership changes, staff reductions, and other controversies.

In January 2018, the paper's staff voted to unionize and finalized their first union contract on October 16, 2019. The paper moved out of its historic downtown headquarters to a facility in El Segundo, California near Los Angeles International Airport in July 2018.

The Times was first published on December 4, 1881, as the Los Angeles Daily Times under the direction of Nathan Cole Jr. and Thomas Gardiner.  

 

It was first printed at the Mirror printing plant, owned by Jesse Yarnell and T.J. Caystile. Unable to pay the printing bill, Cole and Gardiner turned the paper over to the Mirror Company. In the meantime, S. J. Mathes had joined the firm, and it was at his insistence that the Times continued publication.

In July 1882, Harrison Gray Otis moved from Santa Barbara to become the paper's editor. Otis made the Times a financial success.

More information: Los Angeles Times

Historian Kevin Starr wrote that Otis was a businessman capable of manipulating the entire apparatus of politics and public opinion for his own enrichment. Otis's editorial policy was based on civic boosterism, extolling the virtues of Los Angeles and promoting its growth. Toward those ends, the paper supported efforts to expand the city's water supply by acquiring the rights to the water supply of the distant Owens Valley.

The efforts of the Times to fight local unions led to the bombing of its headquarters on October 1, 1910, killing twenty-one people. Two union leaders, James and Joseph McNamara, were charged. The American Federation of Labor hired noted trial attorney Clarence Darrow to represent the brothers, who eventually pleaded guilty.

Otis fastened a bronze eagle on top of a high frieze of the new Times headquarters building designed by Gordon Kaufmann, proclaiming anew the credo written by his wife, Eliza: Stand Fast, Stand Firm, Stand Sure, Stand True.

The Los Angeles Times was beset in the first decade of the 21st century by a change in ownership, a bankruptcy, a rapid succession of editors, reductions in staff, decreases in paid circulation, the need to increase its Web presence, and a series of controversies.

For two days in 2005, the Times experimented with Wikitorial, the first Wiki by a major news organization to allow readers to combine forces to produce their own editorial pieces. It was shut down after being besieged with inappropriate material.

More information: Los Angeles Times-Twitter

The newspaper moved to a new headquarters building in El Segundo, near Los Angeles International Airport, in July 2018.

In the 19th century, the chief competition to the Times was the Los Angeles Herald, followed by the smaller Los Angeles Tribune. In December 1903, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst began publishing the Los Angeles Examiner as a direct morning competitor to the Times.

In the 20th century, the Los Angeles Express was an afternoon competitor, as was Manchester Boddy's Los Angeles Daily News, a Democratic newspaper.

By the mid-1940s, the Times was the leading newspaper in terms of circulation in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.

In 1948, it launched the Los Angeles Mirror, an afternoon tabloid, to compete with both the Daily News and the merged Herald-Express.

In 1954, the Mirror absorbed the Daily News. The combined paper, the Mirror-News, ceased publication in 1962, when the Hearst afternoon Herald-Express and the morning Los Angeles Examiner merged to become the Herald-Examiner. The Herald-Examiner published its last number in 1989.

In 2014, the Los Angeles Register, published by Freedom Communications, then-parent company of the Orange County Register was launched as a daily newspaper to compete with the Times. By late September of the same year, the Los Angeles Register was folded.

More information: Los Angeles Times-Youtube

What gunpowder did for war
the printing press has done for the mind.

Wendell Phillips

THE DUST BOWL, THE BIG DROUGHTS IN NORTH AMERICA

The Dust Bowl, The USA, 1930's

Today, The Grandma is relaxing at home. She has corrected the last exams of The Watsons and she has decided to read a little.

She has chosen an amazing theme, the Dust Bowl, the period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s.

On a day like today in 1935, the Dust Bowl heat wave reached its peak, sending temperatures to 43 °C in Chicago and 40 °C in Milwaukee.

This phenomenon explains how important is to know and respect nature and not alterating it. Nowadays, we listen to a lot of stories about climate change but, in fact, is something very old, as old as the direct influence of the human on nature.

The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s; severe drought and a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent the Aeolian processes (wind erosion) caused the phenomenon.

The drought came in three waves, 1934, 1936, and 1939–1940, but some regions of the High Plains experienced drought conditions for as many as eight years.

With insufficient understanding of the ecology of the plains, farmers had conducted extensive deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains during the previous decade; this had displaced the native, deep-rooted grasses that normally trapped soil and moisture even during periods of drought and high winds.

More information: Smithsonian

The rapid mechanization of farm equipment, especially small gasoline tractors, and widespread use of the combine harvester contributed to farmers' decisions to convert arid grassland, much of which received no more than 250 mm of precipitation per year to cultivated cropland.

During the drought of the 1930s, the unanchored soil turned to dust, which the prevailing winds blew away in huge clouds that sometimes blackened the sky. These choking billows of dust -named black blizzards or black rollers -travelled cross country, reaching as far as the East Coast and striking such cities as New York City and Washington, D.C. On the plains, they often reduced visibility to 1 m or less.

Associated Press reporter Robert E. Geiger happened to be in Boise City, Oklahoma, to witness the Black Sunday black blizzards of April 14, 1935; Edward Stanley, the Kansas City news editor of the Associated Press, coined the term Dust Bowl while rewriting Geiger's news story.

The Dust Bowl, The USA, 1930's

While the term the Dust Bowl was originally a reference to the geographical area affected by the dust, today it usually refers to the event itself, the term Dirty Thirties is also sometimes used.

The drought and erosion of the Dust Bowl affected 400,000 km2 that centered on the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and touched adjacent sections of New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas.

The Dust Bowl forced tens of thousands of poverty-stricken families to abandon their farms, unable to pay mortgages or grow crops, and losses reached $25 million per day by 1936 (equivalent to $460,000,000 in 2020). Many of these families, who were often known as Okies because so many of them came from Oklahoma, migrated to California and other states to find that the Great Depression had rendered economic conditions there little better than those they had left.

The Dust Bowl has been the subject of many cultural works, notably the novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck, the folk music of Woody Guthrie, and photographs depicting the conditions of migrants by Dorothea Lange.

The Dust Bowl area lies principally west of the 100th meridian on the High Plains, characterized by plains which vary from rolling in the north to flat in the Llano Estacado. Elevation ranges from 760 m in the east to 1,800 m at the base of the Rocky Mountains. The area is semiarid, receiving less than 510 mm of rain annually; this rainfall supports the shortgrass prairie biome originally present in the area.

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The region is also prone to extended drought, alternating with unusual wetness of equivalent duration. During wet years, the rich soil provides bountiful agricultural output, but crops fail during dry years. The region is also subject to high winds.

During early European and American exploration of the Great Plains, this region was thought unsuitable for European-style agriculture; explorers called it the Great American Desert.

The lack of surface water and timber made the region less attractive than other areas for pioneer settlement and agriculture.

The federal government encouraged settlement and development of the Plains for agriculture via the Homestead Act of 1862, offering settlers 65 ha plots.

With the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, waves of new migrants and immigrants reached the Great Plains, and they greatly increased the acreage under cultivation.

The Dust Bowl, The USA, 1930's

An unusually wet period in the Great Plains mistakenly led settlers and the federal government to believe that rain follows the plow, a popular phrase among real estate promoters, and that the climate of the region had changed permanently.

While initial agricultural endeavours were primarily cattle ranching, the adverse effect of harsh winters on the cattle, beginning in 1886, a short drought in 1890, and general overgrazing, led many landowners to increase the amount of land under cultivation.

Recognizing the challenge of cultivating marginal arid land, the United States government expanded on the 65 ha offered under the Homestead Act -granting 260 ha to homesteaders in western Nebraska under the Kinkaid Act (1904) and 130 ha elsewhere in the Great Plains under the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909.

Waves of European settlers arrived in the plains at the beginning of the 20th century.

A return of unusually wet weather seemingly confirmed a previously held opinion that the formerly semiarid area could support large-scale agriculture. At the same time, technological improvements such as mechanized plowing and mechanized harvesting made it possible to operate larger properties without increasing labour costs.

The combined effects of the disruption of the Russian Revolution, which decreased the supply of wheat and other commodity crops, and World War I increased agricultural prices; this demand encouraged farmers to dramatically increase cultivation. For example, in the Llano Estacado of eastern New Mexico and north western Texas, the area of farmland was doubled between 1900 and 1920, and then tripled again between 1925 and 1930.

More information: The Balance

The agricultural methods favoured by farmers during this period created the conditions for large-scale erosion under certain environmental conditions.

The widespread conversion of the land by deep plowing and other soil preparation methods to enable agriculture eliminated the native grasses which held the soil in place and helped retain moisture during dry periods. Furthermore, cotton farmers left fields bare during winter months, when winds in the High Plains are highest, and burned the stubble as a means to control weeds prior to planting, thereby depriving the soil of organic nutrients and surface vegetation.

After fairly favourable climatic conditions in the 1920s with good rainfall and relatively moderate winters, which permitted increased settlement and cultivation in the Great Plains, the region entered an unusually dry era in the summer of 1930. During the next decade, the northern plains suffered four of their seven driest calendar years since 1895, Kansas four of its twelve driest, and the entire region south to West Texas lacked any period of above-normal rainfall until record rains hit in 1941.

When severe drought struck the Great Plains region in the 1930s, it resulted in erosion and loss of topsoil because of farming practices at the time. The drought dried the topsoil and over time it became friable, reduced to a powdery consistency in some places.

The Dust Bowl, The USA, 1930's

Without the indigenous grasses in place, the high winds that occur on the plains picked up the topsoil and created the massive dust storms that marked the Dust Bowl period.

The persistent dry weather caused crops to fail, leaving the plowed fields exposed to wind erosion. The fine soil of the Great Plains was easily eroded and carried east by strong continental winds.

On November 11, 1933, a very strong dust storm stripped topsoil from desiccated South Dakota farmlands in just one of a series of severe dust storms that year. 

Beginning on May 9, 1934, a strong, two-day dust storm removed massive amounts of Great Plains topsoil in one of the worst such storms of the Dust Bowl. The dust clouds blew all the way to Chicago, where they deposited 5500 tonnes of dust. Two days later, the same storm reached cities to the east, such as Cleveland, Buffalo, Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C. That winter (1934–1935), red snow fell on New England.

On April 14, 1935, known as Black Sunday, 20 of the worst black blizzards occurred across the entire sweep of the Great Plains, from Canada south to Texas. The dust storms caused extensive damage and appeared to turn the day to night; witnesses reported that they could not see five feet in front of them at certain points.

Denver-based Associated Press reporter Robert E. Geiger happened to be in Boise City, Oklahoma, that day. His story about Black Sunday marked the first appearance of the term Dust Bowl; it was coined by Edward Stanley, Kansas City news editor of the Associated Press, while rewriting Geiger's news story.

More information: The Atlantic

The greatly expanded participation of government in land management and soil conservation was an important outcome from the disaster. Different groups took many different approaches to responding to the disaster. To identify areas that needed attention, groups such as the Soil Conservation Service generated detailed soil maps and took photos of the land from the sky.

To create shelterbelts to reduce soil erosion, groups such as the United States Forestry Service's Prairie States Forestry Project planted trees on private lands. Finally, groups like the Resettlement Administration, which later became the Farm Security Administration, encouraged small farm owners to resettle on other lands, if they lived in drier parts of the Plains.

During President Franklin D. Roosevelt's first 100 days in office in 1933, his administration quickly initiated programs to conserve soil and restore the ecological balance of the nation. Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes established the Soil Erosion Service in August 1933 under Hugh Hammond Bennett.

In 1935, it was transferred and reorganized under the Department of Agriculture and renamed the Soil Conservation Service. It is now known as the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS).

As part of New Deal programs, Congress passed the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act in 1936, requiring landowners to share the allocated government subsidies with the labourers who worked on their farms.

Under the law, benefit payments were continued as measures for production control and income support, but they were now financed by direct Congressional appropriations and justified as soil conservation measures. The Act shifted the parity goal from price equality of agricultural commodities and the articles that farmers buy to income equality of farm and non-farm population.

Thus, the parity goal was to re-create the ratio between the purchasing power of the net income per person on farms from agriculture and that of the income of persons not on farms that prevailed during 1909–1914.

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As a young girl, I saw commitment in my grandmother,

who helped Grandpa homestead our farm on the Kansas prairie.

Somehow they outlasted the Dust Bowl, the Depression,

and the tornadoes that terrorize the Great Plains.

Sheri L. Dew

MINERS DISCOVER SOME SKULLS IN CALAVERAS COUNTY

Tina Picotes visits Calaveras County, California

Today, The Grandma is resting at home. She has received news from Tina Picotes, one of her closest friends. Tina is visiting California and she has sent her some photos and information about the Calaveras County Skulls a controversial story ocurred in those lands when on a day like today in 1866 a skull was found there.

Some scientists believed these skulls belonged to ancient humans while other think they are a fake. It does not matter for The Grandma because she appreciates the idea of something that has become a legend and every legend has lights and shadows, trues and lies.

The Calaveras Skull was a human skull found by miners in Calaveras County, California, which was purported to prove that humans, mastodons, and elephants had coexisted in California. It was later revealed to be a hoax. Coincidentally, calaveras is the Spanish word for skulls.

On February 25, 1866, miners claimed to have found a human skull in a mine, beneath a layer of lava, 40 m below the surface of the earth, which made it into the hands of Josiah Whitney, then the State Geologist of California as well as a Professor of Geology at Harvard University.

More information: Calaveras County

 

A year before the skull came to his attention, Whitney published the belief that humans, mastodons, and mammoths coexisted; the skull served as proof of his convictions. After careful study, he officially announced its discovery at a meeting of the California Academy of Sciences on July 16, 1866, declaring it evidence of the existence of Pliocene age man in North America, which would make it the oldest known record of humans on the continent.

Its authenticity was immediately challenged. In 1869 the San Francisco Evening Bulletin reported that a miner had told a minister that the skull was planted as a practical joke. Thomas Wilson of Harvard ran a fluorine analysis on it in 1879, the first ever usage of such on human bone, with the results indicating it was of recent origin. It was so widely believed to be a hoax that Bret Harte famously wrote a satirical poem called To the Pliocene Skull in 1899.

More information: Go Calaveras

Whitney did not waver in his belief that it was genuine. His successor at Harvard, F. W. Putnam, also believed it to be real. By 1901 Putnam was determined to discover the truth and he headed to California. While there, he heard a story that in 1865 one of a number of Indian skulls had been dug up from a nearby burial site and planted in the mine specifically for miners to find. 

Putnam still declined to declare the skull a fake, instead conceding, It may be impossible ever to determine to the satisfaction of the archaeologist the place where the skull was actually found. Others, such as adherents of Theosophy, also were unwavering in their belief in the authenticity of the skull.

The Calaveras Skull

To further complicate the issue, careful comparison of the skull with descriptions of it at the time of its discovery revealed that the skull Whitney had in his possession was not the one originally found.

Anthropologist William Henry Holmes of the Smithsonian Institution investigated around the turn of the century. He determined that the plant and animal fossils that had been discovered near the skull were indeed genuine, but the skull was too modern, and concluded that to suppose that man could have remained unchanged... for a million years, roughly speaking... is to suppose a miracle. Likewise, J. M. Boutwell, investigating in 1911, was told by one of the participants in the discovery that the whole thing was indeed a hoax. The miners of the Sierra Nevada apparently did not greatly like Whitney, being an Easterner of very reserved demeanor, and were delighted to have played such a joke on him.

Furthermore, John C. Scribner, a local shopkeeper, claimed to have planted it, and the story was revealed by his sister after his death. Radiocarbon dating in 1992 established the age of the skull at about 1,000 years, placing it in the late Holocene age.

Despite evidence to the contrary, the Calaveras Skull continues to be cited by some creationists as proof that paleontologists ignore evidence that does not fit their theories, although others have acknowledged that the Calaveras Skull is a hoax.

More information: Archaeology

Calaveras County, officially the County of Calaveras, is a county in the northern portion of the U.S. state, California. As of the 2010 census, the population was 40,171. The county seat is San Andreas. Angels Camp is the only incorporated city in the county.

Calaveras is the Spanish word for skulls; the county was reportedly named for the remains of Native Americans discovered by the Spanish explorer Captain Gabriel Moraga.

 

Tina Picotes visits the Calaveras County Archives

Calaveras Big Trees State Park, a preserve of giant sequoia trees, is in the county several miles east of the town of Arnold on State Highway 4. Credit for the discovery of giant sequoias here is given to Augustus T. Dowd, a trapper who made the discovery in 1852 while tracking a bear. When the bark from the Discovery Tree was removed and taken on a tour around the world, the trees became a worldwide sensation and one of the county's first tourist attractions. The uncommon gold telluride mineral calaverite was discovered in the county in 1861 and is named for it.

Mark Twain set his story, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, in the county. The county hosts an annual fair and Jumping Frog Jubilee, featuring a frog-jumping contest, to celebrate the association with Twain's story. Each year's winner is commemorated with a brass plaque mounted in the sidewalk of downtown Historic Angels Camp and this feature is known as the Frog Hop of Fame.

The Spanish word calaveras means skulls. The county takes its name from the Calaveras River; it was said to have been named by Spanish explorer Gabriel Moraga, during his 1806–1808 expeditions, when he found many skulls of Native Americans along the banks of the stream. He believed they had either died of famine or been killed in tribal conflicts over hunting and fishing grounds. A more likely cause was a European epidemic disease, acquired from interacting with other tribes near the Missions on the coast.

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The Stanislaus River, which forms the southern boundary, is named for Estanislao, a Lakisamni Yokut who escaped from Mission San Jose in the late 1830s. He is reported to have raised a small group of men with crude weapons, hiding in the foothills when the Mexicans attacked. The natives were quickly decimated by Mexican gunfire.

In 1836, John Marsh, Jose Noriega, and a party of men, went exploring in Northern California. They made camp along a river bed in the evening, and when they woke up the next morning, discovered that they had camped in the midst of a great quantity of skulls and bones. They also gave the river the appropriate name: Calaveras.

The writer Mark Twain spent 88 seminal days in the county, during which time he heard the story that became The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County in the Angel Hotel in 1865. This short story kicked off Mark Twain's career and put Calaveras County on the map. 

The Calaveras Skull

Calaveras County was one of the original counties of the state of California, created in 1850 at the time of admission to the Union. Parts of the county's territory were reassigned to Amador County in 1854 and to Alpine County in 1864.

The county's geography includes beautiful landmarks, rolling hills, and giant valleys. It is also known for its friendly communities, and businesses such as agriculture management and construction engineering. It has numerous caverns, such as Mercer Caverns, California Cavern and Moaning Cavern that are national destinations for tourists from across the country. Other attractions include a thriving wine making industry, including the largest of the Calaveras wineries: Ironstone Vineyards, mountain sports recreation and the performing arts.

Gold prospecting in Calaveras County began in late 1848 with a camp founded by Henry Angel. Angel may have first arrived in California as a soldier, serving under Colonel Frémont during the Mexican War. After the war's end, he was found themselves in Monterey where he heard of the fabulous finds in the gold fields. He joined the Carson-Robinson party of prospectors and set out for the mines.

The company parted ways upon reaching what later became known as Angels Creek. Henry Angel tried placer mining but soon opened a trading post. By the end of the year, over one hundred tents were scattered about the creek and the settlement was referred to as Angels Trading Post, later shortened to Angels Camp.

More information: Sequoia Parks Conservacy

Placer mining soon gave out around the camp, but an extensive gold-bearing quartz vein of the area's Mother Lode was located by the Winter brothers during the mid-1850s, and this brought in the foundations of a permanent town. This vein followed Main Street from Angels Creek up to the southern edge of Altaville.

Five major mines worked the rich vein: the Stickle, the Utica, the Lightner, the Angels, and the Sultana. These mines reached their peaks during the 1880s and 1890s, when over 200 stamp mills crushed quartz ore brought in by hand cars on track from the mines. By the time hard rock mining was done, the five mines had producing a total of over $20 million in gold.

The telluride mineral calaverite was first recognized and obtained in 1861 from the Stanislaus Mine, Carson Hill, Angels Camp, in Calaveras Co., California. It was named for the County of origin by chemist and mineralogist Frederick Augustus Genth who differentiated it from the known gold telluride mineral sylvanite, and formally reported it as a new gold mineral in 1868.

A California Department of Forestry report lists the county's area in acres as 663,000, although the exact figure would be 2,685.00000 km2. There are a number of caverns located in Calaveras County.

More information: The Museum of Hoaxes

There's a saying among prospectors:

'Go out looking for one thing,

and that's all you'll ever find.'

Robert J. Flaherty