On the way to the Tavern

Happy Birthday to you! Today is my sister Mary’s birthday. This information will become significant later in this post. We are still in Southern California. We are still on Mt. Lowe. Today’s two post cards contain pictures of the trip from Echo Mountain to the Alpine Tavern.

The card on the left is the older of the two. It is from the “divided back” era. It has a title in red ink in the top, right-hand corner of the post card. It reads: “On the Road to Alpine Tavern, Mt. Lowe Division, Pacific Electric Ry. Los Angeles, Cal.” You can see that part of the mountain was very covered in tall trees. They look like pine, spruce and live oaks. At the bottom of the card is a curve. It is probably horseshoe curve. It was located toward the top of Los Flores Canyon and was on the trolley line to the Alpine Tavern. The post card on the right is of later vintage. It is from the “white border” era. The title at the bottom of the card in the white border (a very good reason to have a white border) reads: “CLIMBING LOS FLORES CANYON, MT. LOWE, CALIFORNIA.” It shows the trolley going through a more rugged part of the trail to the Alpine Tavern. After the horseshoe curve and the circular bridge (coming soon to this blog) the trolley climbed, went around a rocky point and the top of this hill, then it headed back in the direction from which it came toward the tavern at the base of Mt. Lowe.

The post card at the top in this view is the one on the left in the previous view. It was published by M. Rieder, a company headquartered in Los Angeles. The card itself was printed in Germany – very famous at this time for their quality of post cards. It was also prior to World War I so trade with Germany was fine. This is card No. 3790. You can see that it has a divided back. The right side was for the stamp, the postmark and the address – ONLY. The left side was for the message, the very short message. In a posting coming up we will see a similar card but just a wee bit older than this one. No message was allowed in this space, either. The card on the left looks to like it is a post card printed by Curt Otto Teich’s company. At the top is the number R-53774. If it is a card by Curt Teich it could be from around 1915, when the first started printing the white border cards. There is no other indicator on the card (unless maybe I lift the stamp) to indicate who printed or published it. You can see that the Mt. Lowe insignia is clearly printed on the back, top left corner of the card. We know for sure that this card existed on December 2, 1922. That is the postmarked date. It was mailed from Los Angeles, California to Winnipeg, Manitoba in Canada at 12:30 PM. Now for the significance of my sister’s birthday: This card was mailed about 3 decades to the day before she was born. So, it almost like today is both my sister’s birthday and this post card’s birthday – sort of…