"It Hasta be Shasta"

I have purchased many more post cards than I had time to catalogue into my albums. I resolved that I would not purchase any more train post cards until I had entered those sitting in the stack on my desk into albums and my spreadsheets. So, these last several posts have been the result of this process. I picked up the post card; did the research; blogged about the card; then, entered the post card into my album and spreadsheet. Thanks to this resolve, I have found out that this is post card number 2,900 that has been entered into my post card collection!

In the late 1800s and early 1900s people used to flock to a summer resort on the Sacrament River. They could get there easily via the Southern Pacific Railroad because the railroad built a station there. It was near the small town of Dunsmuir, California whose population came in at 1,650 in the 2010 census. Dunsmuir is where the Southern Pacific makes a couple of wicked hairpin turns to get up the river valley.

When I was growing up in Southern California I remember an advertising tag line that said, “It Hasta be Shasta. The springs on the resort property is where the water came from that was the primary ingredient in these drinks. They bottled the liquid right there.

The resort closed in the early 1950s when it was sold and continues to be owned by the Saint Germain Foundation, and is used as a major facility by that organization (you can look up this organization on Wikipedia). It is no longer open to the public and the lower part of the resort - the bottling plant, the train station, the incline railway, the kiosk and the fountains are all gone. The falls that were visible from the railroad tracks and what ruins are left of the lower part of the resort are all overgrown by blackberry bushes.

The post card was published by the Newman Post Card Company out of Los Angeles.

The card itself was printed in Germany. It is from the Divided Back Era (1907 – 1915). The Newman Post Card Company existed for a very long time. It began in 1907. It was a publisher and printer of lithographic postcards, mostly views of southern California, with some cards of Hawaii and Nevada and the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition. They were related to the O. Newman Company.

In the 1960s the company was acquired by H.S. Crocker. This is taken from the H.S. Crocker Company website: “The first offset-lithographic press manufactured in America was purchased and used by H.S. Crocker Company and later donated to the Smithsonian Museum.” As was this: “Since 1856, H.S. Crocker Printing & Packaging has provided it’s customers with quality and excellence in Customer Service.”

This reminds me of the Lucky Strike cigarette commercials when they said, “Lucky Strike tastes like a cigarette should.” If they had used proper English grammar the saying would have been, “Lucky Strike tastes as a cigarette should.” Someone complained so the next commercial said, “What do you want, good grammar or good taste.” I guess that in case the H.S. Crocker Company would say the same thing about the way they spelled “it’s”, above.

It’s is a contraction for it is.
Its is the third person possessive for a pronoun.