Ansel Adams’ pictures of LA recall an era of war factories and 10-cent hot dogs | Hacker News Reader

Ansel Adams’ pictures of LA recall an era of war factories and 10-cent hot dogs

medium.californiasun.co

167 pointsprismatic127 comments

My father (right out of high school) worked at Lockheed during the time. I looked for his face in the pictures. He volunteered after Pearl Harbor.

The picture of "comic books" at the newsstand weren't comic books, they were pulp fiction. Pulp fiction pretty much died with the advent of TV. Pulps from those days can fetch hundreds of dollars.

I like how the hot dog stand has signs for soft drinks from three different soft drink companies. Now days restaurants almost always have a deal with one company and only serve those brands. It would be nice to be able to get a Coke or a Pepsi.

There are places that sell both. Arco mini marts have drink machines that dispense both, for example.

Mini marts are different from food vendors... they don't have similar arrangements. If anything only for promotions, not exclusivity like a restaurant chain would agree to.

I think they provide the machines as an incentive, and in turn it can only dispense their brands.

$0.10 is supposedly $1.89 today according to an inflation calculator (1939) -> (2018).

$0.05 (for a soda) using the same site is $0.91. Not sure how the scaling works.

My local Costco still serves $1.50 hot dogs + drink, so I'd only need to eat about 93 hot dogs and drink 93 sodas a year to offset the cost of a membership ;) and break even on 1939 hot dog dollars.

You don't need a membership to eat at the food courts.

Costco sells hot dog/soda combo at a loss (and I love them for that, even though I'm not a customer):

https://thetakeout.com/costco-loses-money-every-time-it-sell...

There's a video by NPR explaining how coke price was same for a long time:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/03/28/597302023/the-...

What a lack of personal space. It might be that the photos are staged, but the people are looking natural and comfortable. This sort of thing is personal and cultural, but having someone sit down so close that our shoulders touch would not make me happy.

Yes, people were less isolated and privy to their little bubbles back then. Heck, even urban neighbors got to know each other and hang around the front etc...

Now we just get on the internet and bitch at total strangers. What an awful gnashing of teeth it has all become, too!

I'm introverted myself, but I think being around people makes us better as persons. Even more so if its all kinds of people (e.g. a community, neighbors, etc) and not just our self-selected friends.

The internet, on the other hand, usually has the opposite effects: it multiplies the pathologist of the individual, and makes them the god of their own puny universe.

Agreed. I still think there is potential here(on the Internet), though.

I would put it down to culture. Also note that people’s shoulders aren’t touching apart from the group looking over the pier and maybe the men on the bench looking into the city. I think most of those people are just sitting a normal distance apart, and I would argue that this is basically the correct distance to sit from someone you know (seems to be the case in all the photos) when on a shared surface like a bench. It’s different with chairs because it is harder to shift a small distance and typically chairs cannot be moved so close together without hitting each other or getting fingers trapped in between

I think some of that comes down to relative wealth. I know friends from developing countries who are very comfortable with little personal space. That's what happens when you have large families (and even bigger extended families) and little space.

I’m not sure that it relates to money. I’m from New Zealand and found people in London came closer than I liked. Could it be population density?

Probably; and in a high density arena, it would be the wealthy that can afford low density subslices.

In a low density area, money simply gets you more space over the baseline of ...a lot of space

I'd love to see the rest of these. I grew up in the LA area, my mom worked in aeropspace, while there were shades of this Los Angeles left in my childhood, most of it was swept away by the shovel of progress and growth that happenened post war.

http://www.drkrm.com/ansel_adams.html https://tessa.lapl.org/cdm/search/collection/photos/searchte...

Just fantastic, thank you!

Being a photo geek, I’d love to know more about the technical side of these photos. Angel Adams is most often associated with large format (8x10 inch or larger) sheet film and zone system exposure and developing. But the subject matter of these photos is not conducive to that kind of photography. We’re these shot on 35mm or was he using a handheld large format (like a press camera)?

I’d also love to know the film used.

When I saw these pictures before, I noticed they were all square. So probably not 35mm. You could expose square photos on 35mm film, but it would be unusual. So probably likely medium format of some kind?

Adams was known to use the Zeiss Ikonta B, which would have been available in the 1930s:

https://www.cameraquest.com/zikontb.htm

So I think there's a decent chance it was used for these shots, but I've found no definite confirmation of this...yet.

He used a variety of cameras. [1]

[1] https://improvephotography.com/53059/what-kind-of-camera-did...

Your guess seems likely. He apparently also used a Hasselblad 500C a fair bit but that's a later camera.

You're definitely correct, the Zeiss was one among many he used over the course of his career.

I knew about the 500c but didn't mention it here because he wouldn't have been able to use it for these shots unless he were a time traveler. :)

Good catch. I was looking at them on my iPad, and the site puts enough junk on my screen that I can’t see the entire photo at once. That would also make a 4x5 press camera unlikely. It seems the 6x6 folder makes sense.

He had a huge and spectacular collection of cameras and used all of them a lot. This most likely are taken with the Hasselblad 500C, he has a couple of very well known pictures with the 80mm and the 120mm and the dates match.

If you are into Ansel and gear get "The Making of 40 Photographs" were he details gear, exposure, composition and scouting and development process for 40 pictures.

Also I think most of his well known pictures are 4x5 and not 8x10, he has a lot of spectacular 8x10s because he liked to contact print big, like the famous portrait of Edward Weston sitting in the tree in Carmel.

The 500C was introduced in 1957, well over a decade after these photos.

Oh, then it's probably his Ikonta, the other 6x6 camera he used. It's a foldable.

He also had a TLR but he seldom used it for people.

While technically proficient, as one expects from Ansel Adams, these images don't have the same feel or impact one gets from his classic landscape images. Looking closely at them, I wouldn't necessarily be able to attribute them to Adams in many cases if I didn't already know they were his. In contrast, when you see one of his Sierra Nevada images or photographs of the National Parks, you know immediately that they could only have been his. I have to wonder if he treated this assignment casually, as a means to make some money, as opposed to making art. It may also show an Ansel Adams operating outside his wheelhouse, applying his eye and skills but being a bit uncomfortable with the genre. In either case, I wouldn't mind being able to hang these on my wall.

The article notes that he wasn’t very impressed with them and that he felt he hadn’t ever gotten the right weather for photographs. The main problem was likely that he didn’t have enough time to get the photos he wanted.

Some of his best landscape prints took years to produce. His photography is not about serendipitous "found" imaging, nor documenting a scene you were likely to see with your own eyes. Those romantic and dramatic landscapes existed in his mind, and I really mean he produced the images. He used the wilderness and environment like set pieces for studio work, and also manipulated the exposures and printing quite a bit to get some of the dramatic lighting.

His technical skill was only one part of what made his art. His patience and deep familiarity with the land was also essential. He traveled the same areas repeatedly, imagined a composition, and returned later to get the season, weather, and light the way he wanted. Many return visits were not as fruitful as hoped, since nature doesn't have a reservation system.

These urban photos seem more journalistic in nature. Not only was his time compressed for the work, the nature of the subject lacks the permanence to pre-visualize a composition and return to capture it at a more ideal time.

It is well known that much of the impact those images make on people is due, in large part, to the time he spent making prints from the negatives. He was a master at that. I like you term, "journalistic", in referring to this work. That is concept I was thinking about but the word didn't come to me at that time.

Iirc he used quite a bit of medium format and 35mm later in his life, when he got too old to lug around the large format camera and tripod. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he used those for more mobile work.

In those pictures I counted just two people who looked overweight, and at worst they were a little chubby. Yet there's plenty of food in the photos, and it's ice cream, soft drinks, burgers, hot dogs, etc., the same stuff routinely blamed for the obesity epidemic four score years later.

I suppose a lot of that is that these photos are from public places, and most of these people ate out rarely, mostly eating healthier from their lunch boxes and at their dinner tables.

Also, they were more active:

- most likely didn't own a car : transit + walking - no TV, internet etc - working in a factory

Even in the 1940s, most middle-class families owned at least one car. But during WWII, gasoline was rationed so people did drive less for a few years.

> most of these people ate out rarely, mostly eating healthier from their lunch boxes

Yes to 'eat out rarely' definitely was like that (even in the 60's). But more importantly food wasn't prepared at home to make you want to eat more of it than you needed to (the average person). Things were done by mom and not enhanced in a way to make you overeat. Very important and often overlooked.

You have an interesting point. Although... I always seemed to think the culprit wasn’t just unhealthy meals but the snacks/soda etc.

The US didn't have a meaningful problem with obesity until ~1990 forward.

If you look at high school yearbook photos from the 1980s, almost all the people were thin. These are young persons that should have high metabolisms and high rates of activity, so you'd expect that. That thinness changed noticeably and rapidly through the 1990s. I went to high school in the 1990s and could see that shift very plainly during the decade.

All childhood age range obesity was typically about 5% until the early 1980s. Now the combined average is around 15%

From 1960 to 1980 adult obesity was typically 12% to 15%. Today that would nearly qualify as the thinnest country in the developed world (only Japan, South Korea and Singapore beat it now). From 1980 to 1990 it went up five or six points. By 2000 it had doubled (since the early 1980s) to ~30%. So approximately a doubling of the obesity rate in 15-20 years. Contrast 1980 US at ~15% obesity, with present day Denmark, Italy, Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland which are all considered fairly thin at ~20% obesity rates.

Not sure why this was down voted. If the cited numbers are wrong, which is the only valid reason to down vote, please call it out and provide the correct numbers. If not don't down vote.

I've run into resistance to what I pointed out, pretty much every time I've ever pointed it out anywhere online. For some reason people like to believe a myth that the US always had a big problem with obesity. Factually that's simply not true at all, it's a relatively recent problem.

As a meta point, I've found people over the past few years less willing to even entertain facts that contradict their worldview. I blame the culture war, which has broken, in a serious way, the ability for lots of people to think critically and evaluate arguments on their own. People instead interpret posts that don't confirm their conclusions as attacks on their person, and then downvote, block, and counterattack as needed.

Point in case the down votes on your post and the OP above as of now. Let's hope that changes again.

There is no official explanation for the obesity crisis except people are lazy and eat poorly. The only alternative to this is that officials are ignoring other explanations. This, in most people's minds, is conspiracy theory to even suggest and that's what makes people uncomfortable.

Most people don't know how to answer questions outside their limited domain expertise without relying on authority figures. Telling them their authority figures are unreliable on such an important topic seriously complicates their lives.

I think that it is fairly well acknowledged that obesity, both in the US and globally, has gotten a lot worse fairly recently.

There's a lot of different theories, and a lot of controversy as to why but the idea that wide scale obesity is a fairly recent problem is not controversial.

I'd guess that the reason why the top comment here was downvoted, if it was downvoted, is that many people feel it's an obvious problem; calories in and calories out and the falling costs of calories in and the increasing cost of calories out explains the whole thing for me. You take an organism that has lived essentially on the edge of starvation for hundreds of thousands of years, and you put it in an environment where calories in are almost free and where for most of them, calories out are not? and yeah, those organisms are going to overeat. (Just my opinion, but it's a common one)

(the complaints about downvotes were downvoted because they are complaints about downvotes; those are obligatory downvotes.)

Based on this CDC paper -- https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_adult_07_08/obe... -- the numbers for the US look absolutely correct to me.

Note that the percentage of overweight but not obese individuals has remained a constant at roughly 30% of the population (both in 1960 and now). So there were some problems with weight issues back then too. But not so extreme.

What's also noteworthy is that extreme obesity (BMI >= 40) has shot up from barely existing in 1960 (0.9%) to 6% of the population. The health risks of obesity are much more problematic at BMI >= 40.

Roughly coinciding with the complete dominance of high fructose corn syrup completely taking over from granulated sugar in food manufacturing. Correlation is not causation. In the U.S. the sugar industry my uncle used to work in is now non-existent. Sugar beet is possibly not even a crop in Californian any longer, and I believe the cane industry in Hawaii is either non-existent or at least much smaller.

There's a bit of a perfect storm in that 1980-2000 frame.

US soda consumption roughly doubled from 1975 to 2000. And of course as you mentioned, the US switched from sugar to high fructose. The US Government poured gasoline on the fire, with its industry collusion re sugar and its wildly screwed up food pyramids encouraging the over-consumption of carbs.

US sugar consumption also oddly skyrocketed from roughly 1980 to 2000. It went from ~80 pounds to ~110 pounds annually per capita in just under 20 years (after being relatively stable in a 20lb range the prior 60 years minus WW2).

The era of sugar cereal, sugar breakfast, large containers of soda everywhere, a large junk food boom, a big pizza & carb boom (rapid growth of pizza chains everywhere), continued explosion of low quality fast food chains. And last but not least, a huge increase in sedentary lifestyles.

also coincides with advertising deregulation, the advent of ads directed at children during the first reagan administration

Source? Also coincides with the advent of cable television.

I remember plenty of commercials for cereal during my childhood which significantly predated the 1980s. The idea that kids didn't widely eat Frosted Flakes, Lucky Charms, Trix, etc. etc. is simply counterfactual. I

I suspect there are many reasons for increased obesity including more fast food, more (large) soda consumption, less physical play activity, etc. Simply blaming advertising, farm subsidies, or whatever may make people feel that they've identified an external bogeyman but it's not as simple as that.

https://www.awn.com/animationworld/dr-toon-when-reagan-met-o...

This is an interesting take on an inevitable event in television history. Deregulation was bound to happen as the triopoly held by ABC, CBS, and NBC began to break up with the advent of cable TV. Furthermore I have very many fond memories of children's television in the 80s and 90s, and commercialized or not, like the Ninja Turtles, Transformers, Hot Wheels, Captain N, etc...it was very enjoyable to me and I would hate for some bureaucrat to dictate what was and wasn't acceptable. Markets do that just fine when choice is available. It would be even harder to enforce such a thing in the age of the internet.

The sugar cereal breakfast was common in the 1960s. The same ones as today were there in the 1960s - Captain Crunch, Fruit Loops, etc.

>> Sugar beet is possibly not even a crop in Californian any longer

Plenty of sugar beet here in Michigan. plugs nose

So far there's no real proof that HFCS is any worse than other forms of sugar. The problem is more likely due to consuming more sugar in general.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3679479/

No it's not the corn syrup that's the problem it's that it is a lot cheaper than cane sugar so it's used in higher quantities and in more types of food. Also the late 1980s and 1990s was when people started going nuts about "low-fat" diets. When food producers removed fats and oils from their products, consumers thought it tasted like cardboard. So manufacturers would add sugar or corn syrup to make the food taste better, while still being able to call it low fat.

> it's not the corn syrup that's the problem it's that it is a lot cheaper than cane sugar so it's used in higher quantities and in more types of food

For reference, corn syrup is not in fact cheaper than cane sugar. But the US imposes a tariff on imported sugar that keeps the price at roughly 300% of what it would otherwise be.

Then you would have to explain why the same thing happened in other western countries where the dominant sugar is not HFCS.

Normalization of deviance.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Professionalism/Diane_Vaughan_...?

Once society passed some critical threshold of obesity prevalence, people started to see it as normal and then the problem accelerated.

In the 1970s, looking at old pictures, people I thought were "fat" at the time I would not regard as such these days.

There are also way fewer cars in those photos that anywhere comparable in LA today. Maybe these things are related?

>Yet there's plenty of food in the photos, and it's ice cream, soft drinks, burgers, hot dogs, etc., the same stuff routinely blamed for the obesity epidemic four score years later.

That "plenty of food" was not 24/7 bombarded into the population with ads, not was it 90% of a supermarket, portions at restaurants were much smaller, and the sugar content was less. Plus most people, and for decades more, cooked and ate at home.

Work was more physical.

much less processed food...

I believe in this and also that the overall cumulative amount of activity really makes the difference. A while ago we met with couple of childhood friends and even though none of us are really sedentary it was obvious that one of the guys in our group was in seemingly excellent physical condition. We discussed about this and he wasn't involved in any actual sports hobby or nutritional diet but lives in a small town with his wife and two dogs, works in a industrial production plant and turned out that his average daily step count over the last year or so with his current phone was something between 15 000 - 20 000 steps per day without even trying. Those of us who live in a city doing office work and mostly trying to hit the gym couple of times per week clocked in around 6000-7000 steps per day on average. That difference must add up somewhere!

The portion sizes are really a big factor here I think. A bottle of CocaCola in 1940 was 6 ounces. Today, a small Coke at McDonald's is 16 oz.

>> soft drinks

Those nickel sodas in the old days were only 6.5 oz

A can of coke is 12 oz today, nearly double, and the 20 oz bottle is probably more common. And the fast food restaurants serve 16 oz as a 'small'...

Yeah but they're filled with ice. And also we have diet soda options today. I don't believe they existed in the 40s.

> Diet Soda

Maybe that is part of the problem?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/drinking-diet-sod... "People who drink diet soda may be more likely to overeat in other areas, he told Reuters Health."

I wonder about the little things.

In winter, indoors was colder, not much, but you expended energy keeping warm. Wanted to send a message to you colleague 10ft away? No email, so you'd get up and walk over. Your whisk would probably be a hand whisk, your hedge trimmer would probably have been shears. Even driving would have been without power steering. Everything was just slightly less automated, and required just a little bit more energy. It really starts adding up very quickly.

I'm bemused by the effort people will go to to park as close as possible to their destination. Me, I park in the first slot that appears, often with a mind to being able to drive forward to get out rather than backing up into pedestrians and shopping carts. In a large parking lot, there'll be a pack of cars near the entrance, and then my lonely car a ways away.

This never fails to annoy my passengers:

"Why'd ya park here? The entrance is over there."

"Wut, ya legs broke?"

Yeah. I don't even drive anywhere, I cycle. I am bemused by people who drive when they don't have to. I am not sure a short walk through the car park is going to to do much for you.

My gp comment was precisely on the little things making a difference. Walking a few extra steps fits in with that.

> your hedge trimmer would probably have been shears

I'm sorry to say, I finally gave up on using a bellows to clean the driveway, and succumbed to the lure of a leafblower.

They were on their feet most of the day.

Baggier clothes were in style, so hard to tell what their actual weight/waist size could be.

Less processed sugar.

I was surprised that so many of you all were grasping at physical activity nuances. A factor but it doesnt exist in a vacuum

The percentage of families with both parents working has increased significantly over the last several decades - perhaps as more families have both parents working, healthy homemade meals are becoming less popular, since the parents just don't have the time required to prepare healthy food.

Less sedentary lifestyles and something Dr. Jason Fung always likes to point out: most people ate three times a day until a couple of decades ago. Very rarely would one have a snack, usually no snacks in between those three meals.

People ate those foods far less often because grocery prices were a tiny fraction of fast food prices. There were even intermittent price wars between competing grocery stores.

Now the Savemart-Kroger duopoly means fast food and groceries have reached esentialy the same price point.

Grocery stores now have cutthroat price competition, with some of the slimmest margins in retail. Not sure where you're getting these ideas.

Look at the ingredients, noticeably lacking in all of them in 1940 will be HFCS.

And since the advent of HFCS in the 70s it would is now found in everything named above coke, ice cream, hotdog/burger buns (and condiments) and fries. And the amount of sugar in food stuffs has increased substantially.

We have thousands of years of agriculture showing us forcefeeding corn to animals leads to fattening them up and in particular fatty livers (fois gras). Since the advent of HFCS in the 70’s we have seen the first cases of childhood t2 diabeties and non alcoholic fatty liver disease in the US in the 80’s. Once HFCS made its way into the UK we saw childhood diabeties there too with the first cases in the 90’s and you can follow the spread of western diseases to every country where western HFCS foodstuffs were introduced, for example Okinawa, which once had the best life expectancy in the world and now has western foods and an explosion of these chronic diseases.

Even when you adjust for physical activity and caloric intake, Americans weigh more than previous generations. Pesticides, non-stick chemicals, BPA, and antibiotics probably have something to do with it: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/whats-rea...

Also, possibly only one photo in this set with a non-white persons in it.

Imagine getting dressed up to go to a bowling alley. We are such bums these days.

Not to mention, most men wore top hats in those times.

Most men wore some kind of hat outdoors, but top hats were already mostly out of style by that time and worn only with formal attire.

Considering how choice of hat signaled class I think you would find that most men did not wear top hats when these pictures were taken. If you look at the pictures in the article, few people are wearing hats and no one is wearing a top hat. I think top hats were also going out of fashion before and during the war.

I find really interesting that over time that style of clothes just became "dressed up", while technically advanced clothing with comfortable cuts is seen as casual or working outfits.

Even discussing with people in their 30ies, they'll often throw "a good fitted suit should be as comfortable as pyjamas" without questionning why we don't live in what would be outdoor pyjamas.

>Even discussing with people in their 30ies, they'll often throw "a good fitted suit should be as comfortable as pyjamas" without questionning why we don't live in what would be outdoor pyjamas.

I don't know anyone who thinks that suits are as comfy as pajamas; In spite of being well into my late 30s, I've only heard that in fiction; I suspect it's one of those fictional things; we'd all like to be the man who is so well-tailored that his suit was as comfortable as pajamas.

(Of course, I live in California, so I think outerwear is something highly engineered that you keep in your travel chest, so perhaps this is a subject I shouldn't speak on too much. )

Also, Lindybeige, probably my favorite commentator on historical clothing, disagrees with you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQcJfTGbjuo

He prefers the cloak:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN8cYd3poIk

It's interesting that men of the day wore loose fitting pants. Today, when period pictures are made of that time, the actors wear closely fitted pants.

Admittedly the only film that comes to my mind imediately is LA Confidential, but that film stars loose fitting pants.

Which period films with tight fitting pants are you thinking of?

Offhand "Black Sheep Squadron" comes to mind.

The zoot suit riots were during the war, right? Man... Those pants were pegged! Very nearly hammerpants.

Anyone read "Factotum" by Bukowski? While looking at these, I can't help but think about Henry Chinaski wandering from job to job in 1940s L.A and all the characters he mixes with while doing so.

The accommodation crisis close to big factories was awful but remember people who had been in the depression were living in jungle camps made out of cardboard by freight lines. These caravan trailers were a step up for e.g. former migrant field labour.

Richard Rhodes talks about workers in the wider Manhatten district nuclear factory system eg at oak Ridge having no limit to meat in their ration to attract workers to barracks style entertainment free zone: bars with windows which swing up and out for rapid teargassing by police due to barfights.

> “The weather was bad over a rather long period,” he wrote in a letter. “None of the pictures were very good.”

Before I read that statement my first thought was 'these are not that good'. [1] And in fact I actually question (despite what appears to be proof that they are Adam's photos ie 'given to the library' that they really are his photos.

I did photography (and made money from it; had a darkroom at home growing up) and artistically it would be extremely odd for someone (especially of his caliber) to release photos that were not up to visual standards. It's part a sense of pride and partly just you don't show your work if it's not good. And you care about your work and you definitely care if the product is not quality and so on. I remember another photographer (whose last name ironically was also Adams) when I was in high school saying that 'nothing leaves my darkroom that isn't ready for printing or publication'.

These photos are actually prompting me to see if there is anything about Ansel Adams that I should take into consideration that would change what I am thinking about this. Something doesn't add up or make sense.

[1] I don't mean visually they aren't interesting. But they look quality wise (even considering he said the weather wasn't nice [2] to be very poor. I say that as someone who has printed photos and knows the difference.

[2] That could also be part of the 'cover' story to explain why they aren't quality that one would expect.

I would guess that it's not unusual for a photographer to do much better work on a subject that they love than on a random assignment. I suspect Mr. Adams would spend days chasing a shot of mountains and clouds, adagissimo, but shoot a lunch crowd as fast as he could get away with, allegrissimo.

>I did photography (and made money from it; had a darkroom at home growing up) and artistically it would be extremely odd for someone (especially of his caliber) to release photos that were not up to visual standards.

Photographers released all kinds of photos, even when they weren't up to "visual standards". It was "f8 and be there" when it came to photo-journalism, not some aesthetic ideal.

Besides those are the photographs that weren't picked for the story.

Agree with all of that, but he didn’t release most of them. Forbes published a few then the rest languished in his archives. Also everyone has to work for a paycheck from time to time.

Based on inflation calculations, $0.10 in 1943 would be equivalent to $1.45 today. You can still buy a hot dog with soda at Costco for $1.50 (although it may be a loss leader).

I think this says more about how inaccurate inflation has been measured.

How is it inaccurate?

The argument is that since a sidewalk hotdog currently costs more than $1.45, we should have considerable doubt that the inflation rate was calculated correctly. If the average sidewalk price then is equivalent to the lowest possible price now, it seems fair to say that the actual rate of inflation was higher than the official figure. The problem is deciding if a "sidewalk hotdog" then is really comparable to a "sidewalk hotdog" now, given all the other changes in consumption habits and opportunities.

Hot dogs today may be higher quality due to improved food safety practices. And even if hot dogs are slightly more expensive, other things are relatively cheaper.

Would many people claim that the modern hot dog is higher quality? Mostly pretty nasty in my opinion!

CPI-U is an average rate of inflation across a basket of products. It's possible that the price of some products has gone up higher than CPI-U and that other products haven't gone up as high.

Yeah I don't think Costco hotdogs are representative of current food prices. They are unusually cheap

I live near Santa Monica, I have a hard time reconciling the wealthy beach town of today with the idea of it being a blue collar factory town 75 years ago.

If you look carefully there are still little signs. The Aero Theatre was built as a 24-hour movie house by Donald W. Douglas for their aircraft employees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aero_Theatre

The "man on an unidentified street in Burbank" [4] is likely on today's Lincoln Street. The railroad offers little clues; unfortunately, mileposts [5] are not visible -- the '40-30' on the sign is a speed limit [6].

The railroad crossing there is now closed; there's one slightly to the west on Buena Vista Street, from which Google Streetview has a similar view of the ridgeline [1]. A simulated view of the ridgeline from Lincoln Street [2] matches closely with the ridgeline seen in the photo. The N-S orientation of the street and the nearest building corresponds with the buildings seen on the right side of this south-facing 1939 aerial photo [3].

The photographer must be facing east-northeast, because the mountains towards the south are much further away and appear less prominent on the skyline. A south-facing photo would have had to been taken from the other side of the factory, which was the side with the entrance. From that angle, the street grid would be out of place with the railroad and the buildings would look much different.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@34.1898286,-118.3382049,3a,75y,... [2] https://www.udeuschle.de/panoramas/panqueryfull.aspx?mode=ne... [3] search for '1939 aerial view looking south at Lockheed' at http://members.tripod.com/airfields_freeman/CA/Airfields_CA_... [4] https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*sY_ju9NCmwSEySh5Z... [5] http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2014/03/milepost-markers.h... [6] http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2014/03/speed-signs.html

Well, what's 10 cents in today's hot dog buying dollars?

US Steel has, of all things, a massive steel mill compound in the Utah desert near Provo.

It was built there during WWII to have steel fabrication closer to ship building on the West coast.

The other reason it is there is that the contingency plan for a Nazi landing and invasion of the East Coast was to retreat behind the Rocky Mountains.

>The other reason it is there is that the contingency plan for a Nazi landing and invasion of the East Coast was to retreat behind the Rocky Mountains.

That's the first time I've heard of that plan. Would love to read more about that if you have any resources for it. A quick cursory search online wasn't too successful. Retreating behind the Rockies would leave a huge amount of space and resources available, and presumably the majority of the citizens. Would places like steel mills or other industrial facilities be sabotaged so they could not be used by the opposition?

That factoid is from this book:

The Corporation : A Centennial Biography of United States Steel Corporation, 1901-2001 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1887969128/

To answer your other question, there were plans in place to evacuate most of the capital via rail behind the Rockies as well. The Soviets did this tactic for real during the German invasion and were quite successful at it.

Thanks for the link. I find these mostly untaught tidbits of what the US did domestically during the war very interesting. War bonds, rationing, scrap metal drives etc. The contrast with today's "war effort" is mind boggling. Current "war efforts" include tax cuts. It's so 1984ish to me. We've always been at war with...

To have a real “war effort,” in a democracy you need a population that strongly supports the war. Otherwise you get voted out and replaced with leaders who will seek peace.

You’d hope the outcome would be that unpopular wars are avoided, but it seems that the real outcome is only that big ones are. Our leaders have discovered that small wars that don’t require major sacrifices from the general population can be highly unpopular and it just doesn’t matter.

At least small wars kill a lot fewer people than big wars. You might even call it progress.

That is true. And it’s not like small wars that didn’t require major sacrifices from the general population weren’t a thing before.

The idea of anyone invading the east coast is hilarious, Appalachia would make Afghanistan look like an amusement park in comparison.

Never heard that perspective before. It resonates powerfully.

To go into detail why Germany couldn't invade or even annoy the US mainland in WW2, they didn't have a credible navy and never had a strategic bomber fleet.

Hitler started WW2 5 years before the German navy was built-up, and most of their aviation was for close air support.

Even the English Channel ended up being too much.

In summary, both Germany and Japan declared war on a country they couldn't invade, the USA - how futile is that?

Neither had the means to get an army to the US mainland, either, nor supply it. The logistical support needed for the D-Day invasion was incredible.

The Japanese knew that they would lose in a war with the US but the military leadership considered a war inevitable. Pearl Harbor was their "Hail Mary". The civilian leadership (Konoe et al) tried to negotiate an alliance of some kind with the US as late as autumn 1941.

"In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success." – Yamamoto, head of the Japanese Navy, and architect of the Pearl Harbor attack

it's funny how people have almost the same thoughts and feelings, just in different space and time.

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