Broadway and 7th Street, Los Angeles. Probably the late forties or early fifties.

(via Vintage Los Angeles)

Classic Don Knotts. Fans of The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966) will get an extra kick. This episode was filmed three years prior, so one would suspect it may have been an inspiration for that film.

ATTABOY, LUTHER!!!

Looking toward the Hollywood Hotel at the northwest corner of Hollywood & Highland in Dec. 1953. Behind the P.E. Red Car is Grauman’s Theater.

Photo: Walter Abenseth P.E.Collection

(via Vintage Los Angeles)

Apparently a Christmas-themed episode. Just caught the last 30 seconds on cable and saw Hoss in a Santa costume. I’ll have to get back to this.

The Cartwrights find a loving home for Gabrielle, a blind eleven year old girl, whose parents were killed in an overturned wagon; but Gabrielle wants to live with her grandfather, a crusty mountain hermit who wants nothing to do with anyone…including his orphaned granddaughter.

In 1954, somebody left their bicycle in the woods, forgot about it, and never went back looking for it. (Details of the story’s unconfirmed, but still.)

(via History in Pictures)

Behind the scenes of the Twilight Zone episode starring Burgess Meredith as a timid little man who is given super human powers by a Martian scientist. Also features Don Rickles. Original air date March 3, 1961.

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An old friend of mine just sent me this. I checked with Snopes, and it’s true.

Every so often, usually in the vast deserts of the American Southwest, a hiker or a backpacker will run across something puzzling: a large concrete arrow, as much as seventy feet in length, sitting in the middle of scrub-covered nowhere.

What are these giant arrows? Some kind of surveying mark? Landing beacons for flying saucers? Earth’s turn signals?

No. They are points along the Transcontinental Air Mail Route.

On August 20, 1920, the United States opened its first coast-to-coast airmail delivery route, just 60 years after the Pony Express closed up shop.

There were no good aviation charts in those days, so pilots had to eyeball their way across the country using landmarks. This meant that flying in bad weather was difficult, and night flying was just about impossible.

The Postal Service solved the problem with the world’s first ground-based civilian navigation system: a series of lit beacons that would extend from New York to San Francisco. Every ten miles, pilots would pass a bright yellow concrete arrow. Each arrow would be surmounted by a 51-foot steel tower and lit by a million candlepower rotating beacon.

(A generator shed at the tail of each arrow powered the beacon.)

Now mail could get from the Atlantic to the Pacific not in a matter of weeks,
but in just 30 hours or so.

Even the dumbest of air mail pilots, it seems, could follow a series of bright yellow arrows straight out of a Tex Avery cartoon. By 1924, just a year after
Congress funded it, the line of giant concrete markers stretched from Rock Springs, Wyoming to Cleveland, Ohio. The next summer, it reached all the way to New York, and by 1929 it spanned the continent uninterrupted, the envy of postal systems worldwide.

Radio and radar are, of course, infinitely less cool than a concrete Yellow Brick Road from sea to shining sea, but I think we all know how this story ends. New advances in communication and navigation technology made the big arrows obsolete, and the Commerce Department decommissioned the beacons in the 1940s. The steel towers were torn down and went to the war effort.

But the hundreds of arrows remain. Their yellow paint is gone, their concrete cracks a little more with every winter frost, and no one crosses their path much, except for coyotes and tumbleweeds.

But they’re still out there.

I’ve gotta remember to touch the gold apple next time. And bring Purell.

The real human skeleton on the Pirates’ headboard is pretty cool, but favorite might be the incognito vent on Main Street that pumps out candy and bakery scents.

Seen at the beach. Pretty much sums up the gift only dogs can give us. An inspiring message that gets even louder once they’re gone.

00:00 The Christmas Song
03:10 Deck the Halls
04:20 Frosty the Snowman
06:39 I Saw Three Ships
08:09 Buon Natale (Means Merry Christmas to You)
09:48 Adest Fideles (O Come All Ye Faithful)
12:17 Little Town of Bethlehem
14:39 The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot
17:14 Tannenbaum
20:17 The First Noel