Tram Tuesday - Seattle, Washington

King Street Station (on the right) was completed in 1906 and still looks very much the same, at least on the exterior. The Oregon-Washington Station (later named Union Station) was built alongside King Street Station in 1911. Both Union Pacific and Milwaukee Road trains served this station for 50+ years. Then, Union station sat empty until it was renovated in the 1990s. Now you can rent the grand hall for your wedding or party, but mostly the building is used as the headquarters for Sound Transit.  I haven't seen much of the building interior, but the last time I was in King Street Station it was terribly run down inside and showed evidence of bad remodels. I understand that a restoration process is underway.

Seattle is also bringing back streetcars. See the official Seattle Streetcar website for details.

As for the message on the back, it's page #2 of an extended message, so it doesn't begin or end on this card. Make of it what you will:

2.  mine (you can get them for fifty cents for any camera and they are well worth while and got portraits of about all the bunch. As long as you don't know the people,  and wouldn't probably be interested in the portraits as you would the scenery I'm going to keep them to look at myself until I come home - when I'll show them to you. I have prints of all of that the others took that I was in - too.

I have got mixed up with a jollier, more congenial bunch of young people and we were all just like one big family. After "being in the family" so long, I felt pretty blue at leaving them, and I'm afraid my blueness  was a good deal to blame for my not writing sooner. There is quite a 

And with that abrupt ending, we're off to card # 3, which along with card #1 is not in my possession. It means we don't know who the sender or the recipient was. All we have is that little snippet from the middle.

Views of Oregon

Steven from Facing West kindly sent me these Oregon postcards some time ago. I had trouble finding information on the monument below until Jennfer Keyser of the Oregon Historical Society came to my rescue. The name of the park is now Lownsdale Park and the statue is known as the soldier's monument. It is a memorial to Oregon's 2nd volunteer regiment that helped to capture Manila in 1896 at the end of the Spanish-American War.

Here are a two other cards Steven sent me, a great beach scene at Seaside, Oregon, and a view of Cascade Locks on the Columbia River. I don't go to Seaside very often, but it is a popular destination for Oregonians and visitors alike.

There is now a city called Cascade Locks, but the locks you see in this postcard were submerged in 1938 by the Bonneville Dam, which included its own locks to replace the Cascade Locks. The Cascade Locks were originally built to ease navigation through the treacherous 4.5 mile Cascade Rapids, which Lewis and Clark named The Great Shute. When they came through in 1805, they carried their gear around the rapids and took the canoes down empty.

Here are the backs of the postcards in the same order.

The message sent to Mrs. H.L. Barth of Seattle in 1911 is faint and hard to read, but I think this is what it says:

Portland, Ore May 5, 1911

Dear Fanny:

Rec'd your letter and was very glad to hear from you. I would like to write, but expect to be home soon and will tell you all the news then. We expect to stop over at Centralia and Grand Mound on our way up. We are having a dandy time. Say, maybe I wasent glad to go.

Best. With Love SM

Rudy

Last week I opened my big mouth and said I would have something to post for Sepia Saturday this week, especially if the theme was World War II, cooking, kidneys or strange outfits. Well, guess what? It seems I got my wish. So, here's the story of Rudy, the uncle-in-law I never met. I'm not sure if you can accurately call a person an uncle-in-law, but it seems less cumbersome than 'the brother of my father-in-law.'

Rudy was born in Binghamton, New York in about 1920. Here he is as a toddler.

 Here's another picture of him (on the left) with my father-in-law, John.

Rudy was in the army during World War II, stationed in England.  Here's a letter he wrote home in 1944.

Rudy worked as a cook in the army.

Does this picture say something about his cooking?

Later, Rudy ended up at the 127th Station Hospital. In the letter below, it sounds as if he is working at the hospital, but this is about the time he became sick and had to be hospitalized. For a long time, they couldn't figure out what was wrong with him. Finally, they discovered he was suffering from kidney failure. The story I have heard is that they went to remove one kidney, but found that he only had one. I don't know if that detail is right, but I do know that it's true that he only had one kidney. There were no kidney transplants at the time and dialysis was in the early development stages. Poor Rudy died at the age of 27.

Here's a letter Rudy sent to his brother John, who was also in the army. I'd love to know what the censors blocked out here.

Be sure to stop by Sepia Saturday for great stories and photos, which may or may not have anything to do with cooks, kidneys, or World War II.