Director W.S. Van Dyke had a reputation for getting things right the first time. Two movies he directed in the 1920s were shot on location in Tahiti. For Trader Horn (1931), he spent seven months filming in East Africa. His best known movies, however, are The Thin Man (he also directed three of the sequels), Tarzan the Ape Man (filmed in Hollywood, it used stock footage from Trader Horn), and several Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy films. ClassicMovieHub.com has several behind-the-scenes photos of Van Dyke at work.
Filming Trader Horn. Source: Horning into Africa, by W.S. Van Dyke, 1931/erbzine.com W.S. Van Dyke with Myrna Loy & William Powell on the set of After the Thin Man (1936). Source: classicmoviehub.com.W.S. Van Dyke with Jeanette MacDonald and a lamb. Source: classicmoviehub.com
There are over 150 houses within the Van Wyck Brooks historic district, ranging in age from the mid 1800s to the early 1900s. Here are just a few of them.
Last year, three teams brought back a mostly forgotten and unjustly maligned baseball icon, the bullpen cart. The cart’s purpose was to transport the relief pitcher from the bullpen to the mound, avoiding the exertion of jogging that distance. A true bullpen cart has a bottom shaped like a baseball, and a top that is a giant baseball cap. Bat-shaped columns bridging the two are optional.
New York Mets’ vintage bullpen cart. Source: Sothebys.
Predecessors of the bullpen cart date back to the 1950s, and include a Harley-Davidson scooter (Milwaukee, of course) and a hearse (Casey Stengel was allegedly involved in that one). Then there was that time the Dodgers’ catcher drove the pitcher to the mound, let him out, and then ran into him. This article at Cut 4 details everything that is known about cart history, but was unable to solve the mystery of who first introduced the round, cap-topped cart. Could it be the New York Mets? Their cart may have been introduced in 1967, and its penultimate appearance was in 1986 when an enthusiastic Mets employee jacked it and took it for a joyride around the field when his team clinched the Division title enroute to their World Series victory. The cart resurfaced recently when it sold at an auction for $112,000 dollars.
The carts cruised through the seventies, but fell out of favor and finally disappeared sometime in the 1980s. But in 2018, the Arizona Diamondbacks and Detroit Tigers re-introduced the carts. Unfortunately, most relievers refused the ride. Washington Nationals reliever Sean Doolittle was the first visiting pitcher to use the Arizona cart, and he reportedly was instrumental in the Nationals debuting their own cart later in the season.
Sean Doolittle exiting the Nationals’ bullpen cart. Source: nbcsports.Insert your own joke about Detroit not knowing what people want in a car. Source: Detroit Tigers.
A few years after completing the Trenton Bath House, Louis Kahn designed the one-bedroom Esherick house for a bookstore owner who want plenty of reading nooks. The current owners conducted a 17 month restoration of the house.
Esherick House, Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia. Source: philly.curbed.com/photography by Heidi’s Bridge.
What does concrete block want? Probably a sympathetic and historically accurate restoration.
Louis Kahn is considered one of the most important architects of the twentieth century, but his early career was unremarkable. When Kahn was about fifty, he traveled through Italy, Greece, and Egypt. The ancient architecture he studied there transformed him, and when he returned to the United States, one of the first buildings he designed was the Trenton Bath House, one component of the Trenton Jewish Community Center. This unassuming structure, completed in 1957, is a landmark in Modernism and marks a turning point in Kahn’s design vision, and in twentieth century architecture.
One internship available Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Site in Nebraska.
Teleoceros skeletons at Ashfall. Source: Ammodramus [CC0]
A single internship will be offered
for late summer/early autumn for field studies in
vertebrate paleontology. With preference to geology or biology
students, the position is open to college students with a genuine interest in,
and knowledge of vertebrate paleontology, especially those aspiring to
further their experience outside of the classroom. Duties include excavation,
sorting of micro-vertebrate fossils, prep lab tasks, interpretive duties and
other park support tasks.
Lamoka is a word that you don’t see used much other than for the lake itself, and the prehistoric archaeological culture found along its shores. Does anyone know where its name came from?
On early maps, including the 1829 Atlas of New York and the 1869 New Map of the State of New York, Lamoka is named Mud Lake, and Waneta Lake to the north is called Little Lake. By 1874, in an atlas of Schuyler County, Lamoka Lake appears on the map, although Little Lake is still used for Waneta. In the 1879 book History of Tioga, Chemung, Tompkins and Schuyler Counties, New York, “Lamoka” is used repeatedly, and Little Lake has become “Wanetta.”
1874 Map of Schuyler County.
I’m not surprised they changed the name – there are at least 30 other Mud lakes in New York, and Lamoka has a nice sound to it—but I’d like to know where they got the name from.
If anybody knows, or has any clues, please leave a comment!
