From the Editor

Wes Hammond

Coming Soon: Vintage Views

As you have read in previous newsletters, our California Chapter will host the National Conference of the Lincoln Highway Association in Sacramento in June 2002. To celebrate this event, there will be a new feature beginning with the June 2001 issue. Entitled Vintage Views, it will appear in all subsequent issues through June 2002. The idea for this feature came from chapter member George Clark.

In Vintage Views, we will take a trip along the Lincoln Highway from New York to California. The accompanying views are through the eyes of a postcard photographer. With the June issue, we will start in New York and travel through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Afterwards, we will travel through two states in each issue. All of the featured postcards except for two are from the collection of George Clark.

This Issue: San Pablo Avenue

The featured section of the Lincoln Highway in this issue is a twelve-mile part between San Pablo and Oakland known as San Pablo Avenue. The theme is music and entertainment, and we use the word "entertainment" in the broadest sense. The music venues mentioned in the feature article were located either directly on or close to the Lincoln Highway. A 1928 photo included with this story shows the Peekaboo Club in El Cerrito and it advertises "Music and Dancing," indicating that music and entertainment had an early start along San Pablo Avenue.

In addition to El Cerrito, San Pablo Avenue ran through the small towns of Emeryville and Albany. Until the late 1940s, these towns were unincorporated and very rural. There are many references to these locations as being "wide open," and there were many roadhouse type establishments with both legal and illegal activities.

There is no way of knowing for certain, but this short section of the Lincoln Highway may have had the largest concentration of musical establishments of any part of the highway. These establishments included bars, honkey-tonks, clubs, roadhouses, dance halls, large ballrooms and the dance floor of a large luxury hotel. The music included country/western (called Western Swing or California Swing in the '30s), jazz, blues, and big band. The music hit its peak between the late 1930s and mid-1950s.

I could not have written this article without the assistance of two people. I wish to thank chapter member George Clark, who lived the scene firsthand as you will read, and his contributions of information and photos. Also, thanks to my cousin Ebba Rae Terry, a longtime resident of Oakland. She located the individuals who had knowledge of some of the locations.

Thanks to the Contra Costa County History Center in Martinez for locating several photos that I used to illustrate this story. And thanks to Marie Hammond, wife of my cousin Lester, for locating a photo of the Placer Mashine and Auto Company, once located in Auburn. This facility was mentioned in the story about my uncle Clyde Hammond in the September issue of The Traveler. It is now part of the chapter archives and will be used in a future issue of the newsletter.

Sections of the Lincoln Highway to be Featured in Future Issues of The Traveler

Not necessarily in the order shown:

• Altamont Pass
• Auburn (revisited)
• Baxters Camp
• Donner Summit
• Placerville to Echo Summit
• the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley ferry system
• Vallejo
• World War II U.S. Navy bases between Dublin and Livermore