Here's something I never thought I'd see: a postcard sent from McKinleyville—my home town of the last quarter-century—to the home town of my birth, Covina, back when both burgs were basically backwoods backwaters that no one ever heard of.
Let's see if we can figure out the connection between these two home towns of mine!
I decided to give social media a try and create a Facebook page to hopefully boost this blog's readership. Check it out!
Presently, I plan to populate the page with short teasers to my blog's "greatest hits," some of the more interesting vintage photos of Covina I've collected, and links to new articles as they appear here. I'll still update the Twitter/X account with those same new article notifications, but that's about all that site was ever good for. I doubt my blog got a single new reader going that route.
In other news, I've been working on multiple different topics for new posts lately, which unfortunately is actually proving to be more of an impediment to my productivity than anything else. I really should try to stick to just one subject at a time. That's the way I've always been used to working, anyway.
More to come soon! And do please Like and share the new Facebook page! This blog needs all the help it can get. :-)
I'll be frank—I don't generally care for oral histories. Reason being, people's memories of past events tend to be embellished or even just plain mistaken; my own being no exception. However, every once in a while, I chance upon an oral account that's really interesting and even compelling in its particulars, and this one—published for the city's 51st anniversary commemoration—is one I believe worthy of historical preservation, in spite of its anonymous authorship. So, with no further ado...
From the Covina Argus of October 18, 1935:
Recently, I added this very early C. W. Tucker photo postcard to my Covina ephemera collection.
Although the view looks very different today, and the palms are way taller now, I doubt someone who grew up in Covina would have too much difficulty recognizing where this picture was taken.
But, just in case not, we are looking north on Hollenbeck Avenue from only a few feet north of its intersection with Badillo Street.
And the year? Well, let's play history detective and see what we can come up with!
For this blog's 100th post, I thought a little retrospective might be in order. There've been quite a few changes here at Covina Past since I created this account in 2012. Suffice it to say, it's a very different site now versus what it used to be.
Once upon a time, a young man named Lysle C. Ummel1 visited Covina, and while he was here, he bought four picture postcards of the place and sent them back to relatives in Fremont, Nebraska.
Lysle must have mailed them all together in an envelope, because they have no postmarks and thus are not readily datable. However, various clues in the photo of Citrus Avenue made it possible for me to determine that particular picture was taken in 1919.
The familiar view below looking north on Citrus from Badillo. Lysle went on to become an electrical engineer,2 so that perhaps explains his pointing out the precise location of the Edison office at the time.
So how did I figure out the year? Let's start out with that blade sign on the Chapman-Workmen building at left. Turns out that "Winder & Jones" were in business at that location from 1919 to 1926,3 so that narrowed the range of possible dates right away. The Covina Theatre isn't there across the street yet, so that narrows things even further to 1919-1921.4 But the clincher was the license plates, as 1919 was the last year between 1919 and 1921 that California plates were white.5
Here are the other two postcards with white borders, which I feel safe in assuming are also from 1919.
