A Burst From the Past→

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Cold cuts at eye level
Major appliance manufacturer General Electric launched a number of industry firsts in the mid-'50s while advertising its products' modern appeal. The GE Wonder Kitchen featured a built-in range, dishwasher, disposal, and washer and dryer under a single countertop. The sleek wall-mount, side-by-side refrigerator/freezer, right, has the look of kitchen cabinetry.

Bursts of color
As bright shades debuted in 1950s kitchens, cooks could now choose appliances in hues of yellow, pink, blue or turquoise to help modernize their family gathering spot.

Working for you
This colorful kitchen is worth your minute of study. There are no wasted steps in serving meals or in cleaning up: A drop-leaf cart carries food from range and refrigerator to table in one trip. The folding doors of the dish cabinet open easily to place contents within easy reach. Featured in the House Beautiful April 1957 issue.

Mint green accent
This 1950s magazine illustration features a mint green oven that matches the slanted rafters, a polished brass pendant light, and elegant wood cabinetry. Note the white-brick wall – a predecessor to the metro tile – and the trendy gold-colored hardware, which can be seen in many modern homes today.

Domestic bliss
This magazine illustration features powder-blue units and contrasting copper-colored appliances. Note the archetypal sunburst clock, the under-cabinet dining nook, and of course the beaming housewife. An early ancestor of the industrial trend, the image reveals the roots of the exposed brick wall.

Pink is everywhere
It’s the 1950s. The war is over, and the United States is enjoying a wave of unprecedented prosperity. Millions of GIs returned, eager for the comforts of home that they had been missing, and everyone settled down to a kind of nationwide nesting. Record numbers of homes were being built in the newly developed suburbs, and the center of all those homes was the kitchen.

 

1980s Flashback

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Whether you were in Elementary or High School, in the workforce or you were not even born, we thought it would be fun to have an 80s flashback! Enjoy! (Hover over image to read caption)

Untangling the History of Christmas Lights

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Edward Hibberd Johnson not only added flash and color to Christmas trees when he introduced electric lights in 1882, he saved lives in the process.

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As Christmas approached in the waning days of 1882, Edward Hibberd Johnson joined his fellow New Yorkers in decking the halls. Then as now, Yuletide traditions ran deep, and the 36-year-old once again undertook the annual ritual of decorating the parlor of his Manhattan home with a majestic evergreen. For this particular Christmas season, however, Johnson decided to freshen the cherished holiday tradition with a state-of-the-art innovation—electric lights.

Nearly three years had passed since Thomas Edison demonstrated the first practical light bulb, and few people were better acquainted with the emerging electrical technology than Johnson, the Wizard of Menlo Park’s trusted business associate. As a manager of the Automatic Telegraph Company in 1871, Johnson had shrewdly hired the 24-year-old Edison, but the whiz kid proved so brilliant and entrepreneurial that in short order their roles reversed and the boss became an employee for the famed inventor. Johnson worked as a vice president of the Edison Electric Light Company, and he was chief engineer for the electric generation system that Edison had unveiled in lower Manhattan that September.

Now at Christmastime, Johnson prepared to make some history of his own. For centuries—according to some folklore all the way back to the 1500s when Protestant reformer Martin Luther wished to replicate the wintertime sight of stars twinkling among the evergreens—people had used wax candles to illuminate their Christmas trees. The candles may have been beautiful, but they were obviously a huge fire hazard. Every year as year the holiday approached, without fail newspapers printed tragic stories about Christmas trees accidentally catching fire and houses burning to the ground, sometimes with deadly consequences.

By replacing candles with electrical lights, Johnson not only greatly reduced the risk of Christmas trees going up in flames, he added flash and color as well. According to a reporter from the Detroit Post and Tribune who visited the home of Edison’s right-hand man, 80 brilliant red, white and blue hand-wired bulbs “about as large as an English walnut” lit up Johnson’s Christmas tree. An additional 28 lights sparkled on two wires mounted on the ceiling.

Johnson’s electrically lit tree was revolutionary—literally. It spun in a circle six times a minute on a little pine box as its lights flashed in “a continuous twinkling of dancing colors.” An electric current drawn from Edison’s main office powered the lights and the crank that rotated the tree. “I need not tell you that the scintillating evergreen was a pretty sight,” gushed the newspaper reporter. “One can hardly imagine anything prettier.”

Unbeknownst to Johnson, he also launched the annual Yuletide tradition of trying to one-up the neighbors with dazzling Christmas light displays. Once electrical power spread to Manhattan’s Gilded Age mansions, the city’s prominent socialites coveted the novel lights to showcase their Christmas trees at their ornate holiday parties. Those first bulbs, however, lacked screw-in sockets and required the tedious process of wiring each lamp individually, a task that few had the knowledge or time to undertake. As a result, members of high society spent as much as $300 per tree to hire electricians to install lights on their conifers and be on call in case a bulb burned out or broke.

“High society spent as much as $300 per tree to hire electricians to install lights on their conifers and be on call in case a bulb burned out or broke.”

The White House Christmas tree became electrified in 1894 when President Grover Cleveland’s daughters were delighted by the evergreen that the Wheeling Register described as “very beautifully trimmed and decorated with tiny parti-colored electric lamps in place of the old time wax candles.” For most of the country, however, candles still remained the primary means of illuminating trees because of the limited availability of electric power and the cost and hassle of the Christmas lights themselves. That began to change at the turn of the 20th century when the General Electric Company started to produce and sell electric Christmas lights that did not require the services of an electrician to wire. The company accentuated the safety advantages of electric lights in their advertisements in popular magazines of the day such as The Saturday Evening Post and Harper’s Bazaar. “No danger from the lights on Christmas trees when Edison Miniature Lamps are used,” boasted the copy of one ad next to a dramatic drawing of a candle-lit tree engulfed in an inferno.

 In 1903, General Electric began to offer Christmas lights in eight-lamp strings, called festoons, that featured pre-wired porcelain sockets, miniature glass bulbs and a screw-in plug that attached to a wall or ceiling light socket. The $12 price for a three-festoon set was beyond the reach of most consumers, but department stores in some cities made the lights available for rental for $1.50.

By the 1940s when electrification had become standard in rural America, electric lights had replaced wax candles on most Christmas trees, and the danger of trees bursting into flames had been replaced by the annual frustration of untangling gnarled webs of Christmas light strands. For that, thank Johnson, the man who has been called the “Father of Electric Christmas Tree Lights.”

The Murphy Bed. A Love Story!

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William Lawrence Murphy was the son of a 49’er gold rush prospector. He was born in 1876 near Stockton, California in the small gold rush town of Columbia. Prior to moving to San Francisco in his early 20s, Murphy had various jobs that included a being a horse-breaker, a small-town sheriff, and a stagecoach driver.

When he moved to San Francisco, he rented a small walk-up studio apartment at 625 Bush Street. Fans of Humphrey Bogart’s classic film, The Maltese Falcon, will remember its location as the spot where Sam Spade’s partner, Miles Archer, was shot. William began tinkering with hideaway beds when he found his one-room apartment too small to entertain friends or a particular young woman.

William was falling for a young opera singer named Gladys M. Kaighin. Courting customs at that time would not permit a lady to enter a gentleman's bedroom. So according to family legend, William Murphy had a blacksmith help him mount a mechanism that would make it possible to flip his bed into a closet. Once the closet door was closed, his bed disappeared, turning his once cramped quarters into a proper parlor. He had a strict moral code and he didn’t want to spoil any chance of winning Gladys’ heart. It worked! In 1901 William married Gladys and had one son.

Today the original Murphy Bed company is still run by the Murphy family. Clark W. Murphy is 3rd generation and has been the CEO since 1983.

A CBS segment on the history of the murphy bed, first created in the San Francisco area. What makes a murphy bed a murphy bed? August 4, 2010

Who did something similar before William L. Murphy?

Though the Murphy Bed history is mostly credited to William L. Murphy, several others had already experimented with space saving bed designs, and beds with similar functions had also been produced. The first documented catalog featuring folding beds was put on the street by Sears and Roebuck in 1895. According to one source Thomas Jefferson and Paul Revere also used Murphy Beds. Entrepreneur and inventor Sarah Elisabeth Goode (1855 – 1905) was the first African American woman to receive a United States Patent in 1885, for her bed. It could be folded up, and it looked like a desk with room for storage.

FUN FACT | 625 Bush and the Maltese Falcon

According to The Dashiell Hammett Tour, columnist Warren Hinckle collaborated with innovative, advertising copywriter, Howard Gossage, to place a plaque on the movie site. When Gossage died in 1969, Hinckle stored the plaque and forgot about it. About five years later someone spray painted "Miles Archer was shot here" on a sidewalk at Bush and Stockton. Hinckle remembered the plaque and retrieved it. On February 12, 1974, it was placed on the wall at Burritt Street by three compatriots: James Kennedy, the owner of the building, Marino Nibbi, a contractor, and City Supervisor Quentin Kopp.

Holiday Cheer Throughout the Decades

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For its first century as a city, San Francisco celebrated the holidays with all the energy it could muster. With each tragedy, war and building boom, the holiday spirit seemed to be growing along with the city. The traditions arguably peaked in the 1950s, when optimism, good financial times and hometown spirit combined for some of the most magical Decembers in San Francisco. Through the good and bad times, San Francisco has always embraced the holiday spirit as depicted in the stories and quotes in this column.

Late 1800s

“Yesterday was (meteorologically speaking) another dismal day, with drenching rain and miry street crossings, suggesting anything but cheerful reflections,” The Chronicle reported in 1869. “Yet the streets were full of men and women whose countenance showed no sympathy with the untoward surroundings.”
— The Chronicle

By the 1870s, the newspaper was advertising multiple Christmas tree lots in San Francisco, including one owner who boasted he was cutting down the best of the “virgin redwood forest” in Marin County. There were early reports of charity, and boardinghouses served roast beef and plum pudding to miners and other men who were away from their families.

Jewish families were rising in economic and philanthropic clout at the end of the 19th century, and the city’s holiday celebrations started to reflect their traditions. The earliest coverage of Hanukkah was respectful (if not well researched) and never divisive.

The first Chronicle article to use the word Hanukkah, in 1897, was headlined “Hebrew Festival of Lights Observed — Children Assemble to Light a Taper.”

“‘The Festival of Lights,’ a pretty biblical celebration, replete with religious sentiment and forcibly recalling a heroic period of Hebrew history, was inaugurated yesterday at the Mission-Sabbath school,” The Chronicle wrote.

Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger’s speech to the congregation was also excerpted, and seemed to be aimed at the gentiles in the crowd as much as the Jews: “Maccabee was a hero, fighting for liberty as George Washington fought. The lesson of the Hebrew hero should grow strong in your hearts, making you faithful Jews and loyal citizens. Yours is a beautiful religion. You should be proud of being Hebrews. If you are true to your country your country will be benefited in good men and women.”

Early 1900s

“Who could believe that there would be another merry Christmas in San Francisco for many a year?” The Chronicle editorial staff wrote after the 1906 earthquake and fire. “And yet the first return of this day is the merriest Christmas of all. It is something to think of. It is something to be proud of. It is something to pass on to our children and our children’s children, as a glorious exemplification of the way in which a heroic people meet a great crisis.”
— The Chronicle

The April 18, 1906, earthquake and fire destroyed most of downtown, and many other businesses and homes. But if anything the holiday spirit grew in its wake. In the years that followed, as the city rebuilt and prepared for the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition of 1915, new traditions seemed to be added in the city every year.

In 1907, different charities decorated 12 large outdoor trees in San Francisco, with the aim of having one within walking distance of children in every city neighborhood. (The Chronicle called it “a perfect orgy of Christmas tree-ing.”)

1920s

“There will be half-orphans there that are boarded with their mothers, whole orphans, and children who were sick or poor or abandoned,” an unnamed reporter wrote of one tree celebration on Nob Hill. “There will be children of all ages up to 14, and of all sizes and colors and creeds and nationalities, and all interested in Santa and sharing the Christmas joy.”
— Unknown

Radio in the 1920s added hype to the holiday; many stations were sponsored by department stores, bringing more commercialization to the season. The KPO “Christmas party” on Dec. 24, 1929, included Christmas carols, a live visit from Santa Claus and “a Bavarian yodel number with jingle-bell accompaniment.”

1930s

“Santa Claus again is making preparations for a visit to San Francisco, according to a radio-gram just received from the North Pole,” read one 1932 story, which ran in the news section next to articles about real-life crimes.”
— The Chronicle

By the 1930s, Chronicle reporters were taking the ethically questionable (but well-intentioned) approach of reporting about Santa Claus as if they had interviewed him, or had a correspondent embedded in his workshop full of elves.

1940s

“Christmas in San Francisco is quickly assuming all the traditional holiday color,” The Chronicle reported in 1949. “The city’s fire stations, normally prosaic brick structures with cavernous entrances, now have charmed themselves into Christmas wonderlands for the second year.”
— The Chronicle

The end of World War II brought more families, more money and an all-time high for holiday revelry. Macy’s took its window displays to new levels of memorable. The City of Paris Christmas tree, rising at least four stories in the middle of the Union Square store, was a holiday destination for generations of children.

But the arrival of Santa Claus down Market Street was the focal point of the holiday excitement. In an era before Elvis started shaking his hips and before Willie Mays came to town, Santa Claus was the biggest rock star in the city. Thousands of children would line the streets as Santa arrived at the Emporium by carriage, helicopter and (most San Francisco of all) on the top of a Muni bus.

1950s

“He appeared at the brink of Nob Hill, sitting in a chimney atop Muni’s No. 514, filled with a throng of happy children and an engineer at the controls of the public address system to broadcast Santa’s cheery, preseason greetings,” The Chronicle reported in 1952, on the eve of an election. “A torrent of multicolored balloons spilled from the top windows of the Emporium, and as he paused, Terry Gould, a Cub Scout of Pack 30 presented Santa with an ‘absentee ballot.’ Then the crowd, following behind Santa, surged into the store and up to The Emporium’s Christmas roof playground.”
— The Chronicle

Possibly the greatest holiday tradition in San Francisco history, which lasted just three years from 1948 to 1950, was the decorating of the city’s firehouses. San Francisco Fire Department stations transformed their facades — turning the buildings into presents and toy factories and giant letters to Santa. Neighbors pitched in, building props and sewing costumes. Muni offered San Francisco children free tours of the finished product.

It was more than a playground. The Emporium had rides on the roof, including a carousel and giant slides. One year, the store on Market between Fourth and Fifth streets used a giant crane to lift a cable car to the top of the building.

The tradition ended, in true San Francisco fashion, with a battle between the unions and the city. After the citizens failed to pass a proposition that included a firefighter pay raise, the organizers decided decorating fire stations was too expensive. There were no fire stations decorated in 1951.

1960s and 70s

Santa Claus continued his parades through the 1960s and 1970s, but with television, “Star Wars” and arcade games stealing the hearts and imaginations of children, the sight of St. Nick became less of a novelty. The first mention of Kwanzaa was in 1977; once again treated respectfully, even if the celebration honoring African American culture was oversimplified.

The new Transamerica Pyramid in the 1970s transformed itself into a large red-and-green Christmas tree, and then stopped, according to Herb Caen, because of the high cost. There’s a bright light on top of the Pyramid now, and smaller buildings downtown have added colored lighting. But it’s all hard to see anyway, because newer construction blocks the view.

Today

Progressive change was arguably positive for the city, but not as good for the San Francisco holiday spirit. Families have traditions, but there are fewer celebrations that unite San Francisco as a city. Union Square still has an ice rink. The San Francisco City Hall Christmas tree still exists (now named the more politically correct World Tree of Hope).

One of the last great traditions is one of the best: The Embarcadero Center rims each of its four buildings with lights, looking like a pile of shining presents near the waterfront. Take a ferry to Alameda or Larkspur, and you can pretend San Francisco is still embracing the old days, when Christmas in the city was the most important day of the year.

Or you can just read the old clippings. There are messages from previous generations, practically begging us not to forget to count our blessings and celebrate the season.

Special thanks to the Chronicle and Peter Hartlaub. These are excerpts from an article he wrote in 2015.

Iconic Coca Cola Sign

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San Francisco History

Standing 112 feet above Bryant Street atop a three-story building in San Francisco's South of Market area, the Coca Cola billboard has been a landmark for drivers going to and from the Bay Bridge since 1937 -- One year after the bridge opened to traffic.

The Spencerian script of the logo with its glowing background in a shade known as Coca-Cola Red was originally illuminated with neon. It alternately twinkled and shone for the better part of seven decades, but in 2010 it began showing its age.

Seventy-feet long and 30 feet high, the new sign is about the same size as its predecessor, but the look at night is crisper and the colors seem more vibrant.

The work to remove the original lighting system and reface the billboard with 4,800 CFLs for the white lettering and strip LEDs for the background took crews working day and night. The billboard was dark for only four days.

When I return from a long trip, I can always count on one of my favorite signs to light up and welcome me back to San Francisco. I am sure for years to come.......