This post card (and the banner of this site) is from the 1930 Golden Gate InternationalExposition.  It was a Worlds Fair type of event that created its own island in the San Francisco bay!  Named Treasure Island, many buildings were built for the fair and folks from around the world came to see the spectacle.

Fine art, peepshows, and everything in-between could be found.  Here is what Grandpa Swede (Clarence Almquist) had to say about his visit in July of 1939:

A transcription (with a few spelling errors and punctuation cleaned up):

“Dear ma and family,

We just arrived in San Francisco and sure tired.  We are staying in Oakland.  Which is about nine miles from Frisco.  It’s about half as big as Frisco.  Well I have to close now,

Love Clarence

PS It went swell coming up.”

Do you detect a little disappointment in the letter that they stayed in Oakland, not ‘Frisco?

I wonder who he took the trip with? One of his older siblings? Sister Blanche and her husband Howard? Sister Freda and her husband Banta?  Brother Dan and his wife Susie? He would have been 17 when he went, right before his senior year in high school.

He would find himself back on Treasure Island a few short years later, under less festive circumstances, as a new member of the Coast Guard during World War II. The island was taken over by the Navy and Coast Guard one year after his visit and functioned as a military base until 1993. It is my understanding that he served as a prison/brig guard of some type, but that is all I know, if anyone else has info let me know!

I am guessing he hung on to this card specifically because of this sequence of events, as well as the memory of the impression that “Frisco” made on a young 17 year-old.

The place has slowly gone downhill since then.

In a later post I’ll cover the few shots I’ve seen of him in San Francisco during/shortly after the war.