Thematic Photographic–Far From Home.

Well, the farthest I made it this summer.

Price, Utah.  Only 120 miles away from my home, but I did feel like I went back in time 50 years.

We had lunch at this little café, looked like the last time they remodeled was sometime in the 50’s.  And not that “trying to look like the 50’s but all new or refurbished” look, I swear it was the real thing.  Tall ceilings, old booths (in good shape), even had the soda bar along one side.

I had the bacon cheeseburger with curly fries.  Well, more like curly fry.  It looked like they took a whole potato and just spun it around cutting it into one long curl.  The meal was awesome.

Just up the street from Farlaino’s was this J.C.Penny.  Again, it had been a long time since their last remodel.  Except for what they were selling, they hadn’t changed a thing since the 60’s.  They even had the offices above the entry way with windows that looked down on the sales floor.  And there were people up there.

Those two put us into an old-thing mood, so we headed up to Helper, about 5 miles back towards Salt Lake.  Helper is got it’s name because it was built to store extra train engines they used to help the coal trains get up the steep hill to Soldier Summit.

Main Street is now a hodgepodge of old buildings, some abandoned and some used for various purposes.  The next few pictures is the La Salle Hotel on the south side of town.  I fell in love with the building, if I had the money I’d buy it, refurbish it, not reopen it as a hotel, but just keep it from being lost.

That little building on the side of the hotel is the La Salle Lounge and Barber.

The family dining room was on the main floor, but…

… around the side and downstairs was the adult dining room, with dancing.

An old washing machine?

Here was the local E Clampus Vitus chapter, whatever that is.  We got a little peak inside and there was a bar, looked kind of like a club house.

Enlarge the picture above and you’ll see a couple of mannequins looking down at the street.  Just up the street, as we were looking at the Piggly Wiggly sign (below) the local postman pulled over to chat with us (With a population of about 2,000 people, I’m sure he had no problem identifying us as tourists.)  First thing he told us was that the Piggly Wiggly sign was a fake, put up for some movie that was filmed there.  We asked him about the mannequins in the window and he told us that they were in homage of the “working girls” that were allowed to openly ply their trade until Utah Gov. Norm Bangerter sent in the  Feds to shut them down in 1982.  As he put it, they had “legalized” prostitution in Helper until 1982.  We talked to him for about a half hour, he’d lived there all his life and it was obvious he loved and was proud of his little berg.

An old building that has been taken over by artists.  Quite a few artisans have found Helper to be a creative place to be.

Just some door front that looked cool.

And here we have the Strand movie house, where I discovered I’m not the only one that wants to buy an old building on that street and fix it up for no reason.  He was working on it as we went buy, the first thing he said to us was, as I took the second shot below, “I’m gonna have to charge you a nickel for every picture you take.”   He was just joking, we talked to him for a while and found out that he bought the building and was fixing it up, with no intention of ever showing movies there.

This is the reason we have child labor laws.

Tile on the outside of the building?

City Hall.

Arguably the tallest miner in the world.

Um, I just couldn’t resist.

This sign is authentic.

We had another excellent meal, dinner at the Balance Rock Eatery.  It was inside an old Mercantile, and although it didn’t give the immediate “flew back in time” that Farliano’s had, but it was still cool.

For more “Far From Home” pictures, visit:

In time and space.

The theme for this week is “Far from home.”

When I was a kid living in Massachusetts my parents bought some land up in New Hampshire.  The deed to the property, probably originally dating back to the 1700’s, read “20 acres, more or less”.  My parents should have had it surveyed when they bought it, because when they sold it 2 decades later, the surveyor found it to be about 12 acres.  It was 80 miles (129 km) from our home, near the town of Bradford, New Hampshire.

The cabin my dad and uncle built seems to be gone now, I spent some time on Google Maps going up and down the Old Sutton Road looking and couldn’t find it.  It had an old wood burning stove for heat and cooking and we got our water from a hand pump just down the hill.   At the time, those 80 miles seemed like a long way away, but it was always a lot of fun to get out into the wilderness.

In August of the same year the previous two pictures were taken, we left for a year in Europe.  My dad taught one semester at the University in Grenoble, and my parents enrolled us 4 kids in the public schools there.  There was no FSL (French as a Second Language) class for us to take, so we just muddled our way through.  I remember coming home and taking a French class in Middle School and being as fluent in French as the teacher.

For the first time in my life we lived in an apartment, on the 10^th floor of a building that had intermittently working elevators.  Still, it was worth the trek every morning for our baguette and croissants.  I took this picture from the window of our apartment.

I had my own little instamatic camera and took a ton of pictures even back then.  Unfortunately these are the only three that seemed to have survived the move out here to Utah.