Author’s note: I presented this narrative to the Pasadena Historical Museum (now known as the Pasadena Museum of History) on April 22, 1999.

When the Pasadena Historical Museum asked me last month to give a presentation on travel and tourism in Pasadena before the First World War, I wondered how I would organize such a big topic.
We’ve all endured those “what I did on my summer vacation” slide shows, so I knew I didn’t want to go that route. 

I worked as a travel agent for American Express years ago, and I always remembered the delight and excitement most customers showed when I first presented them their itinerary. (This was before the reality set in of getting passports, packing, and deciding who would feed the cat while they were gone.) So I decided that maybe the best way to organize our time-travel to a long-vanished Southern California was by way of an itinerary that might have been provided to visitors to Pasadena some ninety years ago.

As you notice on the itineraries I call my fictional company “Tim’s Tours.” This is just a little inside joke. I have always enjoyed showing visitors around the Los Angeles area, particularly Pasadena; so that now, when our family has a visitor, perhaps a relative from Canada or England who’s never been here before, they order up a “Tim’s Tour” for wherever they want to visit.
 
In order to ground this in some sort of reality, I looked at issues of the Pasadena Star News published during the time period we are considering. This newspaper made a special point of listing all the visitors to Pasadena and the hotels where they would be staying. I found a real couple from Chicago who checked into the Hotel Green on the date I wanted. But that’s where the reality ends. I know nothing about who Mr. and Mrs. John. F. Taylor were, what their ages were, or what they enjoyed doing. I’d guess we have to say that everything but their names have been changed to protect the innocent.

For the sake of our story, let’s say Mr. and Mrs. Taylor are a youngish couple in their early thirties. Mr. Taylor is what we would call today upwardly mobile, having inherited his father’s flourishing hardware store in a suburb of Chicago. Mrs. Taylor recently endured a rather difficult pregnancy and, after the birth of her child, has not regained her strength and her usual high spirits. When a very kind mother-in-law volunteers to look after the baby for the month they will be away, Mr. and Mrs. Taylor agree that perhaps a trip out of the frigid East to the well-advertised Eden of California will revive Mrs. Taylor. That is all we need to know about the Taylors. You can use your own imaginations as to what they look like, how they sound, and how they dress. Imagination is something we don’t use nearly enough today. What with hundreds of cable-TV channels and millions of web sites on the Internet to investigate, there isn’t much occasion anymore when we can free ourselves from pre-digested images and let or fantasies roam free.
 
My major source for documenting this excursion to and around Pasadena and Southern California was the archives of the Pasadena Historical Museum.  There is a lot of information there on the individual sites we will be visiting today.  But to tie it all together and to get an over-all sense of what tourists experienced and how they reacted to what they saw, I discovered a wonderful couple of books. In 1896 and again in 1910 the National Association of the H.M.M.B.A. visited the West Coast and held their annual convention in Los Angeles. It took most of my research time to figure what those initials stood for – it’s the Hotel Men’s Mutual Benefit Association of the United States and Canada. Special trains were dispatched from several points in the East, filled with hundreds of hotel owners and managers and their families. For three weeks they hit all the tourist high points in California and were wined and dined without ceasing from one end of the state to another. What is wonderful about this is that both trips were documented in souvenir books by that celebrated local writer George Wharton James.

Another great thing about the souvenir books, beside the writing style, is the photographs. You don’t often see candid shots of people from that era actually smiling, talking, and enjoying themselves. Our views of the Edwardian years are often influenced by the starchy, ramrod-stiff people we see formally posed in family photographs. But here we see the same people in some unguarded moments. It somehow makes them seem much more human and much closer to us as individuals.

According to Ann Scheid in her book Pasadena: Crown of the Valley, George Wharton James was a defrocked minister (something about a scandalous divorce) who came to Pasadena in the early 1890s. He worked as a publicist for the Mt. Lowe Railway and wrote a number of books about Indians of the Southwest. He also wrote on general California history, travel, and the Craftsman Movement. He was a rival of Charles Lummis, but never quite achieved the same fame that Lummis did. James conducted salons at his home on North Raymond Avenue on Thursday evenings and was the founder of the local Browning Club. His rather purple prose might seem a little overcooked to us in our more cynical era, but it reflects the enthusiastic style that was the hallmark of travel writing in his day. I’ll be quoting from these souvenir books quite often; and, for the sake of consistency, from a book in my own collection James wrote in 1914, called California: Romantic and Beautiful. Whenever I use the terms “quote” and “unquote” you can assume I am quoting from Mr. James, unless I say otherwise.

I must also tell you I have played a bit fast and loose with the excursion schedules. Although I know all these trips were available to Pasadena visitors, I don’t know for sure that, say, the trip to the Ostrich Farm was actually offered on January 5. But the Taylors would have been able to avail themselves of all these tours, if not on the actual day I have decided they did. Likewise, the hotel menus are based on real ones, but may not have been offered on those particular days. However, the weather reports are accurate based on what was reported in the Daily News. Now sit back and listed to the story of the Taylors and their visit to Pasadena. You can even close your eyes if you like, it will help your imaginations work – but, please, no snoring!

It is Christmas Day, 1908, in the Taylors’ home in Chicago. It’s a rather unusual Christmas for the family.  Instead of relaxing after a calorie-filled dinner, they are busy packing for their great adventure that will start the next day.  The sheer amount of clothes people wear in these days is staggering.  And stagger is what they do under the load of trunks, suitcases, grips, hat-boxed, and other hand-luggage that a young couple, worth their salt, will need to travel with. Mrs. Taylor claims that she has packed very economically because she has read that the Southern California climate is very mild: “In Los Angeles sunstroke is unknown. There are no hot nights. In the shade it is always cool. On the sunny side of the street it is summer; on the shady side will be found the temperature of the spring and fall seasons.”

On the evening of Saturday, December 26, Mr. and Mrs. Taylor are seen off at the station by members of their family, including their little daughter, too tiny in the arms of grandma to know what’s going on, but the object of tears from her departing mother. Mr. Taylor succeeds in pulling his weeping wife back out of the window and into the train as it slowly chugs out of the station and on to the land of roses and orange blossoms.

The route of the California Limited will take them from Chicago through the Plains States and then by way of the desert directly to Pasadena.

Mr. and Mrs. Taylor have decided to go first-class all the way. Their train consists of two (sometimes three) locomotives, a baggage car, a barber shop, smoking and reading rooms, a buffet car, two dining cars, Pullman cars with sectional berths, a drawing room coach, and two observational cars. One of the observation cars is at the very end of the train, so you can go out on the rear platform and watch the scenery recede behind you. There is even a library car for entertainment. The Taylors have their own compartment on a first-class coach. The riff-raff of course are housed some distance away in their own sleeping cars. There are several sittings, or “calls,” for meals and the Taylors are informed that the train “closes” at midnight.

Time goes by very quickly. Meals are superb, unlike airline meals of our day, with real cloth napkins and silver service. The dining car itself is a real work of art, electrically lit, and designed in the latest art nouveau style, with solid mahogany walls. Activities include reading, card-playing, visiting, and live music and singing in the observation car. A few renditions of “Coming though the Rye” and “Has anybody here seen Kelly?” lubricated by a few glasses of Roederer’s Champaign usually has Mr. Taylor feeling no pain and leaves Mrs. Taylor with a warm fuzzy feeling. They know they have really left home far behind as the train passes through the rolling prairies of the Midwest where only fifty years before wild herds of buffalo once covered the land; they travel through some snow flurries in New Mexico and the cactus plains of Arizona. The train passes through a multitude of Harvey Houses along the way – those outposts of civilization and good eating that made travel less grueling. According to James, the Harvey Houses provided most of the food on the Santa Fe line.
 
Following my recommendations, as their travel agent, the Taylors leave the train for an overnight stay at the El Tovar Hotel, just fifty feet from the rim of the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon is the first huge work of nature the Taylors have ever seen and they can well understand why it is almost mandatory that all visitors from the East stop at this still-isolated and overwhelmingly beautiful place. The Grand Canyon was known at that time as the Imperial City of Silence. The El Tovar itself is a sight to behold with its rustic lobby that has a ceiling and supporting columns made of tree trunks and a floor covered with Indian mats.

The next day, back on the train, Mr. and Mrs. Taylor realize they have crossed the California state line when they see the surprisingly sophisticated-looking Harvey House, called El Garces, that adjoins the tracks at Needles. Later, as they enter the San Bernardino Valley, the Taylors get their first glimpse of this exotic place called Southern California. Having reached flat land again, their train speeds through vineyards and orange groves and they are amazed to see all this lush agriculture growing in such a dry climate. There are endless lines of orange trees, with a snow-capped range of mountains behind them. A veteran traveler has told the Taylors at their dining table last night that nearby Redlands alone exported 1.7 million boxes of oranges and lemons last year. Imagine how much has been exported in total by all the Southern California groves!

At last, around 1:00 on Tuesday, December, 29, the train pulls into Pasadena. The Taylors are almost startled they have arrived already. With only 25,000 people living in Pasadena at the time, the town seems very small and doesn’t have much in the way of suburbs. Disembarking at the brick Victorian-style station with its tall tower, the Taylors can see the hotel just steps away. The air seems very warm to Eastern visitors; the temperature that day reached 78 degrees.
 
In 1909 the main entrance to the Green Hotel is in the old building on the east side of Raymond just north of the train station. Opening in 1890 as the Webster Hotel, but now owned by Colonel George Green, it still contains most of the hotel’s central facilities. But eleven years before, in 1899, a huge annex was built across the street and is connected to the old building by a bridge across Raymond. Another addition on the corner of Green and Raymond was built in 1903. I’ll let Mr. James describe the hotel to us:

“A magnificent and world-famed structure that, growing larger and more splendidly equipped every year, has served as the Pasadena home for a large and growing Eastern, Southern, Northern, and Mid-continental clientele, who require in this quiet and beautiful city a resting place that affords all the refinement, comfort and luxury of the finest metropolitan hotels. The Hotel Green is the largest resort hotel in California. It covers almost the entire area of two city blocks, the west wing standing in its own park. The ten-acre Central Park is practically a continuation of Hotel Green Park, for a beautiful driveway (probably Dayton Street today) lined with exquisite flowering plants and shrubs, where a fountain constantly plays, is the connecting link between the two.

“[The Hotel Green] consists of three buildings known as the East, Central, and West Buildings. The East Building is five stories tall and is constructed of brick and stone. In this building is located the main offices of the entire plant, the American Plan dining room and private theater.

(continued)