Great Lakes Naval Training Center

Outgoing postcard US-3202777 to Poland shows an event on Ross Field, carrying on a long tradition of Naval Ceremony at Great Lakes Naval Training Center (NTC), home to the Navy's largest Recruit Training Command as well as the largest Service School Command. The NTC was dedicated in 1911 and is located on Lake Michigan, just 35 miles north of Chicago and 45 miles south of Milwaukee.

The Great Lakes Naval Museum, one of fifteen official U.S. Navy museums, is nearby.

Peking at the South Street Seaport Museum in New York City

Outgoing postcard US-2452506 to Germany shows Peking, a steel-hulled four-masted barque which is a type of sailing vessel with three or more masts, at the South Street Seaport Museum in New York City.

Built in Hamburg, Germany in 1911, Peking is one of the famous "Flying P Liners" of F. Laeisz Lines. Used in the nitrate trade and wheat trade, Peking made voyages from Europe to the west coast of South America around the often treacherous Cape Horn with general cargo and returned filled with guano for use in the making of fertilizer and explosives. Peking was made famous by the Irving Johnson film Around Cape Horn which documented her 1929 passage around the southern tip of South America in hurricane conditions.

The Peking was retired in 1975 and sold to Jack Aron, for the South Street Seaport Museum. However, the Museum does not have the Peking included in their long-term operational plan. In 2012, an offer was made to Hamburg, to return the ship to its port of building as a gift. The plan was not successful as the effort to raise an endowment in Germany to ensure the preservation of the vessel fell short.

The photo on the postcard was taken on November 20, 2011 when I traveled to New York City with a JetBlue unlimited BluePass. The ship, still moored at the South Street Seaport as of 2013, is in need of extensive repairs. The museum is opening Peking to the public every Saturday 12:00 - 4:00 pm from September 7 to October 19, 2013 with $5 suggested donation. With its future uncertain, today (October 12) and next Saturday (October 19) may be your last chances to visit the ship on board.

Double Ten Day

October 10 is the Double Ten Day that celebrates outbreak of the Wuchang Uprising in Hubei Province, China in 1911. It began with the local dissatisfaction about the nationalization of railway lines, and soon became a crisis and escalated to an uprising that ended the Qing Dynasty and ushered in the Republic of China (ROC) in 1912. Following the Chinese Civil War, the Communist Party of China took full control of mainland China and founded the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. The ROC relocated its government to Taiwan and continued to recognize the Double Ten Day as the National Day of ROC,

The island of Taiwan, formerly known as "Formosa", was mainly inhabited by Taiwanese aborigines until the Dutch settlement during the Age of Discovery in the 17th century, when ethnic Chinese began immigrating to the island. The shaped postcard, showing a historical map of Taiwan around that time, was one of my earliest postcard collections. It was acquired when I was in Taipei to attend a joint conference GIS AM/FM Asia'97 & GeoInformatics'97: Mapping the Future of Asia Pacific. held from May 26 to May 29 in 1997. It was mailed back to the US and had a postmark dated on June 3, 1997.

 

Neptune and His Horses, Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City, Missouri is known as the City of Fountains. Among all cities in the world, only Rome, Italy has more fountains. Postcard US-2441790 shows its Neptune Fountain, a 3629 kg or 8000 pound cast lead fountain in an oval pond. It depicts Neptune, the God of the Sea (and father of fictional character Perseus "Percy" Jackson), in his chariot pulled by three mythological attributes, the trident, dolphin and sea horse.

The fountain was cast in 1911 by the Bromsgove Guild of Applied Arts, a group of artists and designers that operated from 1898 to 1966. from Worcestershire, England.  Google books has an ebook on Walter Gilbert who founded the group associated with the Arts and Crafts movement. The fountain was for the Pennsylvania estate of Alba B. Johnson, then president of Baldwin Locomotive Co., who passed away in 1946. Miller Nichols, a local real estate professional who was inducted to the Greater Kansas City Business Hall of Fame in 2011, bought the piece as scrap metal after workmen at a salvage company found it in a railroad car. The JC Nichols Co. installed it on the Country Club Plaza in 1953.

I was in Kansas City for the URISA's 43rd Annual Conference from October 9 to October 12, 2005. However, I missed this fountain. One of the city's most spectacular water displays was the Crown Center Fountains near the conference site Hyatt Regency Kansas City (now Sheraton Kansas City Hotel) at Crown Center, an office, retail, and entertainment complex housing the international headquarters of Hallmark Cards, Inc. I look forward to visiting more fountains when I am in Kansas City next time.

You can find a list of fountains in Kansas City at Wikipedia. ExperienceKC.COM has an article "City of Fountains: tour the stunning structures that gave Kansas City its claim to fame."