Video: 2024-11-21 - History of Lake Olympia & Glenbrook Park with Tanis Thorne and Vince Seck (72 minutes)

Full Transcript of the Video:

So what you came here tonight for, TANIS is the Horn of Instec, and they're going to be talking about their new book as you know titled History of Lake Olympia in Glenbrook Park. So TANIS has been a kind of frequent presenter before, I think this maybe events is, no, we had events about 10 years ago talking about the parks. You've been here previously right? Yeah, yeah, excellent. I did happen to ask you about one of your photo books over there by the brand that it is, is that correct? Yes. Okay, for sale? Excellent document. You want to look at some of the oldest images made in California by an artist? Southern Indians. Oh, the Nis and Onions. Northern Indians based in this area. Southern Indians. Southern Indians. Very impressive book if that's of interest to you. I find it very fascinating myself. Who's going to start? You going to draw straws? Yes, you're on. Ladies, ladies first. Oh, ladies first. Okay. Tell us how do I throw that word around? Okay, if you want. There we go. Okay. Am I on? Yes. Hello? Yes. Is this loud enough? No. No. Is this loud enough? Yes. Oh, yes. Does that need to be louder? Yes. Is this better? Yes. Okay. All right. We begin. Welcome and thank you all for coming out on this dark and stormy night. You are the audience for whom this book was written. Thank you, Dan and Dom and everyone who has helped with this book. A couple of announcements. Dom reminded me that a field trip often accompanies the speaker night. So we will have a field trip to Lake Olympia when it's dry enough to do so. And so there is the sign up sheet. No date has been established, but there's a sign up sheet if you want to go on that Lake Olympia field trip. We have the books for sale in the back and some information about the book here. We also have some Christmas wrapped books off backs if you want to get a gift from one of your loved ones. If you can't buy the book tonight or you know someone who might want to buy it, it's available at an alphabet of places in this community and we can help you out to buy a book. It's also available at the Nevada County Historical Society. All right. So Vince has often said that a picture is worth a thousand words. And from the outset, we intended to make this a picture book. This is one of those pictures, one of my favorite. It dates from the 1920s and in the background you can see the concession building and some fairy-like girls sitting on the bedrock mortar which was an iconic feature of Lake Olympia. First, I will do a very brief introduction. Then Vince will take the floor and then there will be a 15 minute or so question and answer period followed by the book signing and the cookies of course. Hopefully we can wrap up in an hour and 15 minutes but I'm eager to hear any and all of your stories about Lake Olympia. Mr. Mike Carr here I just spoke to, he said that he was at the bowling alley at Lake Olympia. Roller rink, sorry, roller rink at Lake Olympia the day before it burned down. So this is still alive in our memories. So this picture I think conveys the romance of Lake Olympia on a moonlit night. Alright, the overview. Now this book is about recreation in the Glenbrook Basin. Some of you may know it as the Brunswick Basin but it's really the Glenbrook Basin and I'll explain that in a minute. So there's two recreational parts and they took up basically most of the flat land in the Glenbrook Basin and they were vibrant institutions for over 100 years and this is the quote at the bottom kind of sums up this place. You can't believe how fun and romantic it was. The things to point out here is that it was, there was an overlap between Glenbrook Park and Lake Olympia. They were rivals for a period of time at around the year 1900. Secondly I want to point out that this was, these were institutions like the narrow gauge or the traction company, the electric trolley. They were vital places in Nevada County's history. This is a picture, railroad people, have you ever seen this image before? It comes from, we got it from Richard Biggs who was the nephew of Harold Biggs who always identified his postcards by writing in capital letters at the bottom. Most of what we know about Lake Olympia comes from Harold Biggs postcards. The coming, what I want to tell you about briefly is the glorious parts of Glenbrook Park and Lake Olympia which is also called Olympia Park. And what brought on the glory days of Glenbrook Park which was a racetrack which was one mile in length and 40 feet wide was the coming of the narrow gauge to the Glenbrook Basin. Here we see the gold flap, the train going over the gold flap. Tressel on its way to Glenbrook. So shortly after that, and this is the finest picture we have of the racetrack, it was taken very shortly after the track was improved for the district fair of 1885. We see in the corner here the judges stand and it's brand new and here is the two tiered grandstand and I think these are stables right here. The leading men of Nevada City didn't want to go down to Watt Park for the annual county fair. So they managed to create a new agricultural district, the 17th agricultural district and made that the district fairgrounds and that encompass both Nevada and Placer County. And so there would be five days of racing as well as stock exhibits and other things. And so these were the glory days at Glenbrook Park when there were huge, huge purses, $10,000 or more and people brought their horses on the railroad from all over the state. And Glenbrook Park's races were in the sports sections of papers all over the state. Now, if geography is destiny, Glenbrook Basin was destined to be a transportation hub and a place for social gatherings. Well, before 1849 it was a gathering place for the Nisanon in the summer months. But after 1849 a road connected, a tall road connected Grass Valley in Nevada City that later became Nevada City Highway and it's Main Street today. It's still there. Then in 1876 the narrow gauge railroad was established in the basin. And then in 1901 the electric trolley also called the Traction Company went between Nevada City and Grass Valley. And of course today we have the freeway going right through Glenbrook Basin. So where was this wonderful racetrack and Lake Olympia? This is one of the clearest images and what it is is it shows the annexation of Lake Olympia Park which was 14. 8 acres. It had camping and picnicking in addition to swimming in the lake and boating and so forth. But it wasn't the next to the city of Grass Valley until about 2005. And so what you can see here, you know where the old Margaritas restaurant was? And the gas station on this corner and then there is a tire store. Well after annexation when there was water and sewage facilities then that part was developed. And it's kind of like two tiers of strip malls or you know how that is so there's one behind the other. This area right here is currently being developed by a hotel conglomerate. Some of you have probably seen the building going on there. Alright Vince doesn't like this map because Lake Olympia slops over onto Plaza Drive and it really shouldn't. But this is Plaza Drive, this is Sutton Way, this is the cinema. So if you're in the cinema and you look across the street you would have been looking at Lake Olympia and this is the PG&E plant. Alright and this is the racetrack, right adjacent to it. Because in the 19th century people would go across from the racetrack and have picnics in Ishmard's Grove because this was a beautiful area for picnicking and it had a creek going through it. Alright so some facts about the Glenbrook Basin. It was as a wetlands although that is so hard to imagine today. It was very well watered, it was flat. It had a combination of grassland marsh and meadow which made it an ideal place for the Nissanan. A veritable food basket of everything from elk to grasshoppers. And so there was a lot of, and there's some artifacts, some of which we will see tonight, showing the Nissanan occupation of that area. It was also close to the dividing line between two watersheds, Wolf Creek and the Deer Creek watershed. And so it was a very important transportation route along the ridge there. But it was cold and wet and undesirable in the winter months. And you can imagine that on a night like tonight. And after 1849 it continued to be a desirable place, highly desirable in the summertime but not in the winter. So it only had a couple permanent settlers, the Ishmards being one of them and the Sutton's the other. And that left a lot of space free for recreation. Alright, now before I go a bit further I want to emphasize what I call the miracle of Lake Olympia. It was an artificial lake created 50 years after the Gold Rush. And we all know what happened to the creeks and rivers and ravines in Nevada County during the Gold Rush. Well this was a beautiful spring fed lake. This is the headwaters of Wolf Creek. This is Banner Mountain right here. All the water coming rushing down on a night like this and then from Spring Hill. And so we have the origins of Glenbrook Creek here on the Banner of Ridge. Also some springs here on this side and more on this side. And they all joined to form Glenbrook Creek and they went right through the racetrack. This right here in case you're wondering is the Freeway. This is a LiDAR image and the LiDAR image could not get rid of this modern development. So this image is meant to show what it looked like before anybody got there but the Freeway is running through it. Alright so the creek joins here, goes through this and this is a very marshy area. And then this was the ideal place for the lake in a sink just south of the racetrack. Because there was a kind of pinching here and it narrowed here so this was the best place for the dam. And every year in Vince, we talk about this in the book, but every year the lake was replenished with fresh spring water and every fall it was drained. So it was very, very wonderful water. Here again we can see the rivers or creeks and as Vince has emphasized Glenbrook ran year round. And so here are the streams coming in from the right and the left. And it shows the transportation system. We made this with Dom Linder's help. This is the railroad. This is Glenbrook station. This is the electric trolley line and here is the trolley stop. Vince will be talking more about this image a little bit later. And of course Glenbrook Creek ran into Wolf Creek ultimately. This is the train stop, I mean the trolley stop. Alright, now the glory days of Lake Olympia. What made Lake Olympia such a wonderful place and it ultimately won out in its competition against Glenbrook Park because it had this lake, this wonderful lake. And it had something that was really pretty unique in Northern California. Some 40 foot high dive and a large slide, a trapeze. And this was really unique at this time. And there weren't other places that you could find this kind of entertainment. Here is the Indian Rock that we saw before. And the picnicking grounds and the camping area, the bathhouses, the concession stand. But what makes this amazing is that Lake Olympia had an island in the middle of the lake and on that island was a dance floor that was 50 by 100 feet. And 200 people would go to that and dance. And there were dances two, three times a week for decades. And it reached its peak. It reached its peak in the 1930s for a combination of reasons. Oh, I forgot to mention. It was the only place in Nevada County that could house a or could have room for a 12 to 16 piece orchestra that were required in the jazz age and the swing era. So this was the place to go. And in the 1930s some of the best bands in the country came to Lake Olympia. Lake Olympia was strictly a summertime place until the 1930s when the pavilion on the island was enclosed. And then you could have music and dancing all year round. Probably the most famous group to come was Lionel Hampton and he came twice to Lake Olympia in 1935. So I'm going to turn this over to Vince, but I just wanted to say how much Lake Olympia lived in our memories. It's been 75 years since it closed its doors, but it is so fondly remembered still. And of course the obvious reason was that there was so much fun there and people had their youthful memories. But it's more than that. I mean it was a place of reward and respite from labor and it was also a community and gathering place. And it wasn't just Nevada County people that went there, but people came to Glenbrook Park and later to Lake Olympia from all over the region. This was the center of fun. Now as many of you may know, I met Vince in 2006. Maria Brower noted in her book review that we come from very different backgrounds, but I have come to have enormous respect for Vince Zeck. His family owned the Lake Olympia from 1950 to 1958. He has kept this memory of Lake Olympia alive doing many slideshows over the year. So it's only in the last couple of years that we got busy and did this, but I have to hand it to Vince Zeck because this book would not be possible without him. Alright Vince. Applause I'm going to try a different mic here. Hopefully it works. Yes it does. Okay Todd. One, two, three. You went off. Oh, sorry. You know, she never lets me talk. I'm really surprised that I'm up here. She turns me off. You know, Dan has really done a great job. Like you said we met years ago and she said we've got to make a book about this. My program was a lot longer at that time. In fact, I remember these historical guys going like this. Hey, hey, hey. I'm just wasn't finished yet. We're going to do it really quick tonight. I want to give just a little bit of a background. My family lived in Berkeley and Dan wanted to make a change and get involved in either a hotel or some sort of a resort. So my brother was going to the University of California and he was in a fraternity and he met a couple of guys from Grass Valley. Pete and Pat Ingram. I don't know if Ingram people know. Pete ended up as the editor of the union and his father was preceded him as the editor of the union. So anyway, Dan came up here and he purchased a lengthy look around at several properties. He almost bought the bread heart, but then he decided, oh no, we'll get a resort. And so then he came back home to Berkeley and he said, okay, we're moving. Oh, okay. I had just graduated from high school. I was 19 at the time. I was older than most of the guys because I had stopped and did a little stand in the Merchant Marine ship with standard oil. And then came back and a lady kind of coerced me in to come back and so I did that. So anyway, he came up and I drove into the property and looked around, you know, and here's rows and rows of picnic tables. But holy cow, what are we going to do with all of those? I didn't realize the history of this at all. I mean, I've been there for 50 years already and so many things going on. And we had a lot to do to get it in shape because the roller rink has collapsed at one end because of heavy snows and then raining on the snow. But all that's explained in the book. The rink, this man here dropped the cigarette. Right. It started young. Yeah, and it kind of smoldered and then the whole ring burned out for the next day. You never got over that. Anyway, that was in 1958 and the ring burned down and I joined the Grass Valley Preach Department at that time and I was busy on a suicide, you know, and a rookie and I couldn't leave when they said, hey, your place is burning down. So I finally got that out there about five o'clock at night and by that time there was nothing on the island but a big pile of ashes and a whole bunch of big coil springs that the floor had been mounted on. But what happened then is, you know, with the Grass Valley Preach Department there, we only had one police car and very few men. And so when you came to work, let's say you're going to work the swing ship and you start at four o'clock or you walk the beat, you walk the police station, you walk around town and you just talk to people. Well, people knew that I was connected with Lake Olympia and it was just bombarded daily, it seemed like, about, they want to know about Lake Olympia and they mostly, I think they want to tell me, like this man that he, I'm not saying you learned it down. So he had to go out there, these people always went out there, oh yeah, he was there, I swam and my mama and daddy met there. That was really the big thing. There was a lot of romance in that place. So anyway, I had, in 50, in 51, we had a lot of maintenance to do and we were very busy trying to get the place opened up and then I got drafted during the Korean, and so I was gone for two years, 52 to 54, and so my dad and my little brother had to do a lot. Oh, anyway, I was, what I was saying, when I got on the police department, I had so many people to talk to and that kept in my mind that, gee, maybe I better put something together, you know, and then I was asked to come into a couple of rest homes and tell them about it. So I got a binder and got a bunch of big pictures and I would go and I would tell about it and I think I talked to almost every organization in town over the years. But then I got into a slideshow and then I got more photos and I got bigger and bigger and bigger, then I got too big, but when all this came about, I had to re-slim it down. That's my dad. We have very few pictures inside the rake, but that is one I have to do. You know, I'm getting in people's way here. And I need the, we'll see how this works if I get in the middle here, see if the sun gets bad. All right, in this picture, right there, this was part of the property of the whole racetrack organization and clear back to here because this is also part of, this was a glibrook house. It was a towed station at one time and then they dressed it up and built a very modern, really nice hotel light with a huge, huge dining room because there were people coming from all over the states here for the race and then they stayed in a very good place to live. And actually they had a second story on this with a great big porch and they could sit up there with binoculars and watch this. You know, a lot of the ladies, they weren't, okay, she said I'm talking too much. I do that all the time. I can't say my name is 30 days. Anyway, I'm going to quiz through this, okay? This is the grandstands and the judges tower over on this side. Okay, let me switch here. This is working. Am I too far away? Okay. Nothing personally. Sometimes I don't bathe either. Okay. This is, if you back up into the Glenwood area, this is what you would see back in 1901. That is the powerhouse and car barn for the traction company. The traction company had four really beautiful brand new track rail cars. Right there, see that there? That is the judges tower. So you know the race track is over on that side and goes way down. This is the East Main Street looking down towards Glenbrook. It probably ran on the north side of East Main Street when it hit where the B and C is now turned in and would go on around and ride on up to Town Talk. I go over to the city and park in front of the bank on Broad Street. They had to diversify in the, when things were kind of going bad, they couldn't keep up on the maintenance of this race track. They didn't use the race track very often. They had to get in there and build everything, smooth out the track and paint and get it going again. So they started diversifying to get people to come out and they actually put in a dance floor and this is a baseball. Baseball is in. Everyone out baseball really came in. Every mine had their own team and businesses had their own team. Everybody go to Glenbrook and play baseball and with the huge grow, Isford to Grove, it was part of the Olympia park but before that it was Isford to Grove and there was a group of trees that were really big. Okay, this is an area where they built a little tool here for women and kids, this way they put it, and it had the bath houses here and everything was made out of wood, this whole thing. So all of them had a dirt floor and a real nice slide. They were really in the slides and you can see all the people here. Well here's the problem. This got so popular that they had to keep building and building and building bath houses and pretty soon there's a double row of them there because women were in a huge dress and they had to have places that hang them and very few people had their own bathing suits. These were all rentless rental bathing suits. That first day I went into the concession stand and there was a huge box in there and I looked in there and it was full of all these big wool things. I had never seen anything like that and I picked them up and they'd been sitting there for a while and they kind of smelled kind of funny. And anyway, I thought people have got to get their own bathing suits. I had a little stick to the dump. Boy, I wish I had them now. Moving on. This is Howard Brewer. He bought it in 1907 and operated to 1926. Howard was a character. This guy was a bundle of energy and constantly may change and he would move a building, you know. He was a champion swimmer on the west coast in Olympia and looked at all those medals he made and all these trophies and his trainer and this is another swimmer from Australia. But he came up and he saw the lake and he was just enamored. He had to have that lake and he bought it. And he made change after change and change but big changes were in the swimming area but his wife was really into music and so was he because he was a piano tutor. A young man like that. Now here we have an exhibition going on. This guy is in midair. That could very well be him. He might be exhibiting. And look at all the people here. You've got people sitting up on the trapeze. This is the trapeze right here. See this? The trapeze hung down there. You walked up a ladder there. You walked down on the board and there was a rope hanging down with a piece of wood on it and you threw that out and then wrapped around there and you pulled it in and then you started waving. And one of the kids had a lot of fun on that. There used to be a guy here in town named Jimmy Layton and boy, he was really good on that piece. Okay, this is taken very early because here's the island here. The Danpha region was over on this side and this island you can see has even very little vegetation a little winky up and down from there. But here's all this and the tower and everything is made out of wood at this time and then the rows and bathhouses. Okay. Here's a really good shot with a really great postcard. Quite a few of these postcards were sent to Germany. The film was sent to Germany and they would print them out and make postcards out of them and this is probably one of them right here because it doesn't have the writing on it that Harold Pigs used to write on. This is all wood, you can imagine. Later on it will change a little bit, okay? This postcard here, my brother found this. He lived in San Jose and his wife was dragging him around to antique stores, you know, looking for something and he would stand out by the counter and look at the postcards. Well, he looked down and here's one from Olympia Farms and so he bought it and gave it to me years ago. You can see the island is another year or so older and is starting to get some big trees on it. On the back of that postcard it says, I am in the one, I am the one in the middle rowing and I thought, well, that's a bunch of junk, you know? And so anyway, we found out that Harold Pigs was walking around everywhere taking pictures of tourists and he would sell that postcard to the tourists. That's how he made a living and put himself through college. This is another one about the same time, 1910 here. But you see, people love to row boats. I mean, think about it, in Grass Valley, where else are you going to row a boat? All those other islands or those lakes, you know, clear up in the boonies, they weren't accessible, there were no cars, you know, and. . . Okay, here we have, here's the bathhouse of towers stretched out a little bit further and the brewers have built a little building here with a concession stand. This is a bench where the people are, you know, watchers. This is the track bees and it is made out of wood. Pardon? What's in the foreground? Well, this is a raft here or we call them toadstools. There was three of them in the lake and the kids would swim from one to the next. Okay, this is a raft we had to make out so that you would kind of see where everything was, you know, well, it's a dam here and there was a little spillway right here where the water went out and the Indian rock with the older mortar rock, I have always called them grinding rocks. But anyway, there was a little, when they raised the lake, this little creek that came in here and they ended up with a little lane here and they called it Lover's Lane because guys would roll the ball in there and kiss their girlfriends. Well, that was dirty out there. This is one of the posters or an ad in the newspapers that the brewers put in. They had huge, huge parties out there July 3rd, 4th and 5th and just had all kinds of things going on. You know, in those days, you know, kind of feature this, you don't just get in your car and go somewhere for an hour. You've got to either walk there or take the train or take the attraction company and so you spend the whole day. So this guy, Howard Brewer, he tried to have something for everyone. He put in a merry-go-round, he put in a clay ground for the kids and then he had the dancing. He moved the dance floor from the shoreline out and beat it up really good on the island. But he just had to do everything he would consider each age group and say, what do they like to do, you know? You know, we have never found out what the monkey dance is. Jack there, do you know what a monkey dance is? No, I don't. After anybody knew, he'd know. Anyway, there was all kinds of dance. You had ragtime, jazz, the Lindy Hop, all that. But Michael Lindy had to tip up with it. Well, here's the really good one. Good picture of the border rock. At this time, the brewers had built a little concession stand here. Eventually, he would have big hip ropes covering very big porch and they needed that porch because so many people paid for the dances that they couldn't hold them all and so people would dance over on this side. Here he's got the railing all decorated up and there's a 200 foot bridge here coming into that part. Eventually, he would, you know, ruler just kept moving everything and in the book he would go through there and think, oh, this is the same photo. Well, isn't this the same photo? You look at the buildings and look. See all the people here, we don't know what's going on but very possibly a dancer or a show of some sort. Now they're putting a canvas rough over the floor because, you know, the weather was really hard on that floor. You had all the winter snows and rain and cold and freezing and the floor would get all winter so they put that canvas across. Okay, this one, there's the ladies. You saw that before. See over the rock and here is the rock again and now people are sitting on the first two and this is taking that night. You know, it would be really hot up down and they'd have a moonlight night and people would come out to the lake and they would swim and boat and dance or whatever, you know, and just have a good time. Right now, there's no bar right here. You'll see changes all the time. Now they've got the hip roof on it covering this dance floor. This is looking south. This will be the dam right here. This is where this hill came down here and this hill came down here and it was just an excellent place to put a dam in right here and first it was made out of dirt and it got worst out because when it rained all the water drained from Banner Mountain, Ridge Road, Spring Hill, Downtalk and it all came down through here and if you didn't drain this lake that water would come in so quickly it would take the dam off and several owners found that out. One of the many, many posters that went up around town but you see, there's all kinds of things going on. You can't read it here but you want to keep everybody busy and most people stage where they call it Hang in the Last Dog, you know. They had total wars. Cornish wrestling, that's something that nobody here has ever seen. It was a type of wrestling and there were predominantly Cornish people here. People came over from Cornwall and they had been mining for years over there. They were the only people that knew what to do and knew how to mine hard rock. This is a very serene sort of. . . It might be at night too but it's kind of dark but here's the main concession building here and this would be the first bridge and then they had some sort of a little building here it might have been for the band or maybe story but I'm not sure what it was because this kept changing and changing and changing and as long as Brewer was there something was going to change. This is probably the Clinton Park Boys that's a group from San Francisco and the organizations down there would make it a point to get the kids out of town because it's kind of a rough sort of place and they would come up to Lake Olympia. Now the first time they came up they came up on the train and you can catch Southern Pacific right there in Oakland and they'd come up and get off at Auburn or Colfax. Well they got off at Auburn and they hiked to Lake Olympia. So that was probably about a 25 mile hike and they were getting really a workout to get here but anyway they were a nice bunch of boys they were on their best courteous and all and some of them were band they played a lot of horns and they would have bands and they would give them concerts they would help people do things around their house put on acrobatics shows and they came up for years and years and they would come up finally they would come on in on the narrow-gauge rail which that was in. So this would be looking south and the building now is all sealed in. Now the idea of that is when the brewers had it it was strictly summertime at this time of the year that would be all closed and locked up and they wanted to go full time keep it open and busy. That's what happens to the racetrack why it failed and eventually around the 20s they plowed it up and seated it and put the cows back in there. Okay this bar here was built right after prohibition things were changing it was right here and now a guy named Thurston is the one that built it he bought Lake Olympia from the brewers and he operated for 20 years but it didn't work out having the bar up here and so he moved it down can you imagine moving that whole building that must have been a Ryan watching that and attached it to the main building that way one guy could one or two could actually watch the whole and would take less employees this is the boat dock the boat dock right down in here and there goes your bridge headed on out to there's a toadstool okay I got to tell you about this Thurston sold it and after 20 years of work I think he sold it to a cousin but anyway this building right here was for slot machines and it took up part of the porch it had a door from the bar going in and then it had another door an exit on this side going on to the porch these walls were real thick 2x6 and 2x8 and it was filled with sawdust and that was then knocked down the noise so the sheriff couldn't hear where the slob was and he was smoked at that time and this was such a little room and this is a fan right here I could just see all the smoke blowing out of that program there's a great big speaker there's two of them right there and the boat's rented by the hour and so each one had a number and you'd call in okay number 2 your time's up and somebody else would be waiting oh there's the other speaker over there somebody else would be waiting people love to row boats okay this is this is the all sealed in rower rink dance floor it had a facade on it right here well when the snow got 4 or 5 feet deep on this roof that facade kept it there and then it would rain on it and get really heavy and that is what caused this end to collapse and so when we bought it that was collapsed but there was an addition on the side here that was built to put you know you put states on and then there was bathrooms and then there was a big stage area where bands could get up and play when we rebuilt it we removed that facade it was the contractor in dining head nine guard said you don't want to put that on there that's what caused all the problems so anyway we had straight down now and this is the shiny room room and the snow just slipped right off of it but now all we had it piled up here and the snow piled clear up to the east so when we were going to open up to run a skating session or have an answer any event we had to get in there and dig tunnels right there and of course throw all the snow into the lake or where the lake would be actually we had to drain this every winter you would figure out all the rains are coming so you'd start taking the boards out of the spillway and start lowering it down and then I had to get in behind the dam and we removed a big cow who would cap and then it would bring it right down to natural state this is an overhand taken by a guy named Stores and I could differ on contact this guy but it shows the regular road coming in which would be glad to drive now and then it turned and came in to the parking lot and that just about where the new brand new road is to the housing development but you can see this at the parking lot here and there is the concession stand at all the boats right here and the 200 foot and then 50 by 100 best floor with the addition on there toad stools here toad stools there I'll let you read that hey on summer's night Japanese lanterns so long wooden stairs that led to the pavilion and a Japanese lantern that went all the way around the pavilion where moonlight dancing calm in three quarter time to the town nearby that's it okay thank you I don't have any questions okay was there any overnight accommodations? yes we had a row of cabins all the pictures are in the book five cabins and then there was a large area which was the picnic standing around all the way maybe I would I don't think I'd be able to that's okay yeah there was a large area there and you know the great big military tents the military used after the war there were a lot of those things around all kinds of actually surplus but anyway there were a lot of those tents and there were rows of platforms where those tents would go up in the summer and they were so busy out there we weren't in the 50s but before they were so busy that all those tents were rented and the five cabins were rented and there were rows of tables which you'll see in the middle of pictures there's 211 pictures in that because I think a picture is worth a thousand words hey that's so good we love pictures yes why was it like taking down? well the water changed you would notice that let's say a month ago when it was hot you could go out to Glenbrook Creek and it's not fair enough yeah where's the water? well all those springs you had Spring Hill it's called Spring Hill because it had springs on it and springs all across Ridge Road and then as you go around there was a big spring and that's the way it is now because that was dammed up and that actually fed a whole housing area and also we got we got good nice fresh spring water out of that for the lake too for drinking and all but it's just amazing how things change and tried up what you do well you know what's funny here all the lines are operating and there's lots of water in the springs coming right to the surface you know and now that the mines are all full water they're just big wells but there's nothing coming out of the springs so figure that out they have to be a hydrologist or something yes do you know the cabins that are along each main yes those were the Samaritans cabins that little white block building that was a grocery store for that whole area and they own those cabins they're all boarded up now they were going to build a hotel there but they never came about but there is a brand new hotel going in on the Lake Olympia it's for its own property right now what was the toll on the toll road oh I have no idea and is the grinding rock still there the grinding rock is still there the spillway is still there but you can't get to them because it's all totally overgrown it's really a shame it'd be nice to see that and there's supposed to be two leather grinding rocks in there too yes there's at the billboard they talked about a car race and you didn't mention anything about the car races on the racetrack that's all covered in the book there was one car race and it tore the track up so bad that the horses couldn't use it anymore so it went back to horse racing and then horse racing took it down one of the things that happened the state of California made it illegal to vote or to bet bet thank you for that on horses I mean you don't go to a horse race just to watch a bunch of morts and go oh man I hope I win I hope I win and so that kind of put a damper on things and one of the things is that just took a terrible beating all that old wood all those grandstands stables for beautiful stables they only use them once in a while you know it's not like they use it every day like the fairgrounds didn't know it was just when they were going to have a race and they have to go out and rebuild the whole thing to use it yes please two questions, did you have slide cards and they seem to rely on slide cards and they seem to rely on slide cards there wasn't really a lot of back then yeah I was the elite card I was also the bartender and you see how that bar with all those nice windows around it well I'm up in there looking out see if anybody drowned you guys are getting in trouble you know giving yell window open you know we didn't make any money out there we all had other jobs Dan and I worked with middle institutions where I got some of my EDU secrecy also worked at the local hospital she was a nurse and we had more like a hobby you know tell them about the naked ladies man oh yeah we had that problem even in those days what's the problem yeah really wasn't that bad okay anyway I'm bartending and there's parents in there because they bring their kids out and they sit on the stools and watch out the windows and watch the kids you know and there's two ladies there talking and one of them said oh look at the naked ladies well you know I couldn't have that on my watch lifeguard too so anyway I pop off my apron all in and I go running down there and I can't find any where they go you know swimming or what you know and then I ask the kids you see anybody going on down here oh no we didn't do it you know they thought they had done something so I went back up there put my apron on and I says where do you see those naked ladies you're right down there and the flowers aren't there's a really all the naked ladies ruin your whole day where are you oh yes at the corner of Idaho, Maryland and Brunswick there is some kind of a racetrack there well that's Earl McBoyle's racetrack he had beautiful virtualized men and he had race horses too he was the owner of Idaho Maryland and he owned that whole area clear upon the hill to the airport acres and acres where they have that brand new housing development they're building you know but all that was Idaho Maryland's mind surrounded us practically and three sides it did surrounded us it was called the McCary Ranch for Malcolm Hamill anybody know Malcolm Hamill? he was a a word that everybody said Malcolm Hamill he was a really busy guy busy busy guy in fact he ran the dances out there and makes a live game and a contract and we actually oh I gotta go home? no do we go on? are we truly in? yes a question and an anecdote how late did the trolley when did the trolley stop running? in 1924 yeah everybody really you heard for years that they kept the trolley out because it snowed and it couldn't go off the tracks and it was really having a bad time so the guys said oh forget about it they were thinking about doing away with that for years they had everything lined up buses and all because you see the trolley is on a track it goes here boom boom boom it couldn't take the men to the mines whereas with a bus you can go anywhere you want you got a guy that works at the empire you go by there you don't get drugs with mines but anyway they have it in 1924 so part of why I asked is I lived up in the north end of Houston at the dead end of west Olympia Drive and Sharon and Joe Bowman also lived back there yes I know Joe and Sharon grew up in the house across the street from where Joe lived and the trolley went through their property originally but interestingly google maps showed the road to still go through there like 25 years ago and a little later when the internet started people would come down the road thinking that they could drive through there through private property because somehow the trolley road was still on there well it's the trolley right away yeah it's still on I drove in there and we were researching this thing and I saw this area that was really overgrown and I asked the neighbors around there and I said a little piece of property is that and he says nobody claims and I went into the city and they have a really nice map on the wall in there and you can see all the property lines and here's this thing going up to town talk and I asked him well whose property is that he says that no man's land can you imagine it's still there and then my second question is there anybody here from the price family or knew the price family this is more of an anecdote but over many years I had a few occasions to speak with Arnie Price who's now long gone he probably would well into his 90s or close to 100 he said he was one of the last muckers in the mine he started as a teenager and he lived up off of a slate creek he and his wife June but when I would get to visit with him he and June met on the dance floor and so their story family beginnings were that June's younger brother was a skate key boy and he introduced June and Arnie skating at the dance floor and then they had stories for of course many years while it was still functioning where they brought their whole family that was a social gathering they were to grow and you'll see in the book you can see these great big trees there was a time when the grass valley area was denuded because all the steam engines were running all in all the mines and in the forest and they had to have fuel and people cooked with wood they built with wood they heated with wood and there was no wood you can see some old photos and they just it's all gone but Ischmerc's girl was not because Ischmerc would let anybody cut on that so the big trees there and everybody came out to give him the shade it was a draw what was the terminus of the trawling on the south end of the county of our south it came in east main street turned on theville street and came down to the north star mine that was the terminus it was slated to go all the way to Mary'sville but that never took place you know trucks and trailers came in and it kind of took it away from there so I worked for 24 years in the old via bay building on broad end pine into that city later became the button works and then the building was restored back to the bank on the corner of that building there's a scratch plaque commemorating the trawling so if anybody is in that city take a look it's on the corner of that was the terminus they came up the street and went over to the curb that's the terminus so we would love to hear any anecdotes you have about Lake Olympia but we'll have to cut it short now so thank you so much oh you're only paying so much when I'm talking