Janis plays button button who's got the button.

Fourteen years ago when my bride still had long blonde hair she knocked over a display rack. She was NOT happy.

A few displays broke that I rebuilt, but we let her pick up and sort all the buttons.

The bottom photo is Janis going to get the broom. 

These are all old drafts of posts that I had not posted.

The reason that I'm posting them now is because I am trying to figure how to run this blog again so I can do some more blogging.

Wish me Luck.

Ernie 

Baker Hamilton & Pacific Company

I've had an old book laying variously, either on my coffee table or my bookshelf, for about 15 years now. The book is titled "Baker Hamilton and Pacific Company, San Francisco, Catalog No. 8".  The book is 11 1/4" x 9 3/4" x 3 3/4". It has a tabbed index in the front, 3548 numbered pages, and then about 300 mail order blanks in the back. The book was given to me by my brother-in-law. He gave it to me because he knows that I am a builder and tinkerer, and that I would get buried in the pages. Somehow he saw the humor in me having such a book.

The book is completely intact, with the exception of a 2 inch tear on one page that I did myself. The reason that this book has suddenly become important to me is that it is 110 years old this year. There is no print date that I can find in the book, but I have found through a little research that it was printed in 1913, in Baker Hamilton's own facility, for the year 1914.

As all of you already know, the founders of The Baker Hamilton Company were gold miners that came to California in 1849 to mine gold. Livingstone Low Baker and Robert Muirhead Hamilton soon became discouraged by the trials and tribulations of gold mining and decided that they could profit best by cashing in on selling tools to the many hundreds of people with gold fever. They opened a hardware store in a tent on Mormon Island. You could visit Mormon Island, but alas, it is now under water behind the Folsom Dam. Baker and Hamilton were much ridiculed by the miners for passing up the opportunity to get rich quick mining gold, yet they soon became very successful and very wealthy selling hardware.

They expanded and opened a new store in the blossoming town called Sacramento.

http://stiletto.com/t-about.aspx A great youtube video with a Scott Joplin piano roll. About the history of Stilletto.
http://wx4.org/to/foam/sp/san_fran/7th/street2.html A collection of China Basin railyard photos that include the Baker Hamiltion building.

I started the post ten years ago on the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Baker Hamilton & Pacific Company. I didn't finish it because I was trying to find out what happened to the company and why it ended. So far I still have no idea. However, I ran across a news article dated May 23 20023 that said they were replacing the historic sign on the Baker & Hamilton building at 7th and King Street in San Francisco. The sign has been there for seventy years. It even survived the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. 

https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/historic-san-francisco-sign-to-be-replaced-18112494.php 

I'm smarter than I look

 Recently I was referred as a person that was capable of starting a blog and maintaining it. I became a standard of meager capability. I had to laugh at that because I found that I was no longer able to sign in and publish on my old blog "Ernie's Place". I have been puzzled for quite some time now on how to get signed back in. 

I seem to be smartest when I'm NOT trying to figure things out and sometimes it just comes to me. I have a bad habit of over-thinking things. I have tried various methods to re-connect to the blog and failed on all points. Starting a Blogspot account and doing a post was easy, and I did that ,but I wanted to continue my old favorite blog with tons of good stories. I just couldn't get signed in.

I recently had trouble with my comments being blocked on Redheaded Blackbelt (kymkemp.com) and they had to be approved before they could be posted. My comments were posted so late as to be ridiculous. Both Kym and her staff and I could not figure out what was wrong. 

I have always trained my dogs to know what "Go Around" means. If the dog was trying to get to something and couldn't reach it from the front, I would tell it "go around", they would look at my like 'oh, why didn't I think of that'. They would scamper around and get what they were after. I figured that I didn't want to have dog that was smarter than me, so I did a "Go Around" and used a actual email address that I used to have before I started my own URL, and Bingo Redheaded Blackbelt started accepting my comments.

So, last night in my just-before-sleep-stupor, I was rolling my Blog around it my head, thinking there must be a go around. That's when it occurred  to me that I HAD ALREADY CHANGED MY EMAIL ADDRESS. So, now I am almost as smart as my dog. I tried my old email address and the blog opened like a door in the wind.

So here I am again! Now, if I just had something interesting to say... Hummm

Ernie