Scenes from Martinez, 1927

It's amazing what you can find on YouTube if you look. Here is a 15 minute video of Martinez, taken in 1927. It mostly features people, but you can also see the Italian fishing area, the waterfront before any bridges existed, Shell Oil in the days before there were air quality regulations, and Main Street.

Notice the apparel -- you can see, especially by how the students are dressed, the diveristy of social stata that existed in Martinez even then. The last scenes are evidently some kind of contest where the boys dressed as movie stars. This being 1927, the stars then were Charlie Chaplin, cowboys and Indians; mostly Charlie Chaplin.

What's heart-wrenching is to know, from our vantage point, what the smiling, shy, seemingly-content people in this film did not know; that in two brief years from the time the film was shot, the country would be plunged into a deep and decade-long depression, followed by a World War.

But these are people who endured these wrenching events and found a way to survive, and eventually thrive. These are our civic ancestors; they loved this city, too. And we can't help, watching this footage, loving them right back.