The Postcard
A postcard that was published in 1899 by the Detroit Photographic Co.
It was posted in Del Monte, California on Monday the 2nd. September 1907 to:
Miss de Kursel,
12, Redcliffe Square,
South Kensington,
London,
England.
The message was all on the front of the card, as the recipient's name and address stretched across the undivided back.
Hotel Del Monte
The former Hotel Del Monte in Monterey, California, is now known as Herrmann Hall, and is home to the Naval Postgraduate School.
It was one of the finest luxury hotels in North America. During World War II, it closed and the building was leased to the United States Navy.
It first was used by the Navy as a school where enlisted men spent the second, third, and fourth months of an 11-month course being trained as electronic technicians. Later the Hotel Del Monte became the Naval Postgraduate School.
Today, the building is named Herrmann Hall. It contains school administrative offices and the Navy Gateway Inns and Suites, a hotel.
History of the Hotel del Monte
Charles Crocker, one of California's Big Four railroad barons, established the resort through Southern Pacific Railroad's property division, Pacific Improvement Company (PIC), and opened the first hotel on the 3rd. June 1880.
The first true resort complex in the United States, it was an immediate success. Nearby, along Monterey Bay, was a railroad depot where the Del Monte (named for the hotel) served patrons arriving by train.
The property extended south and southeast of the hotel and included gardens, parkland, polo grounds, a race track, and a golf course.
Originally used for hunting and other outdoor activities, the hotel's property became Pebble Beach, an unincorporated resort community, and the world-famous Pebble Beach Golf Links.
The famous 17-Mile Drive was designed as a local excursion for visitors to the Del Monte in order to take in the historic sights of Monterey and Pacific Grove and the scenery of what would become Pebble Beach.
The hotel became popular with the wealthy and influential of the day, and guests included Theodore Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway as well as many early Hollywood stars.
The St. John's Chapel, Del Monte was built in 1891 by Charles Crocker and Collis P. Huntington for guests staying at the Hotel Del Monte.
In 1919 Samuel Finley Brown Morse formed the Del Monte Properties Company, and acquired the extensive holdings of the Pacific Improvement Company, which included the Del Monte Forest, the Del Monte Lodge (since renamed the Lodge at Pebble Beach), and the Hotel Del Monte.
The hotel's shops included branches of Gump's, I. Magnin and City of Paris.
There have been three buildings on the same site. The first building was designed by architect Arthur Brown Sr., who had been the Southern Pacific Railroad's Superintendent of Bridges and Buildings.
Humorist Josh Billings died at the hotel in 1885.
It was destroyed by fire on the 1st. June 1887 and was replaced.
The Del Monte Golf Course opened in 1897 as a public club. It is one the oldest continuously operating golf courses in the United States.
The Hotel’s famed Art Gallery, which was established in 1907 and quickly became the venue for California's most prestigious artists, was also rebuilt.
Also in the grounds are nine additional structures including the Roman Plunge Pool Complex, built in 1918 and designed by Hobart and Tantau, later the architects of the third hotel building. The Roman Plunge Solarium was restored in 2012 by architect James D. McCord. At that time the main Plunge was reconstructed as a reflecting pool and its original above-ground finishes restored. The Arizona Garden (1882), originally designed by landscape architect Rudolph Ulrich, is also on the grounds.
Del Monte Foods traces its name back to an Oakland, California food distributor who used the brand name "Del Monte" for a premium coffee blend made especially for the hotel.
On the 27th. September 1924, the second of three hotels, Hotel Del Monte building was destroyed by fire.
The current building dates from 1926. It was designed by architects Lewis P. Hobart and Clarence A. Tantau.
The Hotel Del Monte was requisitioned by the Navy at the beginning of World War II and used as a pre-flight training school.
In 1947, the U.S. Navy purchased the hotel and its surrounding 627 acres for $2.5 million. In 1951, the United States Naval Academy's postgraduate school moved from Annapolis, Maryland to its new location—the former Hotel del Monte. The hotel is now Herrmann Hall, the central building of the Naval Postgraduate School.
Mikhail Mikhaylovich Gerasimov
So what else happened on the day that the card was posted?
Well, the 2nd. September 1907 marked the birth of Mikhail Mikhaylovich Gerasimov. He was a Soviet archaeologist and anthropologist who discovered the Mal'ta–Buret' culture.
He also developed the first technique of forensic sculpture based on findings of anthropology, archaeology, paleontology, and forensic science.
He studied the skulls and meticulously reconstructed the faces of more than 200 people, ranging from the earliest excavated homo sapiens and neanderthals, to the Middle Ages' monarchs and dignitaries, including emperor Timur (Tamerlane), Yaroslav the Wise, Ivan the Terrible, and Friedrich Schiller.
-- Mikhail Mikhaylovich Gerasimov - The Early Years
Gerasimov was born in St. Petersburg shortly before his doctor father was posted to settlement near Irkutsk. As a child he studied the bones of prehistoric animals that were unearthed during construction in the area.
Gerasimov produced his first reconstructions of prehistoric Neanderthal and Java Man in 1927; they are exhibited in the Irkutsk museum.
Gerasimov learned to take a skull of early hominids and, by dint of elaborate measurements and anatomical research, to form a face that people would recognize, sometimes including the most common expression. As he wrote in his autobiography, The Face Finder (1968):
"I was fascinated with the opportunity
to gaze on the faces of those long dead."
It took a decade of studies and experiments to come close to individual portrait resolution quality of historical persons. His first public work of this type is dated 1930 – the face of Maria Dostoyevskaya, mother of Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
In 1928, Gerasimov studied in the archaeology department of the Irkutsk University where he worked under professor Bernhard Petri. He began to investigate Stone Age sites in Siberia.
In 1932 he moved to Leningrad for graduate study. There he experimented with several skulls to find out if he could reconstruct faces of racial types. In 1937–1939, he reconstructed three faces from skulls of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union — a Papuan, a Kazakh and a Khevsur Caucasian — and performed numerous forensic reconstructions for the NKVD.
He received important public exposure by reconstructing the faces of Yaroslav I the Wise (1938) and Andrei Bogolyubsky (1939).
In June 1941, Stalin sent Gerasimov to Uzbekistan with a team of archaeologists to open the tombs of Timur and other members of the Timurid dynasty. An apocryphal story from this time claims that Gerasimov's team opening Timur's tomb resulted in the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
According to the story, Timur's memorial bore the warning “When I rise from the dead, the world shall tremble”, and when the sarcophagus was raised and opened on the 19th. June, another inscription inside the casket read: “Whomsoever opens my tomb shall unleash an invader more terrible than I".
Three days later, on the 22nd. June, Germany commenced Operation Barbarossa. Even though people close to Gerasimov claim that this story is a fabrication, the legend of the Curse of Timur persists.
During World War II, Gerasimov worked at the military hospital in Tashkent; hundreds of victims of the war provided him with important statistical data on human skulls of different races.
Gerasimov continued to hone his methods. In 1950, he received the USSR State Prize and the state established the Laboratory for Plastic Reconstruction (now in the Institute of Ethnology) where he continued his research. He also acquired a reputation as a man who charmed ladies by complimenting them on the shape of their lips.
In 1953, the Soviet Ministry of Culture decided to open the tomb of Ivan the Terrible (at the Cathedral of the Archangel), and Gerasimov reconstructed his face. Afterwards, he received an extra month's pay for the job.
In 1961, Gerasimov travelled to Europe to help the Germans find the skull of the poet Schiller from the skulls in a mass grave.
Gerasimov died at the age of 62 on the 21st. July 1970 and was survived by four children.
