An "Original" Party Boat. Plus Odds & Ends.

Baron Long's Ship Cafe, built in 1905 alongside the Abbot Kinney pier and originally run by Carlo Marchetti, was the "in" spot to find some of this "action." Named the "Cabrillo,"

http://www.virtualvenice.info/visual/cabrillo.htm




(This post card's publisher)
JAMES BENHAM
A frontier jack-of-all-trades, James Benham co-founded The Curio shop in Phoenix, Arizona in 1895, a store that sold Southwest Indian arts and crafts. In 1903 he parlayed a position with a New Mexico archeological dig into the Benham Trading Company, which, along with the Fred Harvey Company, was one of the top sellers of ancient and contemporary Indian goods.

Benham Company, Los Angeles (1887-1913) was established in 1887 as the Benham Indian Trading Company [a.k.a. The Indian Store; Indian Traders]. By 1912 it had expanded to the "largest Curio Store in the World."
And quite prolific in the post card trade at the time.

In the Western world, it was a symbol of auspiciousness and good luck until the 1930s when the right-facing tilted form became a feature of Nazi symbolism.

The swastika is a Navajo symbol for good luck, also translated to "whirling log".

The symbol was used on state road signs in Arizona



Arizona Republican. Newspaper-1905-10-15
Ad for Ruberoid Roofing (and swastika's!)

Pat - That was interesting. Many thanks!

The swastika is still used widely in India as a symbol of good luck. It can come as a shock to a western traveler who associates the symbol with one of the last century's greatest evils.

RXC - Thank you for the add. I almost included more, but was trying to keep it topical to the card. Indeed the symbols usage precedes the 1930's hijack by many millennia.

The word swastika has been used in the Indian subcontinent since 500 BCE.....
The earliest known swastika is from 10,000 BCE............
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika