Monday Night ONT - October 5, 2026 [TRex]

Good evening Horde. The time has come for Monday shenanigans. The bar is open and the refrigerator has been freshly re-stocked with A&W Rootbeer.

Welcome to the Monday night ONT which means vintage overnight fun and games. Pull up a chair and join the fun. Good will offerings of amusing puns are encouraged. Be nice to your fellow commenters and AoS contributors. Pants are optional. This ONT is a Tucker, Candace, Megyn, and Bill Kristol free zone. Fauci is fair game.

[Top photo: A helicopter is lifting a 34-foot animatronic brontosaurus over Boston toward the Museum of Science - July 1984]

The Monday ONT has dialed up the wayback machine tonight with very random results.

Hagen's Fish Market at 5635 W. Montrose Avenue, Chicago, IL in the Portage Park neighborhood - 1977.

Hagen's opened in 1946 when the area was still semi-rural. Brothers Don and Bennett Hagen, sons of a commercial fisherman, started the business with help from their father, who mortgaged the family home. It has remained family-owned across generations and is now run by the fourth generation. The fish market is still in business at the exact same address and is actively operating.

Blue Blaze Coal Company store in the coal-mining camp of Consumers, Utah (Carbon County), in the Gordon Creek/Gordon Valley district roughly 17 miles northwest of Price - 1936. (Price is about 77 miles south east of Provo.)

Consumers is a ghost town today. A rough road (Consumers Road, off US-6/191 north of Price) reaches the site. Visible remnants include stone and concrete foundations along with scattered mine-related debris and traces of the old tipple area. No standing buildings from the 1930s town remain intact.

Storage tanks (petroleum?), Oklahoma City, Oklahoma - 1942.

Salt Air Pavilion on the south shore of the Great Salt Lake, Utah - circa 1900.

Saltair opened in 1893 as a family-oriented resort promoted by LDS Church leaders - the "Coney Island of the West" - with dancing, bathing, and later amusement rides. The original pavilion burned in April 1925. A second was built and burned in 1970. A third structure was built in 1981 about one mile west of the original site, using a reused aircraft hangar. After flooding in the mid-1980s it was renovated and now operates as a concert and event venue.

The building still exists, but is no longer city hall.

Towns and distances on the sign:
Sparta - 28
Cookeville - 40
McMinnville - 57
Carthage - 63
Lebanon - 90
Murfeesboro - 98
Nashville - 120
Homesteads - 4
Rockwood - 24
Kingston - 37
Harriman - 37
Dayton - 50
Knoxville - 76
Chattanooga - 87
Jamestown - 32
Byrdstown - 63
Albany - 64

The business is closed, but the sign lives in front of the Cumberland County Courthouse.

Conference of judges at Bean Day in Wagon Mound, New Mexico (Mora County) - 1939 photo.

Bean Day is the town's long-running Labor Day weekend festival and rodeo, named for the region's pinto-bean farming.

Demonstration of tracked vehicles near the Key Bridge in Washington DC - circa 1921-1923.

In the foreground is a Citroën-Kégresse half-track (autochenille) which has a car-like chassis, wooden-spoke front wheels, and flexible rubber tracks at the rear. Behind is a Renault FT-type light tank (or very similar WWI-era two-man tank) with a turret.

U.S. Post Office in New Ulm, Minnesota, at the corner of Broadway and Center Street (2 N. Broadway) - 1981 photo.

The building still exists and looks mostly the same. Since 1984, it has been the Brown County Historical Society museum and headquarters.

Walt Stuart's Texaco, West Yellowstone, 1956.

Alex Stuart opened the garage in the auto era (service for Yellowstone Park buses from 1917). Walt worked there from 1919. Walt Stuart bought the family station in 1936 and sold it in 1977. After the 1977 sale, the rustic twin-gable Texaco did not survive as that landmark.

Elk Canyon in the Black Hills of South Dakota, on the narrow-gauge Black Hills and Fort Pierre Railroad - 1890.

The line was built by the Homestake Mining Company to haul timber from the hills to the mines at Lead. It ran toward Piedmont via Elk Creek. The sheer rock face is the "Giant Bluff." The BH&FP was sold to the Burlington in 1901 and the narrow-gauge system faded out by about 1930.

You want music in your ONT? I give you Jerry Reed:

The Monday ONT is brought to you by Mikey and Life Cereal:

Complaints and other correspondence can be sent to moronhobbies at protonmail dot com where they will be promptly be lost by the email gnomes. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

posted by Open Blogger at 10:00 PM

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