I won’t trouble you with an explanation of why I once travelled to Campbeltown, near the southern end of the Kintyre peninsula in Argyll, to have some signwriting done on a Vauxhall Astra. It was interesting to me, but it probably wouldn’t be interesting to you, and in any case it’s not the point of this story. The point of this story is what the man who did the job told me.
I don’t remember his name, or much else about him, but I do remember he was friendly and skilled and happy to explain the business of creating vinyl graphics to someone who knew almost nothing about the subject. The interval between our meeting and our farewell, since when we have had no reason to resume our acquaintance, was no more than an hour and a half, and I spent a good deal of that wandering into Campbeltown to buy a sandwich and marvel at the shop window displays while he performed his magic.
I feel compelled at this point to divert from what Tom Lehrer, the celebrated mathematician and even more celebrated comic songwriter, once called “the mainstream of this evening’s symposium” and devote a couple of paragraphs to shop window displays in Campbeltown. It’s a while since I’ve been there, so for all I know the situation may have changed, but at the time they were startlingly minimalist. I thought of going back with a camera to record them, and upload the images to a website I would create for the purpose of astonishing people who had not visited Campbeltown.
One, in a menswear shop, consisted entirely of a pair of beige trousers folded over the back of a wooden chair. That was it. There was literally nothing else. It was as if the owner was trying to convey a message along the lines of, “We sell trousers. You want trousers? If you don’t buy them from us, you’ll have to go to Tarbert instead, and that’s forty miles away. They might have fancy window displays in Tarbert, but our trousers are right here.”
Enriched bodily by whatever kind of sandwich it was, and spiritually by this insight into the visual arts, I went back to the signwriter and marvelled at his work. I paid him for it, and then we had a little chat, during which he asked me if I wanted to see a picture of his favourite building in the world. Not having much else to do that day, I said I did.
Pan-Pacific Auditorium photo by Martin Rand, Historic American Buildings Survey.
Public domain
We went to his computer, and he opened an image of the Pan-Pacific Auditorium, whose aesthetic was as different from that of Campbeltown shop window displays as could be imagined. Opened in 1935, it looked like an ocean liner, and was a feature of the San Francisco cityscape until, after a long period of neglect, it was destroyed by fire in 1989. The signwriter was enchanted by it, and although it didn’t quite replace New York’s wonderful Flatiron Building in my affections, I was enchanted too.
Back at home, I did some research for my own amusement, and found that the Auditorium was an example of Streamline Moderne, a design movement of which I knew nothing. Others are said to include the Hamburg Flyer train and the De La Warr pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea. (I had read about the pavilion in Spike Milligan’s memoirs. He didn’t like it much, describing it as “a fine modern building with absolutely no architectural merit at all. It was opened just in time to be bombed. The plane that dropped it was said to have been chartered by the Royal Institute of British Architects.” Milligan was stationed in Bexhill for a while during his war service, which he famously did not enjoy, so perhaps he was feeling tetchy.)
MV Kalakala depictured on a postcard published by C.P. Johnston Co., Seattle.
Public domain
The greatest result of my investigation into Streamline Moderne was my discovery of the MV Kalakala, which instantly became, and remains, one of my favourite vehicles. In a strange sort of way, it resembles the BRM V16 Grand Prix car of the early 1950s, described by Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, who owns one, as being like a Victorian attempt to build a space rocket. Vastly complex for its era, it was miserably unreliable, and can be (and has been) scoffed at for that reason; but in my view, and I’m not alone in this, it made the most glorious sound of any race car ever built, and can therefore be forgiven for its lack of success. Similarly, the Kalakala, which by most accounts was an awful ship, was also, again in my view, absolutely captivating because of its design.
It began life as the peculiarly ill-starred Peralta, which operated as a ferry on San Francisco Bay. It got stuck while being launched in 1927, crashed into the San Francisco docks shortly afterwards, drowned five of its passengers the following year and was burned beyond all hope of repair in 1933. Only the hull was salvageable, and this was used as the basis for the Kalakala, which entered service on Puget Sound in 1935.
It looked absolutely incredible, though not everyone liked it. Kalakala means ‘bird’ in Chinook jargon, but it’s said that Washington state residents of Scandinavian heritage instead called it Kackerlacka, the Swedish word for ‘cockroach’. And there were other issues. A serious vibration (which inspired another nickname – Klanks-a-lot) was not cured until the propeller was replaced in 1956. The car deck was narrower than the one on the Peralta, so fewer vehicles could be transported right from the start, and fewer still as American automobiles ballooned in size over the years.
MV Kalakala photographed in 1962 by the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society.
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Worse still, the wheelhouse was mounted very far back and had tiny portholes, making it particularly difficult to see out of. This was an unfortunate case of form over function, since one of the principal requirements of a wheelhouse is that you should be able to see out of it. Accidents were reportedly common, and no wonder.
Nevertheless, it was popular, not least because it was more than just a ferry. In the evenings, it was also a floating dance venue, and had two restaurants and its own radio station. “It was so elegant,” said Susan Tinker, who rode on it as a child. “It was just magical.” Art Skolnik, once the executive director of the Kalakala Foundation, said, “It was a swinging thing on Puget Sound. It replaced Mount Rainier as the symbol of Seattle. It wasn’t until the Space Needle was built that it moved out of first position.”
The Kalakala stopped carrying passengers in 1967, and entered a death spiral slower and more pitiful even than that of the Pan-Pacific Auditorium. It was transported to Alaska, where it became a seafood processing factory. Then it returned to Washington, where attempts to raise money for its restoration were made, but failed. The last was led by Karl Anderson, chairman of Concrete Technology, who was forced to accept the inevitable in 2015 after spending a lot of money on the project. “I see a sad remnant of a lady way past her prime and ready to die,” he said, shortly before the scrapping process began.
Wreck of the Kalakala photographed by choking sun.
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The Kalakala is indeed dead now, but it lives on in the form of salvaged parts bought by those (including Susan Tinker, who acquired one of its portholes) who had been entranced by it while it was still with us.
Top image: a mural in Port Angeles, Washington photographed by Drums 600.
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