On This Day In 1922...

I've been poking through the Evening News on Google News Archive for a couple days looking for some interesting late-January news from San Jose. There's not a lot that's exciting to us twenty-first-century people, but the January 23, 1922 "Patronize These Local Businesses" section showed an interesting fact:

FRUIT ASSOCIATIONS: CAL PACKING CORPORATION, district office: San Fernando St., S.J. 156. Central Cal canneries, Plant No. 4, Seventh & Jackson, J. K. Armsby Co; Plant #52, Cinnabar, Griffin & Skelley Co., Plant 51, San Fernando; Cal Fruit Canners' Assn., dried fruit dept., Plant 50, W. San Carlos; Cannery Plant 3, San Carlos and Narrow Gauge.

There's two odd features of this list: first, it's showing the original owners of each property some six years after the creation of Del Monte, and second, they're still referring to the Santa Cruz branch as the narrow gauge, some ten or twelve years after the line was widened to standard gauge. I might expect this from an old-timer, but I'm surprised to see how Del Monte continued using the old names for so long.

If I was modeling the 1920's and needed nicknames, this would give me a bunch of hints about how the railroaders probably described the branch and the businesses.