The Hotel Whitcomb... 1919

As I've mentioned in another post, my mother was born in a hotel in San Francisco, in 1919.

The first time I learned the name of the hotel, I searched for it and came up empty. While going through things lately, I thought that the internet might give me what i hadn't found before, as it has so many times.

and there it was...

The Hotel Whitcomb.

It's listed on her birth certificate. Room 776.

I sent an e-mail to the hotel and received an enthusiastic response from Joanne Tan of the newly refurbished Hotel Whitcomb. Seems it had other names through the years, and had recently gone back to it's roots, so to speak. She was so pleased, and asked that I send anything I had on the matter. I sent her a letter with the story and some pictures of my Mom as a baby and her birth certificate. She's offered to give me a tour of the room anytime I'm up there.

Don't even know where I'd park! (grin)

Then, my cousin in Long Island sent some of my mother's sisters stuff. Afraid, I think, to throw away the (mostly) junk and pictures of people NOBODY KNOWS, he pawned it off on me.

but...

there was this postcard.

Now it was common in the later part of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th to put pictures on postcards so people could send them to people (I am refraining, quite mightily I might add, from bursting into THAT SONG). I have postcards of my grandfather at about a year old in a bath tub (literally a tub).

I had never seen this picture. It's a cake.

on the back, it says..

" In honor of the first baby born in the Hotel Whitcomb", Nov. 1, 1919."

The little note says "Compliments of the Whitcomb Hotel Manager".. I think..

I'm sending it to Joanne . I think she'll like it!