Happy 50th, Monorail!

The Seattle Monorail hit the big five-oh on Saturday.

Eliza and I lined up early Saturday morning at the Westlake Station ticket window to get our free commemorative medallions, then we rode the blue train to Seattle Center for the festivities: an Elvis impersonator, a table with some vintage memorabilia (brochures, toys, etc.), 50th-anniversary souvenirs (we bought a poster, and Eliza got a T-shirt), some guest speakers, and this eighth-grade kid demonstrated his new monorail video game. We also got to tour the service bays below the trains at the station. Pretty cool.

For the occasion, I scanned in my circa '62 Seattle Monorail booklet (above) and uploaded it as a flickr set -- incidentally, this brings my entire flickr collection to exactly 1,000 images.

The monorail's birthday is the first of what will be many 50th-anniversary celebrations of the 1962 Seattle World's Fair, which I'm planning to fully commemorate myself -- stay tuned.
***

Apropos of Nothing #5

***

We Hardly Knew Ye: Ralph McQuarrie

I knew nothing about the guy, except that he did some awesome conceptual paintings for the original Star Wars trilogy, and that he died on Saturday...

These are some of my favorites...

Here's an obituary...

His Wikipedia page...

And here is his official site.
***

We Hardly Knew Ye: John Belushi

He died 30 years ago today, at age 33. This is finest moment...

***