
As part of that project, I attempted
to find and to photograph items relating to life in the ground floor cafe and
the second floor hotel. I had in mind such artifacts as menus, matchbooks, and
images of the interior rooms.
Despite varied efforts, I was
never able to find, much less to photograph, a single such item.
A few weeks ago and amazing
to me, an antique paper dealer in Smithville, Texas put a Terminal Hotel and
Cafe matchbook on online auction.
I won the bidding and
photographs of that prize are shown here.

The design seems clearly
generic rather than custom. The type and text on the opening-flap side have the
look of a standard set-up done by Diamond Match Company printers. The “service
at moderate prices” graphic on the reverse side seems boilerplate.
If the above characterization
is reasonably accurate, we have one more bit of material suggesting that a
central Davis institution of the ‘20s and ‘30s was a rather modest affair. UC
faculty may have been key players in Davis, but they clearly were not cavorting
in anything even remotely resembling the elegance of the The Faculty Club at
Berkeley.*
BUSINESS MEMORABILIA

Believing a substantial
amount of this kind of material was produced by Davis businesses, I have been alert
to identifying it in various venues. But, mysterious to me, I have found very
little of it.
I have begun to think that
people have treated these artifacts in the same way they have treated old telephone
books: throw them away when they are no longer current.**
__________
** Discussed in post # 99,
this blog.