Feb. 14, 2016: Oldest operating McDonald’s located in Downey, California.

Built in 1953, the oldest still operating McDonald’s sits at the corner of Lakewood Blvd. and Florence Ave. in Downey. The 60-foot tall Speedee the Chef sign was added in 1959.

The restaurant was the third McDonald's ever built. It was franchised by Richard and Maurice McDonald, prior to Ray Kroc acquiring the company. For years, it operated under the McDonald’s name, but was not part of the company. In 1990, McDonald’s Corporation acquired the site. The restaurant was repaired and upgraded.

A gift shop and museum sits next to the restaurant.

Additional photos in this flickr album: 2016 McDonald's Downey.

The best was saved for last. Before leaving the Los Angeles Times in December, I left two dozen blog posts in draft mode. The last one is a 20 photo gallery of a 1981 Rolling Stones concert at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

Nose-bleed seats 100 yards away sold for a hefty 15 dollars. Yes fifteen dollars. But some 180,000 fans attended two concerts in October, 1981.

After this post went live, I couldn't get the Stones 1965 song "The Last Time" out of my head.

Feb. 20, 2016: Images from the Battle of L.A. reenactment at Fort MacArthur in San Pedro, California. Photos taken with Hipstamatic app on iPhone.

On the night of Feb. 24-25, 1942, a rumored Japanese attack on Los Angeles led to some 1400 rounds of anti-aircraft rounds being fired. Spent shells landed all over Los Angeles.

The Fort MacArthur Museum celebrates the 1942 event with a major World War II reenactment with military equipment, dinner and fireworks show. Many attendees are in ‘40s uniforms or fashions.

This year, I took many images using the Hipstamatic app's Helga Viking lens and Blackeys black and white film.

Twenty five Hipstamatic images are in this 2016 Battle of LA Flickr  album.The album also includes about 30 additional images from the event.

I've used this Hipstamatic app setting for several years. Unfortunately I left the updated app in "Classic" mode. The best image from the fireworks show, above right, is only available as shown. Today, I changed my Hipstamatic work flow to save untouched originals in the camera roll. This is a feature available in recent Hipstamatic updates.

Also, I turned off the retro date feature. These images taken in Feb. 2016 have "Feb 1986"- thirty years subtracted by the retro date feature.

It's confusing looking at '1986' images taken in 2016 of a 1942 event.

Want to read more? Check out my 2012 Los Angeles Times From the Archives blog post: Battle of L.A.

The Fort MacArthur Museum also has this web site: The Great Los Angeles Air Raid of 1942.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt enters during Presidents Day ceremonies aboard the U.S.S. Iowa in San Pedro.

The Battleship Iowa Museum on Monday celebrated Presidents Day and the ship's 73rd birthday. Impersonators of President Roosevelt and Gen. Douglas MacArthur and several military reenactors added a World War II atmosphere to the event.

The U.S.S. Iowa was commissioned on Feb. 22, 1943. Three Presidents - Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush - have been hosted aboard the battleship. FDR sailed to the Tehran, Iran, conference in  1943 aboard the Iowa.

I'm posting additional photos in this Flickr album: 2016 USS Iowa.

Feb. 6, 2016: Alien ship crashed into the entrance of Fry's Electronics Burbank store.

Opened in 1995, the Burbank Fry's design theme is 1950s sci-fi. After entering underneath a crashed flying saucer, you're met with a newsboy selling the local newspaper. The headline: "Aliens Invade."

Inside are numerous displays. Giant ants from "Them!" hang from the rafters. A soldier aims his rifle from a jeep - cut in half be a laser. And the robot Gort from "The Day the Earth Stood Still," carries a lady in distress.

To shoot this invaders, I used my new iPhone 6s. Perfect place to test the camera after upgrading from an iPhone 5s. I used Camera + and Hipstamatic apps. The results are in this flickr album: 2016 Fry's Burbank.

Images look great. The crashed UFO image, above, did start to fall apart in the store's pitch black exterior.

Below is one of "Them!" ants and two images taken with Hipstamatic app.

Feb. 6, 2016: The Portal of the Folded Wings and Space Shuttle Memorial at Eastern edge of Pierce Brothers Valhalla Memorial Park in North Hollywood.

The 75-foot tall Portal of Folded Wings originally was the entrance to Valhalla Memorial Park cemetery. Architect Kenneth MacDonald, Jr., and sculptor Federico Giorgi built the Valhalla Memorial Rotunda in 1924.

In the late 1920s, musical concerts and other public events were held at the Rotunda. But noise created by the 1930 opening of nearby Burbank Airport ended events.

In 1950 the Pierce Brothers purchased the cemetery. They closed the Rotunda to vehicle traffic. The park entrance was moved to Victory and Cahuenga boulevards in North Hollywood.

In 1953, the Rotunda was renamed The Portal of the Folded Wings Shrine to Aviation. Today about 25 early aviators are buried there.

In 2007, the Space Shuttle Memorial opened. It’s dedicated to the crews of the Shuttles Challenger and Columbia. One side of the Space Shuttle model is painted for the Challenger, the other for the Columbia.

Additional facts:

Sculptor Federico Fiorgi also also worked on the exterior of the Million Dollar Theatre on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles.

On July 18, 1969, a twin-engine aircraft crashed into the Portal of Folded Winds, killing two.

The Space Shuttle model is a movie prop from 2003 sci-fi film “The Core.” Check out this You Tube video. Spoiler alert: the Shuttle lands in the Los Angeles River.

For more check out this Dec. 6, 2013 article by Hadley Meares on the KCET website: Valhalla Memorial Park and the Portal of Folded Wings.

More photos are in my flickr album: 2016 Space Shuttle Memorial.

Feb. 4, 1981: Director Francis Coppola, head of the financially troubled Zoetrope Studios, conducts a news conference on a set re-creating downtown Las Vegas.

One of my last From the Archives posts went live this morning. Coppola conducted a press conference on the set of "One From the Heart." The movie, set in Las Vegas, bombed. Zoetrope Studios was sold.

Link to Framework post: Las Vegas set at Zoetrope Studios.

Proof sheet, clip, negatives and assignment sheet from 1982 story on 4-H program in Thousand Oaks.

Yes, after 25 years, I’m back working at the Thousand Oaks News Chronicle - sort of.

I'm spending Wednesdays volunteering at the Thousand Oaks Library. There I'm working on the News Chronicle photo collection.

Back in 2012, I donated some News Chronicle negatives to the Thousand Oaks Library. My first chore as a volunteer - going back through my donation.

Proof sheets and negs get separated. Nasty staples and old glassine film envelopes trashed. The negs get placed in acid free envelopes. Captions and metadata get entered into a computer data file.

I’ve finished my first month. In my future are more white glove work with old negs, scanning and microfilm research.
 
For several years, many of the Thousand Oaks Library Special Collections images have been posted on Flickr. As of today, the two most recent Conejo Through the Lens flickr posts are from a 1971 Kazoo parade by Bob Pool.

1981 aerial photo of USNS Hughes Glomar Explorer in mothball at Suisun Bay, California. Photo by Scott Harrison.

The Glomar Explorer was built in 1973-74 by Howard Hughes for use by his company, Global Marine Development Inc. to "extract manganese nodules" from the ocean floor. Nope, the CIA built the ship. The $350 million ship tried to recover a sunken Soviet submarine from the Pacific Ocean floor.

In 1974, a portion of the Soviet sub, K-129 was recovered.

Once the partially successful operation ended, no other use for the Glomar Explorer was found. The ship sat in mothballs for years, only to be scrapped in 2015.

The CIA story began to unfold in a Feb. 8, 1975 Los Angeles Times story by William Farr and Jerry Cohen. But this story had the sunken Soviet sub in the Atlantic. The operation actually proceeded some 1500 miles northwest of Hawaii. Copy of story below from ProQuest.