RETRO-PALM SPRINGS Tennis Club!

I love these old photos of historic places in Palm Springs.  There seems to be a campy and endearing nostalgia for those sun-soaked days in our not-so-distant past.  I will post these photos when I come across them and see if I can include the place as it is today!

The famous oval pool at the Tennis Club on Baristo Road in Palm Springs, March 1947. The pool is still used today.

The Tennis Club is now a vacation rental destination and has the award-winning Spencer’s Restaurant onsite.

Go back to  ‘PALM SPRINGS:1960′

“This was the Palm Springs I had grown up in, where Steve McQueen walked the streets along with tanned locals and sun-hatted tourists, where turquoise swimming pools reflected the sky with an odd romantic poetry.” --Filmaker Cameron Crowe

A previously unpublished collection of Robert Doisneau’s color photography provides a unique opportunity to revisit the early years of one of America’s legendary holiday destinations.  The Collection includes 104 rare color photos taken in 1960.

In 1960, Robert Doisneau was invited by Fortune magazine to cover Palm Springs, the hottest travel destination of the day. Renowned as a playground for the rich and famous, as well as for a silver-haired and well-heeled clientele, it was a world of swimming pools awash with bobbing beehives, martini-fueled parties, and relaxed games of golf, all unfolding against a desert backdrop. There, Doisneau took hundreds of photographs, twenty-three of which were published in the magazine. The rest have been rediscovered in his archives and one hundred are featured here for the first time

Doisneau is best known for his black and white portraits of Parisian street scenes. This rare color collection—which is supplemented with a facsimile reproduction of Doisneau’s original Fortune article—offers a new perspective on his photographic legacy. Accompanying these nostalgic images are extracts from the photographer’s personal correspondence—small masterpieces of derision and self-derision in which he describes being marooned in the “world capital of winter golf”—and an equally amusing introduction written by award-winning French novelist Jean-Paul Dubois.

The following bookstores had ordered “Robert Doisneau: Palm Springs 1960” as of last week:
Barnes & Noble Booksellers, 72-840 Highway 111, Suite 425, Palm Desert.
Latino Books y Mas, 123 N. Palm Canyon Drive, Palm Springs.

To order from Amazon click on the photo!

This is the story of Palm Springs in its golden years, a city that had it all, including marvelous midcentury Modern architecture, fabulous fly-in hotels, and a swinging nightlife. Through vintage photographs, postcards, and other ephemera, Palm Springs Holiday recalls the Palm Springs area from the 1910s through the 1960s, where people vacationed in the desert, dined, danced, and lounged poolside. Features vintage images of the Coachella Valley and shots of the area’s famous hotels and gambling dens.

Around Town Cover Girl: Dinah Shore

The Many Faces of Dinah Shore Reprinted from March 1995 Palm Springs Life Magazine.

Photo from March 1986 Palm Springs Life Magazine “Shore on Shore” – “Nothing could be Finah than an interview with Dinah”

Photographer – Willaim J Hennigar

Friends in the desert knew her as a velvety singer, respected author, gourmet cook, valiant athlete and generous philanthropist who endeared herself around here as the patron saint of one of our most successful golf tournaments. She was all of that, certainly, but to Palm Springs Life she was even more. For nearly a quarter of a century, Dinah Shore was our March cover girl.

From the time her LPGA tournament began in the early 1970s, when the Jones Agency (owned by our publisher, Milton W. Jones) ran the press tent, to the past five years when we produced the official tournament program, Dinah’s cover issue was always a best-seller.

Our relationship with Dinah was business, never personal, but it was so long-lasting and so cordial that it felt like a friendship, especially when, March after March, Dinah came shining through.

The longevity of Dinah’s career was due in part to her great and varied talent, and also to her impeccable professionalism. No shrewder businesswoman ever stood on a stage beneath a baby spot. She knew the worth of her image, to her career as well as to the tournament. In our dealings with Dinah she was never hard, but she could be firm about what suited her image and what didn’t, and in the most pleasant fashion, she usually got her way.

Dinah was noted for her sweet nature, but she was never sugary. She was a special combination of grit and Southern grace, a sexy tomboy who had enough brassy sass in her to hold her own with anybody. She was also that rarest of showbiz blends — a glamorous woman with a sharp wit, and she could swing a mean five iron, cook a great gumbo and still vamp an audience with the way she filled out a designer gown. It was daunting to try to depict this complex woman on the printed page, but Lord knows we tried.

Not that she wasn’t a good and willing interview, especially when it had anything to do with the tournament. It was just that as a lifelong performer, Dinah had polished her public persona to a high gloss, and it was impossible to crack. Her public and private-selves were kept separate, but because she was bred-in-the-bone honest, we suspect that there really wasn’t much difference between the two Dinahs, and what you saw was what you got. If she wanted to keep the details of her life private, that was her business.

Photographing her was a different story. Dinah didn’t keep anything back, she gave the camera her all. She’d been performing in public and having her picture taken for more than half a century, and she never met a lens she didn’t like. And vice versa.

Charles Bush, the Los Angeles photographer who took so many of our Dinah cover shots, regarded her as one of his favorite subjects.

The passing years didn’t mean much when the lights went on and Charlie looked through the lens. Hers was, in the words of Bush, ‘”the smile that lit up the world.”

Dinah Golf

Shore, who played golf herself, was a longtime supporter of women’s professional golf. In 1972, she helped found the Colgate Dinah Shore golf tournament, which today, now known as the Kraft Nabisco Championship, remains as one of the four major golf tournaments on the LPGA Tour. The tournament is held each spring near Shore’s former home in Rancho Mirage, California.

Shore was also the first female member of the famed Hillcrest Country Club in Los Angeles.

In acknowledgment of her contributions to golf, Shore was made an honorary member of the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1994. She also received the 1993 Old Tom Morris Award from the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America, GCSAA’s highest honor.

Dinah’s Death and Legacy

Dinah Shore died February 24, 1994, in Beverly Hills, California, of ovarian cancer five days before her 78th birthday. Her ashes were divided and she has two burial sites. Half were interred in the Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California, and the other half interred at Forest Lawn Cemetery (Cathedral City) near her beloved second home in Palm Springs, California.

Remembering Dinah Shore

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