Oakland Underfoot

3717 Greenacre Road

Good ol’ Louie.

4560 Merrill Avenue

With this example I’ve documented three Cragun & Cragun marks from 1947, apparently their latest year. The first and second differ from this one, which has quite a casual appearance even though it also includes the union bug, which you think might encourage a more shipshape practice.

4484 Tulip Avenue

This Douglas & Wolfe mark throws a spanner into my scenario, on which I expounded just yesterday, for the transition in R. G. Wolfe’s career in 1945. Here’s a perfectly standard mark dated 1946. It seems to mean that there were two copies of the stamp. But it might also mean that instead of removing “Douglas” from the stamp itself, Wolfe simply wiped out Douglas’s name from the wet concrete each time he did a job, and for some reason he didn’t do that here. (See my other 1946 Wolfe mark.) Never assume intelligence when you can explain the same thing through the effort to avoid expending energy.

I can say confidently that Wolfe had a new stamp in use by 1947.

4550 Tulip Avenue

Here’s a variant of R. G. Wolfe’s mark during the transitional year after his break with Mr. Douglas. Maybe he was in the process of filing off the brass letters in the stamp when a quick job came in. At a time like that you don’t turn down any work.

4408 Tulip Avenue

Riechel & Bredhoff marks come in two configurations, the tight arch (which this is) and the easy arch. Once I noticed this, I had to collect both varieties from each year.

3698 Madrone Avenue

Mr. Fischer was mysteriously inconsistent in his practice. Maybe as I find more examples, things will make more sense.