A long time ago, I started collecting postcards. My primary reason for this was trying to capture some stray pieces of my youth: specifically our family vacations in Asbury Park and Atlantic City, both in New Jersey. Asbury Park fell apart in the late 60s, and has never recovered, despite the efforts of people like Bruce Springsteen. And Atlantic City had begun a long slide into oblivion as a resort vacation spot in the late 50s. Casino gambling didn't save it. It ruined it.
One day, back in the mid-80s, I was visiting South Hills Village, a mall in Pittsburgh, and they were having a mall-wide antiques show. In the side entrance I normally went in (like all mall side entrances an area with a lot of space leading to the main drag) was a postcard dealer. I spent hours going through all his boxes and I was hooked. I found so many cool old images, some from Atlantic City and Asbury Park, but what I really discovered was the wonderful world of linen postcards. Linen refers to the finish, kind of a canvasy look on the front. The images themselves are almost surreal. They're photos hand-colored in strange tones that posterize them. A weird malady sometimes effects you after you look through too many postcards in one day: when you walk outside EVERYTHING looks like a postcard. The blue skies are bluer than blue. The clouds all airbrushed, buildings, cars and people more colorful. Luckily--or sadly, depending on your point of view--it fades.
Over the years, and through the saving (albeit mercenary) grace of eBay, I sold off a lot of my collection. I think I had more than 400 or so at one time. I saved some of the ones I loved the most, and I'm reproducing 3 of them here, at almost full-size (eatin' up that bandwith, just to give you, dear reader, the complete Innocent Bystander experience), to show you how colorful and beautiful these things could be, how they transformed the mundane into the magnificent. They're mini works of art: brilliant, vibrant picturizations on 3x5" cards. Along the collecting way, I discovered I loved roadside Americana topics: diners, restaurants, hotels and motels.
Postcards are a lot like comics. They tell a simple direct story in a panel. "I was here," they cry out. They validate and memorialize someone's experiences. Senders felt compelled to mark their room (thus marking their territory) on hotel cards. The messages on the back are snapshots of people's lives, and it's particulary great to find someone's personal collection, an archive of their own history: their personal trips, the vacations of their friends and loved ones, their train trip across the country with postcards sent home, as they went to board a troop ship in San Diego to be shipped out to the war in the Pacific. Did they come home? Was this a packet of cards from someone's estate sale, all addressed to the same person, something kept to remember someone--a son, a husband, a father--who died in World War II?
They're not all that gloomy in their reading. A lot of the cards I have are blanks, grabbed by people as a commemorative object of some vacation or memorable dining experience. This WR Restaurant card, postmarked March 13, 1945, and mailed from Chicago to Sacramento, reads:
"Dear Jakie,
The food here is swell. I have four other cards I'v (sic) not had a chance to mail. I am not a Brat. I'm a good girl.
Love,
The Brat"
What's all that about? I don't know, but it means something to someone, or did, because sadly, that person is probably gone now.
Most importantly, postcards are disposable pieces of history, documents of where this country was at a particular and specific point in time. A lot of these places, like the senders and recipients, no longer exist. In some cases, like my quest for Asbury Park and Atlantic City images, these are the ONLY photos that still exist. It's not purely American; postcards are, of course, prevalent worldwide. But the images on all the cards I collected are pure Americana, postcards from an edge of time that no longer exist.
And you know...I think I just talked myself into collecting them again.
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