Winter Wednesday Postcard Promenade #5: Bits of History and a Challenge

It was hard to decide where to go today for the winter’s last postcard promenade, so many possibilities presenting themselves, and in the end, I went for history rather than geography. That is, rather than going to some top Michigan destination like Mackinac Island, today--not counting the greetings from my birthplace above, home of the team responsible for my mother’s love of baseball, the Aberdeen Pheasants--we’ll be looking at features of the cards other than what they illustrate. Most are in black and white or, in the case of the example below, sepia and white.



This card intrigued the bookseller in me. I had no idea that publishers’ publicity departments were advertising new titles with postcards back in one-cent stamp days, but here’s the evidence. The book, “with frontispiece in full colors” [sic] is available for only $1.50 net. You can put a stamp on the card and mail it for a penny to place your order or send the card in an envelope (for a little more postage) with your remittance. I wonder how many copies of The First Hundred Thousand were sold this way.

Look carefully at the next pair of black-and-white postcards. Can you tell which one is the real photo postcard (RPP), Moose River or Veteran’s [sic] Monuments? (I presume more than one veteran is being honored here.)




Moose River is the RPP. Your clue is the graininess in the closeup. I’ll post a better image of the monument here especially for Gerry, though, because I know how she is about veterans.


Here are some more soldiers, all lined up at Fort Sheridan, Illinois (going by the postmark).


“Dear Sis,” the writer has scrawled in pencil, “A picture of me, I marked it to be sure you could find me. Love Jim.” This card was postmarked (October 22, 1945) but mailed without a stamp, with the word “free” written over the “Place Stamp Here” box, a privilege of the military. I’ll show a closeup so you can see Jim a little better.


Doesn't he have a nice smile? His sister lived on Barlow Street in Traverse City.

I love this RPP from the Pioneer Village at Salem, Massachusetts, showing “Dug Outs, Saw Pit, and English Wigwams.” (English wigwams?) The bottom corner of the card is the second clue that this is an authentic RPP. Then on the back are the words “ACTUAL PHOTOGRAPH.”




Can you tell the difference between the next two? Look closely.



The sepia-tone view of the Virginia gorge is the RPP, printed on Kodak paper, as the back of the card indicates, while the Nova Scotia lighthouse with sailboat (Amy-Lynn! A card from Nova Scotia!) is printed from a photograph but is not itself an actual photograph.

A certain Miss Litchfield received many postcards from friends. One from Nova Scotia bears a 2-cent Canadian stamp and reads, “Hi Doris, I bet you were surprised to find me gone. Well here I am up in Parrsboro. I still have about two hundred and twenty-five miles to go. Glenda.”


Another friend mails Miss Litchfield a card in 1942 with a one-cent stamp showing the Statue of Liberty with the words “INDUSTRY AGRICULTURE FOR DEFENSE.” The writer was enjoying a vacation from serious matters, however: “Here I am enjoying fresh air, ocean bathing and lobster my favorite sea food. This afternoon I took a sun bath and now I am burning up!”

Maine has always been a popular vacation destination. Many of the postcards from Maine almost look like places in Michigan. Here’s a colorful one:



I find the back of this card interesting, too. Like the one from the publisher, this one has an advertising message. “GOOD FISHING” is to be had in Maine, and back in the days of penny postcards you could rent a family kitchenette on Lake Maranacook for only $20 a week from Mr. Charles Brown.

Now here’s the POSTCARD CHALLENGE. Of the three cards below, all RPPs, can you tell which one was developed on Devolite Peerless rather than Kodak Paper? Be the first with the right answer, and you win the card.




How’s that letter-writing commitment going, by the way? Does it seem like a long way to Memorial Day? If you’re having a particularly busy week, it wouldn’t be cheating to send a couple of postcards in place of a single letter. The cost of postcard stamps has risen over the years, but it’s still a bargain. The current polar bear stamps make me think of Grand Marais, Michigan. Go, Polar Bears!


And now, let’s hear it for the fast-approaching vernal equinox and the end of winter! Birds were singing in our farmyard at dawn. That's a sure sign.

Summer’s-End Wanderlust

The goldenrod is blooming and the first bright yellow popple leaves shivering in the wind. Sun and grey clouds alternate, and fall is in the air. My associations with this season are all positive, no longer the excitement of going back to school but now the just-as-welcome (after a busy summer) relief of a little slow-down in activity and maybe a little getaway before too many more weeks have passed. At summer’s end I feel the allure of the open road, the call of the Upper Peninsula, and the temptation of untried two-tracks. No reservations, no set destination. That’s the direction—or rather, lack of direction--my reading takes, also.

Titles in my “Books Read” lists appear in reverse chronological order, blog post style, according to when I finished the books, the one at the top being the last one finished. That apparently rigid order can be misleading, however, in that I’m often reading more than one book at a time, sometimes going back and forth between two books, other times jumping among as many as five. Books I’ve started are spotted around in different rooms of the house, in cars, in tote bags and/or on the bookstore counter. Some are new, and some are very old. There is fiction and nonfiction, and there are popular titles along with the obscure. My only rule is that a book can’t go on the list until I’ve reached the last page.

Every now and then I make a “discovery,” and one of this summer’s discoveries of a 20th-century author new to me has been Ruth Moore. I’d never heard of her but acquired several titles for the store and finally, out of curiosity, began reading one. Moore never named the state that provided her novel’s setting, but the place, a rocky, offshore Atlantic coast island, was described in vivid detail.

The island was all granite, its peak a round hill a hundred feet high and naked as a cup. What grew there, grew where the land leveled out at the base of the hill, a wild tangle of northern coastal forest, on roots driven into the crevices of rock. Through centuries, it had made topsoil, deep enough on the island’s western end to grow a little grass, and on that side, too, a half-mile back from the shore, just before the hill started to climb, was a small, deep pond in an alder swamp of almost tropical lushness.

Reading the description of the island, I couldn’t wait to go there and spent days ducking in and out of that faraway world. Finally, after reaching the end of the novel (which seemed abrupt, despite the length of the story), I did a little investigation into the author, and that made fascinating reading, too. The most thorough story of Moore’s life is an essay called “Homesick for That Place: Ruth Moore Writes About Maine,” by Jennifer Craig Pixley. You can read Pixley’s essay in its entirety here. Her title takes its name from the epigram prefacing Moore’s first novel, The Weir: “That was the place you were homesick for, even when you were there," which in turn reminds me of the French phrase “nostalgia for the present.” We feel that when the moment is so full that we can’t help realizing it is slipping away while we are in it, never to return again.

Moore grew up on Gott’s Island, and Pixley says that the Maine coast was the only place the author ever loved, “the only place for which she was ever homesick.” Not being able to make a permanent life on the island was her sorrow, and yet as Pixley reflects on Moore’s “unconventional attitudes” and “liberal ideas,” she can’t help wondering “what it's like to be homesick for a place in which you have no place, or in which you don't want the place you have.” This, it seems to me, is the situation of Miss Greenwood, one of the characters in Speak to the Winds. Like Ruth Moore, Miss Greenwood has never married. Also like Moore, she has made a close study of the natural world: In one passage of the novel, Miss Greenwood finds her way home in a storm by recognizing the patterns of specific patches of lichens on the rocks. But--

Miss Greenwood wasn’t anybody you could think of loving, being fond of, like other people. Such a thing would never enter your head. She was here, had been here since Joyce could remember—a part of the things at the island; a wonder for living where she did in this lonesome place; a nuisance to the grownups who had to check up every so often, see she was all right; somebody to show off poking fun at, because she looked strange and different from other people. There were the Parties, of course, everybody loved them. But Miss Greenwood herself—

You couldn’t talk to her, like to the people you knew. Oh, if you met her on the Point road, or maybe dropped by at the house....

But to talk to her—it was exactly as if Miss Greenwood had a phonograph record she played with her voice.... It wasn’t very interesting....

There are parts of island life, whether in the novel I read or in Pixley’s biographical essay, that remind me very much of little Northport and other villages in Leelanau County. Once self-sufficient—the fictional Maine island through mining of granite, our own area with fishing and agriculture—summer cottages now ring the coast, while the year-round population has shrunk. Old families now make ends meet by working for summer people.

Elbridge didn’t see how any economy could possibly be healthy, or ever return to prosperity, in a place where two-thirds of the taxable property was owned by people who didn’t use it for nine months out of the year. At the same time, he didn’t see what else could be done. Without the fat taxes the summer people paid, and without the jobs they offered in the summer, the island would be done for.

It’s fiction, set back in time and far from home, and yet it hits close to home, too. Do all roads lead home again?