Love, Love, Love

The Friday following Valentine’s Day is finding me uninspired. Not cranky or gloomy, just short on ideas. And that, for me, is the signal to go to pictures, so what you see here is an old bulletin board that filled up over the course of a few years on Nagonaba and Waukazoo Streets, accompanying me on my move from the former (back) to the latter. I don’t have a good place to display it these days, but digging it out of storage and revisiting for a few days the postcards, photographs, and assorted odds and ends brought back many happy memories.

If you look carefully, you’ll see Nikki, our old dog, relaxing at a sidewalk cafe in Appalachicola, Florida. And there is Martin Melkild, showing some of his carved figures. There are Monopoly cards, and there are postcards showing many fascinating places I’ve never visited (the cards were from friends or correspondents I’ve never met), and there are old family snapshots.

There are friends and family members who are no longer among us, and there are babies and little children, some of them bookstore visitors, now grown up. There’s a lot of dog stuff, too—cards, photos, cartoons. (Why would that be?)

Sweet!

Valentine’s Day was quiet but nice. David got me a decorated cupcake! I talked to my mother on the phone, and a nice new customer visited the bookstore. (I must say, there is nothing like a warm human voice.) In the evening, we watched the first two episodes of the latest “Downton Abbey” on DVD, snug as bugs, while winter raged outside.

How did Sarah take it all? As always, in her stride. She really isn't sulking here, only waiting for her folks to get their act together and head for the door. 

Giving a LOOK!

Ask Me About the West Michigan Pike

We’ve got a lot of fall color left here Up North and a sunny Saturday forecast for tomorrow. It’s amazing there are leaves left on the trees at all, after several days of high winds, but leaves there are—red, yellow, brown, toast- and plum-colored and, yes, even green still--telling us that fall is not over by a long shot.

Speaking of shots, my leading photo image above was taken on one of my favorite back roads near home. Life in the slow lane is my chosen life, but what if all roads up from Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and downstate Michigan were nothing but “serpentine sand trails through barren wilderness, rutted dirt pathways and thin gravel-covered roads”? Try to imagine that, and then imagine the improvement in travel meant by the advent of a good gravel road from Chicago to the Straits!

A new book by M. Chrstine Byron and Thomas R. Wilson is a kind of scrapbook of those early days along Lake Michigan’s eastern shore, back when vacationing in a car was a new thing. The new way of travel was called motor touring, and it began before the advent of numbered highways or even what we think of as highways at all, so when the good road was built between Chicago and the Straits of Mackinac (there would be no bridge for several more decades), motorists had cause for celebration. Ernest Hemingway wrote from Horton Bay to his pals back in Evanston that they could expect to make the trip on the new good road in “less than three days”!

The new road, born without a number, had something better. It had a name. It was called the West Michigan Pike. Ask a dozen people if they know anything about the West Michigan Pike. Fewer people remember this name than know of the Old Dixie Highway, of which the West Michigan Pike became the northernmost stretch. (The section of the West Michigan Pike through Illinois is the road I grew up knowing as the Lincoln Highway.)

Imagine what an adventure it would have been to start out from Chicago and drive north along the shore of Lake Michigan in 1922! How many times would the driver expect to stop for a flat tire, do you suppose? In those days that meant taking the tire off the rim, patching it and remounting it, but the new road was probably easier on tires than the old rocky, sandy trails had been, and gas stations and repair garages quickly sprang up along its length. The subtitle, after all, of Vintage Views Along the West Michigan Pike, M. Christine Byron and Thomas R Wilson (a.k.a. Christine and Tom) is From Sand Trails to U.S. 31. Big difference!

The book shows familiar Lake Michigan resort towns in earlier days when Northport, I note, touted itself as “the niftiest town on the pike” and the “Friendly Town on the northeast tip.” A friend of mine from Spring Lake found one of the old concrete mileposts in a farmer’s field. All the illustrations from this Vintage Views book (one of Byron and Wilson’s earlier books was Vintage Views of Leelanau County) are taken from period postcards, travel posters and advertising circulars, each page inviting close scrutiny and lingering enjoyment. The vision behind the West Michigan Pike Association, all but forgotten, is made vivid and fascinating by Byron and Wilson’s newest work.

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.

Winter Wednesday Postcard Promenade #4: Through the Middle of the Mitten

Today’s lead image of Magician Lake, Dowagiac, is called a “real photo postcard.” Real photo postcards (RPPs) are distinct from postcards printed from photos, and that difference is important to collectors. The image quality of the real photos, images taken by amateur photographers with inexpensive postcard format cameras beginning in 1907, is wonderfully sharp and clear.

Michigan has over 3,000 miles of shoreline, what with three of the five Great Lakes almost surrounding its two peninsulas, but there are also more than 11,000 inland lakes, as well as inland towns, cities, rivers and farms. Beginning down in the lower-left corner of the map with Dowagiac (you go through that town if you take the train from Kalamazoo to Chicago) and strolling a zig-zag path north and east brings us next to one of my favorite little southwest Michigan towns, Paw Paw,


“Where the waters meet” in Paw Paw Lake. “Fine time, fine place,” reports Helen, using a penny stamp to mail the card to St. Paul, Minnesota, on August 3, 1908. This hand-colored card was produced in Germany.




Just above is the post office Sturgis (we’ve zig-zagged back southeast from Van Buren County to dip into St. Joseph County), shown on a postcard copyrighted 1959 by the L. L. Cook Company in Milwaukee, the image reproduced from a natural color transparency. Notice how we’ve gone from a black and white postcard camera image to a hand-colored to color photography with these first three cards? And do you notice the difference between the soft tints of the early German card and the hard, bold colors of the later "chrome" image?


I’ve posted the Kalamazoo Courthouse before but hadn’t photographed it well, and David and I were married in this building, too, so I'm very fond of this image. Someone addressed this card to an acquaintance in Battle Creek but never wrote a message or affixed a stamp. A good intention gone astray! This is another German-made card, with a note on the corner where the stamp was to have gone reading

Place the Stamp here
One Cent for
United States, and
Island Possessions,
Cuba, Canada and
Mexico.
Two Cents
For Foreign

So Canada, Cuba and Mexico were not considered “foreign” when it came to sending penny postcards? Interesting.

Later in Kalamazoo’s history came the country’s first pedestrian mall.


It was great while it lasted. So were the dime stores. All gone now.

Moving east and slightly north brings us to Battle Creek and Lake Goguac. “Camping alongside this lake so you can easily imagine the rest. Many thanks for your nice long letter....” The ink is quite faded on this card that went from Battle Creek to Minneapolis for a penny in 1909.



Lansing, our state capital, is really the middle of the mitt, at least measuring from west to east. Pretty far south from Up North, but let’s not get political today.


This old card of Sparrow Hospital in Lansing looks nothing like the hospital today. I lived in various apartments in the Sparrow neighborhood during my first few years as a Michigan resident.

How about this C. T. Art-Colortone night view of downtown Lansing? Theatre to the left, theatre to the right! Bright lights and traffic!



The Penrod Studio in Berrien Center produced a more modern daytime downtown scene about 30 years later.

Curwood Castle in Owosso, Michigan (east of Lansing), the lavish home of James Oliver Curwood,


is important to Michigan booksellers and readers of old-time Up North adventure tales. The author built this eye-popping palace in a little Midwestern town and then complained of the crowds that came by to gawk.

Time to go back west and visit Grand Rapids, starting with a look up Monroe Avenue.



Anyone know the name of that theatre on the right? I see “S” and then what could be a “T” following. Can this be yet another State Theatre? And do you notice the texture on the "linen" card?

The peaceful fountain at John Ball Park is featured on a card mailed to Minneapolis in 1908,


while another fountain, this one at the Soldiers Homein Grand Rapids, was mailed to St. Paul with not a single word of message. It was the thought that counted, apparently.


From G.R. we pick up M-37, my favorite road north, and promenade to White Cloud,


“where the North begins and pure waters flow.” I imagine all the vacationers reading that sign over the years, all of them feeling the tension leave their shoulders as they realized they were now Up North for real.

Next comes Newago, and I wish I had a card of downtown, but these fishermen and spectators in salmon season are something different.


The Hardy Dam on the Muskegon River creates another inland lake. Or would you call it an impoundment?


Moving indoors, a black and white postcard camera shot captures rustic furniture in Baldwin at the Shrine of the Pines.



Scenic Lake Idlewild was the Michigan destination of choice for black vacationers between 1912 and 1964.


You can read the story of the resort in a book called The Idlewild Community: Black Eden, by Lewis Walker and Ben C. Wilson and in this article in Traverse City’s Northern Express.


Cadillac Printing Co. in Cadillac printed this scene of its own downtown back in penny-postcard days, and Cadillac is where we stop for this week. Come back next Wednesday for this winter's last Postcard Promenade.