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.

Book Review: HOW TO READ THE AIR

“All angry men are depressingly the same, and my father was no different.”

The father in Dinaw Mengestu’s second novel, How to Read the Air (Riverhead, 2010), fled from Ethiopia to Sudan, stowed away on a cargo ship to Europe and eventually found his way to Peoria, Illinois. There he was eventually joined by the girl he had married in Addis Ababa but hadn’t seen for three years. Not surprisingly, the two were strangers to one another. The narrator is their son, Jonas Woldemariam, who tells his father and mother’s story along with his own.

The novel opens with Yosef and Mariam. The parents’ story is presented in small segments through the book as a slow-motion time capsule, the essence of their troubled marriage distilled by their son into a single day before he, Jonas, was born, before his father had yet been told of his wife’s pregnancy, a day on which Yosef and Mariam left their Peoria home on what was intended to be a vacation trip to Nashville.

Chapter II opens with a flash-forward:

Six months before I left my wife, Angela, and began retracing my parents’ route through the Midwest, my father passed away in the boardinghouse he had been living in for ten years.

In their respective childhoods, Angela’s father disappeared from her life without explanation, and Jonas sought to escape his father’s violence by making himself invisible, so it is not surprising that this young couple finds marriage difficult. On their first social occasion together, they discover a delight in playful invention and, over time, invent a shared history for themselves, but in the end it is the creative, invented stories Jonas tells her that erode Angela’s trust in him. By constantly retreating from her and from truth, he pushes her away.

Jonas’s most elaborate invention, however, is not one he creates for or with Angela but the one he tells his high school English students. Setting aside course work, he starts in one day and continues for several days, spinning out a fictional history for his father in the same way he had formerly elaborated on the asylum requests of clients in the immigration center where he and Angela met. In this way, the author lets the narrator give his father two pasts, one day of an unhappy and violent marriage, and months of fear and poverty as a displaced person.

Is the single day less invented than the saga? The way I read the book, the imagined detail Jonas gives to the slowly unrolling day in his parents’ life allows him to see his distant mother as an individual, with her own hopes and dreams, fears, disappointments and moments of happiness, while the twists and turns of the saga he invents for his angry father does the same for that parent. The truth is that Jonas received little in the way of concern or affection from either parent and had no siblings or friends to cushion his childhood loneliness. A lonely child, he naturally carries his defenses with him into adulthood.

...I had always suspected that at some point in my life, while still living with my parents and their daily battles, I had gone numb as a tactical strategy, perhaps at exactly that moment when we’re supposed to be waking up to the world and stepping into our own.

All that said, I do not call this (as one reviewer did) a tragic story. True, it lacks a “happy ending,” but the last page is anything but a tragedy, as I read it. The following passage is not the last in the book, nor part of the last chapter (I’ll not spoil the ending for you), but conveys how much Jonas has experienced and learned in his three-year marriage:

There were vast swaths of my life that I knew if I looked at closely I would come to regret, and I was certain that soon enough I was going to find the time to do that. I’d regret and wonder, and then do so again until all known ground was covered. This was certainly part of the cost that had to be paid.

One of the specific things he learned was the importance of seeing:

I had walked for a long time with my eyes half closed. ...[I]f one was really looking, which was what I felt I was finally doing—looking, with neither judgment nor fear at what was around me—then that was enough to say you had truly been there.

To wake up to life, to begin to see—surely these are enormous gains for the fictional narrator, as they would be for any human being.

Among the many new novels dealing with the immigrant experience (there are many good memoirs, too), How to Read the Air stands out for me as a unique fictional treatment of the social and emotional isolation felt by many immigrants and their American-born children. The subtlety of the writing allows the reader’s involvement in the story to build organically and almost imperceptibly until the last surprising page.

Spring Isn’t Here, But It’s On Its Way

This morning’s snow wasn’t what I’d been looking forward to. Did Sarah look a bit less than her usual exuberant self, too, or am I projecting my own dismay onto her? No matter. We got out in the woods for an afternoon romp (when the air had warmed up), I with smaller, lighter gloves on, Sarah with nose a-quiver.

I’ve been thinking about spring in the bookstore and on the blog. The vernal equinox is coming up fast, with spring 2011 officially beginning on Sunday, March 20, at 7:21 p.m. Eastern time. So here’s my first executive decision: the Winter Wednesday Postcard Promenade will only occur twice more this year, on March 9 and 16. After that there will no longer be winter Wednesdays! Winter will end on March 20!

The next thing to decide is the weekly bookstore schedule and hours. I’ll probably add Tuesdays to the days Dog Ears Books is open and extend the bookstore day to 4 p.m. beginning on March 22. Gotta say, though, I've enjoyed my "work" schedule this winter.

As Dog Ears bounds forward in its eighteenth year, the future for bookstores is very much up in the air. (Nothing new there. Booksellers in London back in the time of Dickens were hanging on by their fingernails.) July 4 will mark the 19th anniversary of Dog Ears Books, and in retrospect the time has flown (as is so often the feeling when one looks backward); on the other hand, some days it feels as if change is coming at us faster than we can tread water. What is the future for printed books? I like to think of them as “the luxury item anyone can afford.” If only my way of thinking would catch on: "Bound books on paper! Decadent self-indulgence! Buy them for you!"

Ah, well. Across the Atlantic, a bookseller in Ireland has dared to object to her trade body’s much-vaunted World Book Night, scheduled for this Saturday, a gigantic book give-away, as she says, “further reinforcing the notion that we’re all there to provide a public service and that authors, publishers and booksellers don’t deserve or need to make a living.” The link to her first post on the subject states her objections, the second marshals support from other nay-sayers, and the third offers her own very creative alternative. Even if you’re not in the business, you may find the behind-the-scenes debate an enlightening opportunity to walk in a bookseller’s shoes.

On the other hand, if you're not a bookseller, maybe you'd rather be leafing through a cookbook for inspiration or reading a good novel or dreaming over seed catalogs or plotting out some personal self-improvement program for the season ahead. I've got a few ideas for followup to Mardi Gras but will probably post them on the new blog for Monday. Oh, and don’t forget writing a letter and/or packaging up a book to put in the mail. I felt almost guilty today when this package arrived from my new friend in Australia and I added up the cost of the stamps. Kathy, I don’t deserve it! But I thank you for the books and the map of your neighborhood in New South Wales. It makes the other side of the world seem much closer.

Tell Me I'm Not Crazy

I've started another blog. Am I out of my mind?

Here's my thinking. This blog is mostly about books, bookstore, dog, Northport, Leelanau Township, Leelanau County, travel, economics, philosophy, politics, environment, wildflowers, seasons, cooking, etc., etc. (My second blog, "A Shot in the Light," is nothing but photography.) To say that this blog has a narrow focus sounds ludicrous, but my new one will be completely random. It will be filled with the kinds of minutiae that float through my mind but don't necessarily connect to much of anything else.

The name of the new blog comes from an anecdote I love about the filmmaker Errol Morris, who was, after many years' extended grace, finally dropped from his Ph.D. program in philosophy for "lacking focus." Morris couldn't finish his dissertation, a common story among graduate students. He couldn't stay focused on his dissertation topic because he was interested in everything, and his curiosity pulled him off-task again and again. While I did complete my dissertation and gain the degree, I have sympathy for Morris and feel we have more than a little in common.

I will never forget the day I went to do research at the enormous University of Illinois library, not the only day I went there, but this particular day is memorable because--the towering stacks all around me, shelves crammed with books, seemed to mock my modest ambition. Who knew, after all, which of the books on the shelves contained the answers I sought so earnestly? Wouldn't I have to read them all?

On the current reading front, after a stretch of nonfiction, I’ve picked up a recent novel, How to Read the Air, by Dinaw Mengestu. Two stories unroll, in alternate chapters, the first chapter introducing the narrator’s parents, his young mother newly arrived in Peoria, Illinois, from Addis Ababa to rejoin the husband she has not seen for three years, and the second chapter jumping ahead to the American-born narrator’s adult life in Manhattan. When the narrator discovers he is a born teacher, the author has him reveal the epiphany to us obliquely and yet very simply:

...I had always suspected that at some point in my life, while still living with my parents and their daily battles, I had gone numb as a tactical strategy, perhaps at exactly that moment when we’re supposed to be waking up to the world and stepping into our own.

With my new job at the academy, I began to see myself as part of that active, breathing world which millions of others claimed membership to. When asked how my day was, I had, if I wanted, more than just a one-word response at hand. I had whole stories now that I often wanted to tell, even if I didn’t have the words for them yet.

The author could have had this character say, “I came alive,” but would that have been anywhere near as effective? I found the passage terribly moving. It gives me hope, despite all the trials and difficulties already underway (I have reached only Chapter V, page 59), that the narrator will find his way to a rewarding and fulfilling life. I want that for him. For a while he seemed so abstract and unengaging, but with this passage he staked a claim in my heart.

Winter Wednesday Postcard Promenade #4: Detroit in the Old Days

Today I invite citizens of the Dominion of Canada to cross the Ambassador Bridge, seen here from the Detroit side. We’ll tour the old town as it looked from 1910 to sometime after the invention of postal zip codes, though not in strict chronological order.

First come two views of “the Heart of Detroit,” one seen from a motorist’s view and then from an airplane pilot’s point of view.



An old monochrome postcard (seen below) showing Capitol Square was printed in Germany. When I asked David if he knew this fountain, he said it was a “truant officers’ trap,” someplace he would never go when he was playing hookey. He stayed away from the toy department in Hudson’s, too. The Oriental rug department, on the other hand, was perfectly safe.


Next, look at these old automobiles in front of the Detroiter Hotel. Calling them mere “cars” seems sacrilege.


We’ve backtracked from the automobile era for this view of the Ponchartrain Hotel and Hammond Building, judging from the horse-drawn vehicles and trolley cars. But wait—how can those be trolley cars without tracks of wires?


Now another fountain, in bright color, identified as the Edison Memorial Fountain at Grand Circus Park, Detroit.


So many tall buildings! Where is Superman?


Two more cards show the beautiful Ponchartrain Hotel. On one of them, a young woman writing to her uncle in Cleveland scrawled in the margin of the picture “Our new hotel.” David tells me that their restaurant, the Ponchartrain Wine Cellars, was “the height of everything.”



I like this image of the Pantlind—oops! Grand Rapids! Sorry! Wrong city! Never mind....


Back to Detroit, I was happy to find a postcard showing the monkey island at the zoo, a view which looks as if it was taken from the island.


Besides the zoo, other notable Detroit landmarks include Woodmere Cemetery,


the Detroit Institute of Arts,


and Children’s Hospital. The hospital postcard is written in what I’m guessing is Dutch and is addressed to a sister of the writer in Minneapolis.



Finally, how could we time-travel to 20th-century Detroit without a visit to Belle Isle? The bridge, the casino, the boat club—that last looking like something from Venice, Italy--





Canoeing the various canals—


Diving into the cool light of the aquarium--


A glossy image of the bus terminal and Post House Cafeteria comes from later in the century.


Finally, from the postal zip code era, we’ll close this week’s promenade with a night skyline view.