My name is John, so I know a thing or two about Dear John letters. One time my wife wrote me a John Deere letter, and ran off with a tractor salesman.

This guy made a serious tactical error, sending a postcard from boot camp to his girl back home, that says “From me to you if you’re not true- A ‘Bronx bird song’ from the boy friend.” the illustrated version of himself on the card, giving the girlfriend a very aggressive Bronx Cheer, such that his face turns red, and she is doused with spittle.

My experience is that the ladies don’t care for even inadvertent spittle, so I imagine that she will find this image and the implied distrust to be very offensive.

So my wife says, “Why did this lady take a tiger to the beach?”

I take the postcard and stare at it. “There’s a tiger in this picture?”

That’s when the trouble started.

Most of the text on the back of this postcard, presumably written from the New Bedford, MA. YMCA in February of 1913, reads;

“Did you think I wasn’t going to write- I had a cold and I thought you might get it if I wrote.”

Not sure if he was joking, or maybe just didn’t understand that his cold germs wouldn’t survive a trip to Dodgeville, MA, a distance of 40 miles. I guess it might have made his mailman sick.

Dodgeville does not appear on Google Maps, but there is a Dodgeville Country Store in Attleboro, which features “Rude and snappy ownership”, according to one reviewer. Personally, I like that better than “Friendly and Sedate ownership”, because I have things to do.

Typically, I will take a postcard and add some wiseacre or snarky comment or caption to make it more “honest”. This one, however, is plain and simple, a plea for the recipient to stop whining, because “dis ain’t no morgue”. I don’t know what you would send to cheer up someone who worked at the morgue.

It should be noted that this postcard was printed a scant few years before a global flu pandemic. At that point the thing to do about someone sniffling, would be to get as far away from them as possible.

I know most people don’t care about my goofy postcard collecting hobby, but it’s a big internet, maybe somebody does. I like the whole “Jackalope” thing that went on in the 30’s, this is a variation on that, cowpokes riding jackrabbits, I guess the mustangs were all in the shop. One thing the sender wrote that I liked;

“Glenn & I will be so fat when we return that you won’t know us. We are being stuffed. I’ll tell you all about it later.”

Yeah, if you manage to escape your jackrabbit overlords.

So many things wrong with this. Everybody is wearing hideous clothing, even for beachwear- And this lady is walking(?) on the sand in HIGH HEELS. How?

I don’t blame her for being upset at the gentleman who mistook her butt for a beach ball. Kind of overkill to turn his eye into an octothorp though.