History
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There are many Lapps
I came across this very old postcard in a lot I purchased a while back. This family is glad to pose on their little hill and with their (reindeer?)
Let’s pause for a moment and have some sympathy for mom.
So I was thinking, what’s up with the hill? Turns out that it’s their house, like this other Lapp family from the same era.
You can’t go there anymore
We were mulling over where to go on vacation this year. I had a crazy idea, we have a box of random postcards (because that’s what packrats do)… My idea was to blindly grab a postcard from the stack, and go there on vacation.
It would be wonderful to go to Mrs. Henderson’s Crown Point Chalet. Alas, this postcard is almost 100 years old. Her health failing, she sold the Chalet in the late 1920’s, and opened a small dining room in Portland. The depression caused that business to fail, and Mrs. Henderson died broke at age 58. This is from the MountHoodHistory.com website. I am assuming that Mrs. Henderson was a widow.
She should have put a picture of one of those home cooked chicken dinners on the back.
Hippie cigar box! Groovy
Apparently some hippie took some newspaper articles and this deceptive invitation, and Mod-podged the hell out of this wooden cigar box.
You have to wonder if some Nixon supporters got all excited to read “You are cordially invited to attend the inauguration of Richard Milhous Nixon…” only to find that it’s just a come-on to round up some college students, pacifists, mothers of draftees, hardcore leftists, recreational protesters, and assorted filthy hippies. I don’t think it was too cordial either.
But what do I know? I was 8. Riding around on my Schwinn with the banana seat, getting my bell-bottoms caught in the chain. (I don’t know what happened to my chain guard)
Pencils down, it’s happy hour
Not sure where I dug this up from, but I am pretty sure my dad worked here or in a very similar situation, when he was a draftsman.
He once told me that for a while, they wouldn’t issue a new pencil unless you brought them your used-up stub, and they would measure it to make sure it was used up enough. Have you guessed Boeing yet?
The guy with the pipe seems to be looking at a vacation snapshot. It’s tough to get back into the groove after a nice vacation. You have to adjust your depth perception so your rut feels like a groove.
Dodge City Scene
There’s a lot going on in this Dodge City postcard. At first I thought the guy in the street outside the cigar store had slipped in some horse poop, but it looks like the Man in the Yellow Hat has given him lead poisoning. Curious George would be appalled by TMITYH’s dark side.
The guy in the yellow shirt at the bottom right, had a WANTED flyer for some dude, and as luck would have it that dude just came up behind him. But the look on his face! Keep your cool man! This old west reenactment show was all very entertaining… Until I saw they hung a guy from a tree on the hill! At the rate people are being shot or hung, pretty soon it will be a ghost town.
The Bricklayer’s Excuse- True story?
Fans of novelty music have all heard “The Bricklayer’s Song”, I have always thought of it as mere clever lyrics, so imagine my surprise when I found it almost verbatim, presented in a 1957 issue of the esteemed Everett, Washington Herald newspaper, and attributed to the Manchester, England Guardian newspaper.
I think this is an urban legend that predated even this old article. Supposedly this was from a bricklayer in Barbados to his contracting firm- but was unsigned. Who writes a letter requesting sick leave? By the time it gets there, you would already be fired. Especially since he didn’t sign it!
How to use a telephone
We were watching an old “telephone manners” instructional video on Youtube, and I mentioned to Teresa the little booklet we got in like second grade when a genial fellow from Ma Bell came out to talk to us… So she goes upstairs and rummages around and guess what she kept…
It had all sorts of useful information in it, here’s an example of how people used to communicate before telephones…
It’s bad enough the messenger had to go on foot, but oh, those sandals… running in flip-flops! I have a hunch that a lot of these messengers slowed to a walk as soon as they got far enough away from the boss.
A nice things about the telephone, is that you can call anyone! Even Jimmy Head! (More on him later)
Not sure about the repairman who can’t figure out his wrench though… and I definitely would not call this cop! He is just dying to try out his new baton, having busted his old one over the skull of some random miscreant.
“Operator, may I have the number for child protective services? What do you mean it hasn’t been invented yet! My dad says he is going to beat the freckles off of me!”
“Sally, are you going to the Freckles Anonymous meeting tonight?…. Gee, that’s swell!”
Here’s Teresa’s personal phone directory. Apparently Lorie H. had an unlisted number. I am guessing that Teresa could call Jimmy Head if she needed to track somebody down. He sounds like the kind of guy who knew where the bones were buried.
Tune the UHF channel for your vicinity
Teresa’s maternal grandparents living in Renton, Washington, in 1957. I would bet that this was taken late on a Saturday afternoon, before some kind of lodge meeting. Note the extra large TV antenna across the street. Pointed towards Seattle for maximum viewing pleasure. We lived in North Seattle when I was young, we could usually pull in the network stations from Seattle OK, but I wanted to watch cartoons on Sunday too, and the only game in town for that was KVOS Bellingham, which our antenna wasn’t optimized to pick up clearly, if that was even possible. So I had to settle for watching that whiny Casper and contend with the extra ghosts generated by poor television reception.
Teresa’s grandfather was an ironworker, I wish I had gotten to know him better. He probably had some stories to tell.