My dopey sister-like substance Leslie’s kids are all grown up. Her oldest is still effortlessly and movie star gorgeous. Yet, technically, she becomes a senior citizen next month. Returning for visits, “Do-Les” used to take them on tours, proudly showing where this sock hop was held or where this soda fountain used to be. Bunch of bona fide wise guys, her kids would sarcastically chirp from the minivan cheap seats — “Hey, Mom! Show us where the dirt used to be!!” Like so many from Old Newhall, they moved out of town eons ago, scattering to countless points on the map.
I’m more than a little into history. I love reminiscing where the dirt used to be. It hit me the other day. I miss postcards.
They still make them. Back when, every drug store and coffee shop sold them. Today, many of the modern ones are garish fakes. With severe angles and sunsets, postcards paint a modern picture that’s supposed to make us believe an imprisoned rhododendron in a tame HOA flowerbed is some work of art. Perhaps it can be.
Postcards have been around nearly 250 years, same as America. In France, in 1777, a printer created a sheet of thick, illustrated cardboard greeting cards. The concept didn’t really take off. People didn’t like the idea of servants being able to read messages addressed to you personally. They also unintentionally sent a message to brigands that you were out of town for a few months.
The famous and collectible Penny Black postcard recently sold for $50,000. Talk about an investment. Originally? The Penny Black was actual truth in advertising because it cost just a penny to mail it then. Now? It’s 65 cents. That rare first Penny Black still has the very first postage stamp on a card on it. It was created May 1, 1840, in England. There are many old postcards, collectible and costing tens of thousands. I was surprised to learn that an original card, honoring the launch of the ill-fated Titanic, is only worth $300. Yet, another card, featuring Mahatma Gandhi and signed by him, fetched $8,000 at auction. Can you imagine? Leaving some object de arte out on a coffee table, then someone mistakes it for a coaster and sets a wet glass of iced tea on it?
The finances surrounding postcard art is fascinating. An artist makes about 90 cents on the dollar for their work. A regular postcard runs $2-$5 today. You sell 500 postcards — well. Do the math. Of course, there’s a lot of bootlegging going on, from Xeroxing a Frederick Remington Wild West painting to photocopying the image of thousands of actors and famous people. Postcarding is a cultural phenomenon that’s slowly dying out. Dratted cellphones. People snap selfies, then text them to friends or family, or post them on social media. In 2022, about 400 million postcards were mailed in the United States. That’s down from about a billion just a decade earlier. There’s another sorry example of a civilization in decay. People are too lazy to hand-write anything, let alone take the time to look up someone’s snail mail address. To be fair — why spend $5.65 when you can text for free?
There was an inherent pride in postcard art. It was as if every nook and cranny of America were boasting: “Here’s where we grew the world’s largest apricot or Paul Bunyan and his blue ox slept here. Ain’t we something?”
I especially loved the old 4-by-6 cards with the fat, cartoon-round lettering, letting you know there’s a sea breeze wafting over the Santa Monica pier, and, by the way, it’s so tranquil and romantic at sunset. Or, in this spreading of regional mythology, that there are actual creatures called jack-a-lopes, half-rabbit, half-horned antelope, bouncing across the country’s Great Plains. Today? Those are called, “memes.” It didn’t matter if the artwork was the moody Golden Gate Bridge or Statue of Liberty. It could be an endless stretch of desert or a redwood tree one could drive a car right through. These little, hand-held billboards announced a certain magic and wonder about our country. They bore a sense of pride, that we, actually had visited these spots on the map, that they now somehow belonged to us.
They sell postcards on Hollywood and Vine, misusing the word, “legends” to describe a perverted and tormented James Dean or self-destructive sex toy like Marilyn Monroe. Notwithstanding the Canyon Theatre Guild, actors strike me as such lesser gods. Yet, decades after the fact, millions still worship deeply flawed thespians.
Rarely are deep thinkers attractive to us. Kind educators? Men and women who dedicated their lives to making the world or their corner of it a better place? No. Hock, spit, ptooey. Actors.
Postcards also worshipped tragedy. We seem to want pictures of things gone blooey — train wrecks, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods. Here in Santa Clarita, almost exactly a century ago, we were home to the great St. Francis Dam Disaster where some 500 souls lost their lives in the cold, muddy waters of an inland and mad-made wave. A scant few days after the 200-foot wall of water in Saugus rumbled down San Francisquito Canyon, the Newhall Pharmacy was hawking disaster postcards. “Get ‘Em While They’re Hot!” fawned an ad in this very newspaper. We were still digging out soggy bodies while business was making a ghoulish buck.
Still. In communities all around America, more often, we celebrated our beauty and quirkiness.
I wonder if anyone living in a condo has pride in their home. There’s probably a wide-screen TV and smart phone charger in every unit, a bean bag chair in the living room, a kitty litter box by the miniature washer-&-dryer. In 21st century America, it’s hard to be excited over the sentiment, that we’re the same as every place else, that nothing special happened here …
Pick up “Naked Came the Novelist,” John Boston’s sequel to the international bestseller, “Naked Came the Sasquatch,” at JohnBoston-Books.com. A lifelong SCV resident with 119 major writing awards and nearly 12,000 columns, Boston is Earth history’s most prolific humorist and satirist.
