Easter mystery postcard

This badly damaged Easter postcard, with its image of children and chickens worshipping a child-sized pink egg, is quite the mystery. Would be very happy to get some feedback and insight, starting with the language and translation of the text at the top of the card (see closeup below). After some internet searching, my very tentative guess is that this is Kurrent, an old form of Germany handwriting based on medieval cursive, according to Wikipedia. It's also known as Kurrentschrift or deutsche Schrift. It was phased out in schools and eventually became obsolete starting in the 1910s. Am I way off? What do you think?

The back of the postcard adds to the mystery and I have little insight beyond some more guesses. One guess on my part is that the 9 4 13 in the postmark signifies April 9, 1913. That's a good bit after Easter, though, which I believe was March 23 in 1913. Meanwhile, the word ВЕНДЕНЪ appears in the first postmark. Again with some internet help, I'm going to guess this is (1) a place name, (2) pre-revolutionary Russian, written in Cyrillic script. Clearly different from the printed script on the front of the card. And what place is ВЕНДЕНЪ? That may translate to Wenden, of which there were several in Germany. There's also Cēsis, Latvia, for which the German name is Wenden. The second postmark contains the word ЛИГАТЪ, but I can't glean much insight from that. 

Please share your thoughts and clues regarding this fascinating very old postcard! 

Guerre

Whenever I fall into a rut of not posting, whether it's due to busyness, stress, depression, despair at world events or some combination of the above, I typically look through postcards to find something that can spark me to break the streak. In this instance, I already knew which postcard I wanted, but I had to go through the entire shoebox to find it. 

I used to have about a half-dozen of these postcards labeled "Guerre 1914-1918." I no longer remember how I acquired them. And this might be the only one I still have, unless the others are elsewhere. Over the years, I've thought often about posting one of them, but there never ended up being a match between the motivation and the moment. 

Now seems like a grimly appropriate global moment.

The photograph for this Great War postcard was taken by Marcel Delboy and was #48 in a series. According to the website undivided-back postcards, Jacques Marcel Delboy (1882-1941) was based in Bordeaux, France: "Delboy published his work as black & white collotype postcards and souvenir booklets. Some of his cards were hand-coloured. He later used Delboy and Yobled (Delboy in reverse) logos."

This postcard features the Great War devastation in Fismes, a commune in northern France. The caption is in both French and English, with the English version stating "Esplanade street after the bombardment of the Germans." 

This photo is likely associated with the monthlong Battle of Fismes and Fismette (Fismette being a hamlet linked to Fismes by bridge), which took up most of August 1918. More than 2,000 Americans were killed and nearly 14,000 wounded during the month of fighting. There are no historical figures for French or German casualties. The horror created a lasting bond between Fisme and Pennsylvania (particularly Meadville), where many of the soldiers had been from.

Hervey Allen (1889-1949), a National Guard soldier from Pittsburgh who survived the gassing, fires, shrapnel and shell shock of the Battle of Fismes and Fismette, wrote this in his memoir, Toward the Flame:

"It took me about half an hour to crawl to the river. I had to put my mask on at the last, as the mustard gas was strong in the little hollow in which I lay. My hands were smarting. Some of the shells brought my heart into my mouth; lying there waiting for them was intolerable. I was sure I was going to be blown to pieces. The river was very nearly in flood and so there was no bank, the field gradually getting soggy and swampy till it sloped out into the water. There was a lot of submerged barbed wire that made going ahead very painful and slow. I had, of course, to throw away my mask as it got full of water. My pistol went also. It was too heavy to risk.

"Once in the water, I worked under the single board of the footbridge, shifting along hand over hand, which took me halfway across. There I struck out, plunging in a few strokes to the other side and working through the wire. Swimming with shoes was not so difficult as I had thought, but the cold water seemed to take all my courage, which was what I needed more than ever. Our own machine guns were playing along the railroad track on our side of the river. After getting across, it seemed for a while that I would be caught between the two fires.

"I lay there in the river for a minute and gave up. When you do that something dies inside."

Ingredients list found in the parking lot of a Circle K in Florence

This small piece of paper was on the ground of the parking lot at a Circle K in Florence this morning. I am, of course, that guy who would pick it up and take it with me, even though it's been trod upon and could potentially be covered in mysterious bacteria from outer space that turns everything into triffids. But an ephemeraologist must take these risks.

Here's a transcript of what's on the paper:

Ingedients [sic] list

Hot Honey

Unbleached Bread flour, Purified Water, Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Kosher Salt, Active Dry Yeast, Roma Tomatos, Onion, Garlic, Roasted Fresno Chiles, Pasteurized Milk, Vinegar, Citric Acid, enzymes, Pork, Honey, Basil

So, what does all of this make? How does the pork fit in? Why are no quantities listed? And it's Hot Honey — what? Is this a from-scratch pizza? A stromboli? I really need some culinary experts to provide insight in the comments section. 

Also, I hope the person dropped this after the trip to the grocery store.

Related posts

• Grocery list left behind on shelf at the supermarket
• Ephemera seen on Weis parking lot at 8:32 p.m. on 12/11/18
• Painted rock in parking lot of Fry's grocery store in San Tan Valley
• In which my wife comes up with a new category of ephemera

Saturday's postcard from Tokyo

Something cheerful for a grim state-of-the-world Saturday: This lovely postcard arrived this week from a fellow Postcrosser in Tokyo, Japan. I love that cat peeking in the doorway. The whole image reminds me of Fruits Basket, for some reason. On the back of the wonderfully decorated card (see below) she writes:

Hello, Chris, my name is Miki and I live in Tokyo. I want to be a journalist in the future, so I'm studying hard. The postcard's picture is Japanese traditional fall event. In Japanese countryside, people make dried persimmons. If you have a chance to visit Japan, I think autumn is the best season. I hope you are having a good day!

Here are some links for more on Hoshigaki (Japanese dried persimmons):

• Persimmons: A Sweet Autumn Tradition in Japan
• Hoshigaki: A Beautiful Fall Tradition
• Why I’m Hand-Massaging Persimmons Every Day (& Loving It)
• The History of Japan’s Autumn Harvest Festivals

Ghoulardi's kid

Speaking of TV horror hosts (as we were last week with Zacherley), Ghoulardi: Inside Cleveland TV's Wildest Ride, is a wonderful book about Ernie Anderson's antics as late-night host Ghoulardi on  Cleveland's Channel 8 (WJW) from 1963 to 1966. He is one of the most widely and fondly remembered of the regional horror hosts. And one of the most influential.

As Tom Feran and R.D. Heldenfels wrote in this 1997 book, WJW and Anderson "created an icon of popular culture whose legacy, decades later, would defy the disposable standards of modern media. Television was growing, still rough around the edges, into the common thread of community consciousness. Ghoulardi would first conquer it, amassing an audience of a size unimaginable today; and then transcend it, surviving in memories, attitudes, and language of a generation who would carry him to even wider attention."

It's a terrific book and one I highly recommend. And it comes with a fun coda. This passage appears on the final two pages of the book:

"Ernie's son Paul, an up-and-coming movie director, is stirring up trouble as eagerly as his father did. Paul's first movie, Hard Eight, came and went, but his second feature, Boogie Nights, was causing comment months before it was released. A look at the people working in and around the pornographic movie business in the '70s, the movie was the subject of eyebrow-raising stories about its subject, its male frontal nudity, and its two-and-a half-to-three-hour length. ... Through the efforts of the twenty-six-year-old auteur, it also boasted a cast of solid players like Don Cheadle, Julianne Moore, and William H. Macy. 'The worst thing you can do is be wishy-washy,' Paul said of moviemaking. His old man seems to have lived his whole life by the code, and Paul acknowledged 'I definitely inherited that trait.' As Boogie Nights sat on the verge of national release, Paul said he was next considering making a film about his dad — one that would focus especially on his years as Ghoulardi. He already had paid tribute to his father by naming his production firm The Ghoulardi Film Company."

Indeed, filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson is the son of Ghoulardi — Ernie Anderson.

Anderson hasn't made a movie specifically about Ghoulardi yet, but his most recent film, One Battle After Another, is up for 13 Oscars this coming weekend. To which Ghoulardi might exclaim, “Stay sick, knif!”

Feral cats, March 2026

Put it in the Louvre. That's Mamacita on the right. In the center is her older son Creamsicle 

and on the left is her younger son Splash. 

Cats are a primary reason I don't write 10 blog posts a week. In addition to taking care of the indoor cats, we have "regulars" in the neighborhood feral community who get from us the food and water they need to subsist in the harsh desert climate. (I realize that I repeat myself when it comes to these cat posts, but c'est la vie.)

Here's the current March 2026 rundown on the feral/community kitties:

1. The matriarch is Mamacita and we've known her for more than four years, since she was a kitten. There a great picture of her at the bottom of this May 2025 post. 

2. She's often seen with her older son Creamsicle, who is the cat we see most often. He hangs around in the mornings, sits in the firepit when he's trying to be sneaky and catch a bird and looks for shade on hot afternoons. 

3. Splash is a black-and-white tuxedo cat and is Creamsicle's younger brother. The two brothers often come for breakfast together in the mornings. Splash, as I'm sure I've noted before, got his name because, when he was a kitten, he fell into the pool and did tiny paddles all the way to safety before I could even get into the water to save him, which I would have.

4. Blue-eyed Gumball has been coming around for almost two years. I think he was an abandoned or lost pet. He often spends the entire day sleeping in a chair underneath the patio roof. Temptations are his favorite food, and I usually have to distract him with Temptations and a stern look when I'm feeding other cats, because he likes to chase them.

5. Meowmix starting visiting around the same time as Gumball, and the two of them get along relatively well together, especially given that they're both tomcats, so I wonder sometimes if they were essentially abandoned together. Meowmix is much more mellow and always runs off after he's finished eating. He's a sweetheart and is the only feral cat, currently, that lets me pet them.

6. Marmalade first started visiting in December, as I noted in the Christmas post, and he's yet another tomcat. And yet another cat that I suspect may have been abandoned or lost. He's extremely not neutered and loves to spray, spray, spray. He has designs on Mamacita, because he's incapable of understanding that she's spayed. I have great hopes that we can TNR at least two of Marmalade, Gumball and Meowmix this month, before the summer weather really kicks. Of course we want to get all three of them neutered, eventually, but these things take time, patience and energy. Marmalade has lost weight since December, which further reinforces the notion that he may not have always been an outdoor cat and is now fending for himself. And so I worry about him, especially, with his first summer coming. Here are two photos of Marmalade in our front window well.

7. And our newest and final semi-regular is Yinzer (named by Joan). I'm fairly sure it's a male. He may be the youngest of the cats, and once again, grrrr, I think there's a decent chance that he was abandoned/lost. He started coming by tentatively and then running off as soon as I went outside. Then he would meow at the back door a couple times before scooting off. Now he stays and eats some food some mornings, which makes me happy. Here he is...

* * *

We had some special cat visitors at the beginning of the year. A new-to-us pregnant female began coming nightly shortly after dark for food and especially for cheese. It got to the point where she would scoot under the table and wait while I put food down for her, but otherwise she was extremely skittish, as a pregnant kitty should be. We watched her get really big as she came for a few weeks and then, unsurprisingly, she stopped coming. I suspect we were her secondary/supplementary food source during pregnancy, so I'm honestly not sure if/when we'll see her again if she lives a fair distance away. We'll worry for her and her kittens and be here to help if they ever return. We named her Daisy and, yes, she has a heck of a R.B.F. Life in the desert is tough for the mama cats.

And Daisy came with a surprise! On three nights and three nights only, she was accompanied by a male tomcat that we realized was the long-lost Fjord Nubbins. Fjord is a son of Mamacita and is Creamsicle's brother from the same litter. He disappeared a couple years ago, before we could TNR him, and we had just assumed the worst. But it appears that he's thriving. In my head canon, he's Daisy's mate and, when she was pregnant and needed food, he remembered this place and led her here, accompanying her a few times to say hello. I could be completely wrong, but I like that story and I'm sticking with it. I could only get snapshots of Fjord, and his very recognizable face, through the window. Here they are: 

Meanwhile, we still have occasional skunks but I can't tell who's who anymore after naming most of them last year. Given the time of year, I suspect that we might not be far from the time when we start seeing some tiny, adorable baby skunks. 

We also seem to have overnight raccoon(s), given the levels of mayhem I find sometimes in the morning. I'm glad we're helping them, but they're hitting the cat food budget pretty hard. (I could just stop leaving out food overnight, but I always imagine that the most skittish and vulnerable cats, ones I never see, depend upon it, so I'll keep doing it.) 

If you're interested in helping in a small way to feed the feral kitties and skunks, my Redbubble page offers a lot of postcards of these cats (both the indoor pets and the ferals) posing in adorable fashion.

Splash pages from 1937 yearbook

Quickie post as I keep working to resimplify. This is a two-page layout near the front of the 1937 yearbook for Hammond High School in Hammond, Indiana. That's the year my grandmother, then Helen Chandler Adams (1919-2003), would have graduated from the school. But I guess maybe the family had moved back eastward by then, because she's not in the yearbook.* It's an interesting snapshot of teenage life in the Midwest as the world was slipping toward all-out war. (Click on the image to see a larger version.)

***

A few hours later ... addendum

*As I continued sorting and pruning family ephemera today, I answered this question by coming across Helen's resume in an envelope of family ephemera. This will be very handy for future posts. It clearly states that she graduated from Wilmington Friends School in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1937. What's not clear is precisely what year the family moved away from Hammond, but I guess we can assume it was sometime between 1934 and 1936. And I assume I'll come across clarity on that with different ephemera at some point.

Also, I absolutely should have remembered Wilmington Friends School as being part of the equation, given, among other things, this 2017 post and this 2018 post.

Welcome to the California Zephyr

This piece of ephemera is about the size of an index card and greets passengers arriving on the California Zephyr.

The California Zephyr has a long, storied and extremely complicated history, and if you're interested in that, Wikipedia and many a railroad buff have you covered. This card is from the iteration of the Zephyr train service that operated from 1949 to 1970. It was operated by the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, Denver & Rio Grande Western and Western Pacific railroads, as noted at the bottom of this card. It was one of the longest train trips in the country, running between Oakland, California, and Chicago, Illinois. I strongly suspect that my great-grandmother, Greta Miriam Chandler Adams (1894-1988), rode the California Zephyr in the 1950s or early 1960s. 

The card notes: 

"Dinner in the dining car is on a reservation basis so as to avoid standing in line. Advance selection of dining hour by each passenger should provide reasonable assurance that a seat will be available at the appointed time. The Zephyrette will pass through the train each afternoon to see about your reservations for dinner that same evening. We earnestly request your cooperation by being in the dining car at the selected time. No reservations are necessary for breakfast or lunch in the dining car or for any meal service in the buffet car."

Yes, "Zephyrette" was a thing. In fact, the Zephyrettes were famous enough to have their own Wikipedia page. It notes that a Zephyrette was a hostess on the California Zephyr between 1949 and 1970. It further states: "To qualify, a prospective Zephyrette had to fulfill a variety of criteria, from being single and either a college graduate or a registered nurse to being between 24 and 28 years old and between 5 ft 4 in (1.63 m) and 5 ft 8 in (1.73 m) tall. Once employed, Zephyrettes were expected to conduct themselves with 'dignity and poise' and also refrain from smoking or drinking while in uniform, among other requirements. Somewhat akin to an air line stewardess, the roles played by a Zephyrette were many, from hostess and tour guide to first aid responder and babysitter."

In addition to Wikipedia, there's an in-depth webpage on the Zephyrettes here. It adds this fun tidbit: "The Zephyrette was expected to pass through the train every couple of hours, checking on the passengers. If there were letters or postcards to be mailed, she would be happy to take care of them. If a passenger needed some item that wasn't available onboard the train, the Zephyrette would rush out to a local store during a station stop. (One Zephyrette took the shopping thing a bit too far, more than once spending too much time at the newsstand, and had to be put into a cab in Denver, rushing off to catch up with the train that had already left.)"

***

Today, Amtrak's iteration of the California Zephyr runs from San Francisco to Chicago, taking a little over 51 hours. As best as I can ascertain from Amtrak's confusing booking website, a one-way trip on the California Zephyr would cost, at minimum, $300 for coach. For some privacy and a place to sleep, the starting minimum would be near $1,000.

I've always imagined that I would enjoy traveling long distances by train, certainly more than I would enjoy traveling by airplane, boat or blimp. The California Zephyr sounds enjoyable and incredibly scenic, but I have no reason to be in San Francisco or Chicago, so I'm not sure what the point would be. I believe, unless I'm forgetting something, that the farthest I've ever traveled by train is from Philadelphia to Manhattan, which I've done numerous times. Basically a commuter-level trip. It would be great fun to take one of those long train rides across Europe and/or Asia, like the trips you see in the movies. Especially Horror Express. Because who wouldn't want to traverse the the 5,800 miles of the Trans-Siberian Railway with Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Telly Savalas? (Of course, I'm completely setting aside 100% of complicating geopolitics and wars at this point, which would make such a trip impossible, because I need a momentary mental health break.)