My 2,000th Postcrossing arrival

Here's Mama Orange posing with the "Happy Mother's Day" Postcrossing postcard that represents the 2,000th arrival in my mailbox since I joined in December 2012. On average, I've sent and received 13 postcards per month since I started this hobby 12½ years ago to have fun and help keep snail mail alive. 

According to my Postcrossing statistics, I've engaged with 83 different countries while either sending or receiving cards. Germany is the No. 1 country in both categories, with 451 sent and 434 received. Russia is still No. 2 in both categories, even though I haven't been able to send postcards to Russia since the U.S. Postal Service suspended service to that country in March 2022. The Netherlands is No. 3 in both categories.

And it's from the Netherlands that I "met" Marte, one of the many pen-pal relationships I've developed through Postcrossing over the past decade. We still exchange postcards about once per week. I've also had pen pals from Ukraine, Russia, Japan, Taiwan, Canada, and Mexico, among other countries.

The 2,000th arrival is from Mia in Taiwan, who's been on Postcrossing since 2017. She enjoys map cards and lighthouse cards, and writes on this Hibeetle postcard that plum rain season has arrived in Taiwan and is very welcome. I learn something with almost every postcard! Here in Arizona, we're awaiting monsoon season. Maybe it will come early, maybe it will be right on time. Either way, we will happily welcome the rains.

Snapshots of post-WWII Japan from a photo album

The Papergreat archives are full of hundreds of vintage vernacular photos and real photo postcards. They're snapshots from a fleeting moment of time decades ago, or perhaps even more than a century ago. I love looking at the faces and the scenery, and thinking about what was going on in those people's minds. What had their life been like up to that point? What was it like afterward? Sometimes you can make guesses based on what you see etched in their faces, but they're only guesses.

Today's photos are all from a 20th century photo album from Japan. I don't know anything about it beyond these photos, though being able to read Japanese might have helped. My guess is that most of these photos are from the 1950s and 1960s, but please correct me if I'm wrong. Several of the photos feature Japanese baseball teams; baseball had been popular in Japan since the 1870s and grew even more popular there after World War II.

All of these photos, including the one above, feature great faces. The kind of faces you could guess about for hours...

Foldout postcard of Los Angeles in a very different moment

This A. Mitock & Sons folding postcard of Los Angeles, California, was mailed in April 1956 to the Ideal Convalescent Home in Gresham, Oregon. (Which presupposes, I guess, that there's a Non-Ideal Convalescent Home.) It shows the clean, happy and economically vibrant side of Los Angeles seven decades ago. Construction was completed on the iconic Capitol Records Building that very month of April 1956.

Today, Los Angeles is having a very different moment. The Associated Press reports:

LOS ANGELES (AP) — U.S. immigration authorities extended their activity in the Los Angeles area Saturday in the wake of protests at a federal detention facility and a police response that included tear gas, flash-bangs and the arrest of a union leader.
Border Patrol personnel in riot gear and gas masks stood guard outside an industrial park in the city of Paramount, deploying tear gas as bystanders and protesters gathered on medians and across the street, some jeering at authorities while recording the events on smartphones.
“ICE out of Paramount. We see you for what you are,” a woman said through a megaphone. “You are not welcome here.”
One handheld sign said, “No Human Being is Illegal.”
The boulevard was closed to traffic as Border Patrol officers circulated through the area. ICE representatives did not respond immediately to email inquiries about weekend enforcement activities.
The immigration arrests in Los Angeles came as President Donald Trump and his administration push to fulfill promises of mass deportations across the country.

It's a harrowing, heartbreaking contrast to this 1956 postcard highlighting Wilshire Boulevard, MacArthur Park, Miracle Mile, the original Brown Derby restaurant, pedestrians gaily going about their day and "Olvera Street operated by Mexicans in their colorful native costumes."

"Will You Buy My Story?"

My San Tan Valley hairstylist told me today that she has seen Wicked: Part I more than 60 times, which is amazing on many levels, but mostly because it only premiered less than seven months ago. Even as a movie lover, I cannot think of a movie I've seen even 20 times, let alone 60. 

We continued to talk about musicals as my head got buzzed, and that gives me a nice opening for today's ephemera. One of the first musicals I remember seeing is The Fabulous Fable Factory in the 1980s. But the crazy part is that I don't remember when or where. It was either fourth, fifth, sixth or seventh grade, and I went to four different schools in three different states over those four grades, so I can't nail down for sure when I saw it.

I know that it was a bus field trip, possibly to a local college. I don't know if was a full class trip or just the extracurricular chorus I was part of (in which case it was Montoursville, in fifth or sixth grade).

And the only part of the musical I remember is the extremely catchy Thomas Tierney/Joseph Robinette song "Will You Buy My Story?" That tidbit allowed me determine that it was 1973's The Fabulous Fable Factory and eventually to track down this worn copy of the book and lyrics.

The synopsis from Dramatic Publishing states: "Monroe wanders into a seemingly abandoned factory and accidentally trips a lever which activates the factory 'machinery,' an assembly line of seven actors who create fabulous fables. Then he meets the factory owner, a Mr. Aloysius A. Aesop, who explains that the factory has been idle for over 2,000 years because of a missing part."

According to this book, the one-act musical was first produced by Glassboro Summer Theatre at Playhouse 121 at Glassboro State College (now Rowan University) in southern New Jersey. That's another connection for me. We lived in Clayton, just a few miles from Glassboro, in the late 1970s.

Here are a few images from the book...

Photo postcard from a Ukrainian

This circular postcard is from my Ukrainian pen pal who has been displaced since Russia's invasion of her country in February 2022. She's currently in Germany, but is there under temporary, visa-free EU travel rules, and may soon have to be on the move again. It's nearly impossible for most of us to fathom what she's been through in the past three-plus years, with it being too unsettling for her to permanently return to Dnipro, Ukraine, while regular missile attacks continue. Yet there's not a permanent place for her elsewhere in the world. All of this while trying to juggle working remotely and live her life.

This postcard is a photo she took while on a short stay in the Netherlands. "I still remember that graceful woman on the bicycle," she writes.

In a recent email, she added: "Trump's winery [sic] really REALLY sucks, and I'm so sorry that your profession also implies the involvement in all of those negative news. For Ukraine, it's catastrophic too. Honestly speaking, I've reached the point where I'm tired of all the negative stuff around (including war, loss, uncertainty about the future) to the extent when I just stopped reading news and being engaged in those things."

That's a feeling I suspect many empathize with in these overwhelming times.

Related posts

• October Postcrossing wrapup
• Ukraine correspondences
• Cat postcard & cat tale from a war-weary Ukrainian
• Nifty envelope from Ukraine Postcrossing pen pal
• 1960s pocket travel guide for Kiev
• Modern postcard: The great stairway in Odessa, Ukraine
• I hope Yuriy Sosnitskiy becomes a famous artist [this one breaks my heart now]
• Colorful Postcrossing card and stamps: "Welcome to Ukraine" [which contains links to even older Ukraine posts]

Before "Collector's Luck" heads out the door ...

As part of the Resimplify Me pruning, 1919's Collector's Luck, by Alice Van Leer Carrick (1875-1961) is among the stuff headed out the door tomorrow.

But it's a pretty nifty 106-year-old volume, with a lot of character, so I thought I'd highlight it with some photos for posterity.

The book's subtitle tells you all you need to know about what's inside: "A Repository of Pleasant and Profitable Discourses Descriptive of the Household Furniture of Ornaments of Olden Time."

The book has had numerous homes over the years. A blacked-out bookplate on the inside front cover indicates it was part of the reference library at the Baltimore Museum of Art. 

Many many pages of the book have a performating stamp indicating that it was part of the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore. I have no idea why there was a need to damage so many pages in this way. A red stamp on the title page indicates that it was withdrawn from Enoch Pratt at some point.

The last page and the inside back cover feature Enoch Pratt's due-date label and the circulation card pocket. Many people checked this book out, with due-date stamps spanning 1934 to 1938. 

Without further ado, here are some photos...

And here is Mademoiselle Fifi (IceBear), who turned 3 today, along with her sister Pete.

"Riddle of Fire" is like a modern Ruth Manning-Sanders fairy tale

Last night, Ashar and I watched Riddle of Fire, a quirky and utterly delightful 2023 film written and directed by Weston Razooli. It's hard to describe or shoehorn into a genre, and I strongly suggest that you don't watch the trailer before seeking it out for a viewing. The trailer gives away too many of the plot's twists and fun moments. 

The best way I can describe Riddle of Fire is that it's as if you took the structure and offbeat logic of a Ruth Manning-Sanders fairy tale and applied it to a 2020s children's movie made to look like something filmed in the 1970s or early 1980s. There's a group of plucky children, a quest for a necessary item, obstacles, villains, magic, side quests, plot twists and loads of wry humor. The "logic" of the film, such that it is, could be described as the tale you'd hear if you asked a long-winded, sugar-fueled 10-year-old to spin a harrowing adventure involving a group of kids battling the world of comically mean-spirited adults.

I love how Austin Shinn described it on Bluesky in early May: "I love trying to explain Riddle of Fire. It’s a 70s/80s neogrindhouse movie except it’s a kids movie and it’s trying to evoke those bizarre indie films that would blow through small towns and play matinees and make zero sense and feel like a kid wrote them. It’s amazing"

One reviewer on IMDb.com hit the nail on the head, too, in stating that movie reminded them of "the films produced in the UK by the Children's Film Foundation." Yes! That struck a chord with me. There's DNA from 1976's The Man from Nowhere in this movie, even if Razooli has never seen that.

But the movie Riddle of Fire most reminded of — and this is extremely specific to a Gen X kid who watched the same half-dozen films over and over on cable in the early 1980s — is The Little Dragons. That 1980 movie (crazily enough, one of the first directorial efforts of Curtis Hanson) features a pair of karate-student brothers who are out of their element when they go camping with their grandfather, but suddenly find themselves in an adventure as they try to rescue a girl from a group of bumbling backwoods villains. It would probably make me wince today, and it only has a 4.3 rating on IMDb, but the overall vibe is similar to the retro feel Riddle of Fire achieves with great success. It's a movie that's lived in a tiny cubbyhole in my brain for decades. ("Souffle" is a good alternative cuss word, according to actor Charles Lane.)

Now, go watch Riddle of Fire.

A letter my grandmother mailed to me 33 years ago

This week I came across a short letter that my grandmother, Olive Virginia Hartford Otto (1914-2006), mailed to me during my junior year at Penn State University in 1992. Snail mail was still in its heyday then, though the end was getting close with the rise of email.

Bambi, as my sister and I called her, lived in a small apartment in Easton, Pennsylvania. My first two jobs after I graduated from Penn State in 1993 were in Gettysburg and York, so I was able to drive up and see her a few times per year in the mid 1990s. We had quiet, relaxing visits. She sat in her rocking recliner and we'd watch The Lawrence Welk Show, Hee Haw, Walker, Texas Ranger and lots of pro bowling and golf.

Her February 12, 1992, letter, in fairly neat cursive, is interesting. Here's an excerpt:

Dear Chris –

Thank you for your letter. You sure are kept busy. Haven't been doing much. ... The country is a mess. Pappy and I went thru it in 1935. He only worked 3 days a week. He went from door to door selling Bleach. So I know what hard times are.

I can't believe that it is 2 months today that Pappy passed away. I sure do miss him. 

Are you watching the Olympics? I enjoy the ice skating. How about Mike Tyson? He was a nice guy. His attitude was very bad. ....

I'm going out for a walk and will mail this to you. Take care. I love you.

Always,

Bambi