Saturday's postcard: Nicollet Avenue

Linen postcard of Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on a brighter day.

Handmade postcard of Wan-Long Tailor in Tainan West Market

This month I received this amazing handmade postcard via Postcrossing member Jyayu in Taiwan. It's an oversize card, measuring 5¼ inches by 7¼ inches, and was clearly drawn and painted with great care and love. It's one of my favorite cards I've received in more than 13 years of Postcrossing.

Her message on the back states:

Hello Chris!!

The Wan-Long Tailor store shown on this postcard has been in business for over 30 years. It's located in the Tainan West Market (opened in 1905). It was once the largest market in Southern Taiwan. In my hometown, Puli, there is a widely circulated story about a "Black Sorcerer - Maxa-daxedaxe."

Legend has it that the sorcerer feeds on the hearts of child to increase his magical power. Reportedly, He can fly as long as attaching banana leaves to his back. If he needs to go out at night to seek his targets, he will replace his own eyes with the cat's eyes, allowing him to see clearly in the dark. Because of this, in earlier times, parents would carry their children on their chest rather than on their back to prevent Maxa-daxedaxe from forcefully snatch the child.

This English-language website has a little more information about Maxa-daxedaxe as it relates to Indigenous storytelling. If anyone from Taiwan or with Taiwanese heritage knows any more about this legend, I'd love to read it in the comments section.

My grandmother's 1942 Medical Technologist card

Short post today today with an item from 84 years ago. It's my grandmother's (Helen Chandler Adams Ingham, 1919-2003) wallet-size blue card indicating that in 1942 she was certified as Medical Technologist as defined by Board of Registry of the American Society of Clinical Pathologists.

According to its website, the society was founded in 1922 by a group of 39 physicians to achieve important goals to further the laboratory in health care. Today, "ASCP continues to drive change in the U.S. and around the world through its many initiatives including the Leading Laboratories Recognition Program; Partners for Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment in Africa, which provides rapid cancer diagnostics, care, and treatment to Sub-Saharan Africa; the ASCP Foundation to support diagnostic medicine and public health; and numerous collaborations with PEPFAR to bring pathology and laboratory medicine to under-resourced countries," the website further states.

Around this general time (World War II), my grandmother was working at Bushnell Army Hospital in Brigham City, Utah. So this card may have been issued to her while she was there. I should try to piece together more information from that time of her life at some point.

Related posts

• My grandmother on the Wilmington Friends School basketball team
• Snapshot & memories: Family outfits of 1972
• A handful of artistic travel snapshots taken by my grandmother
• 100th anniversary of Bingham "rediscovering" Machu Picchu

Mid-century Christmas letter from Richland

During the recent sorting and pruning of old family ephemera I came across this homemade Christmas letter from some family friends who lived in "Richland" and said of it, "This is the town that 'Sam' built." 

That would be Richland, Washington. The area that became Richland was acquired by U.S. Army in 1943, built up by "Uncle Sam" and turned into a fully closed, secretive community — it didn't appear on maps! — in which many people worked on the Manhattan Project, though few people knew that's what they were actually doing. The veil of secrecy wasn't lifted until after the mid-1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the surrender of Japan and the end of World War II.

Of course there were other cities that Uncle Sam built, such as Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

I'm going to guess this Christmas letter, with its nifty illustrations, dates to sometime between 1948 and 1952.

1964 receipt for my grandmother's Olympia SM3 typewriter

When Mom, Adriane and I moved from Florida into my great-grandmother's and grandmother's house on Oak Crest Lane in Wallingford in 1986, the upstairs room that had been used for storage and my grandmother's desk/office supplies was converted into my bedroom. It was absolutely filled with office supplies at first: pens, pencils, paperclips, tape dispensers, notepads, gummed reinforcements, staplers and much more. I still have a stapler and tape dispenser from that bedroom. Probably one or two other things, too.

There was also the typewriter that belonged to my grandmother, Helen Chandler Adams Ingham (1919-2003), and today's post features the receipt for when she originally purchased it. It was an Olympia SM3 and it cost $65 in 1964, which is the equivalent of a whopping $677 today! I remember using it for some schoolwork and hobby stuff, although at some point I would have fully converted to my Commodore 64's dot-matrix printer. Later, I had a lightweight electric typewriter that I took with me to Penn State and that I used for the final Steve Jeltz Fan Club newsletter. (And, yes, I STILL need to do the damn post on the history of the Jeltz Fan Club.)

The typewriter was purchased at Central Typewriter Exchange on 3433 Walnut Street in Philadelphia. I can't find anything specifically about that business, but maybe someone who knows something will see this post and leave a comment. I have to think this is one of its few receipts still in existence. The purchase came with a guarantee for one year on shop parts and labor, according to the cursive note added to the receipt. 

There is a lot of information about Olympia SM3 typewriters online. On Paper Blogging, Michelle Geffken writes of "the gorgeous lines of a stylish typewriter body, with the heavy-duty work capacity that is true of all machines in the German Olympia line, the Olympia SM3." Geffken adds that Olympia SM stands for Schreibmaschine Mittelgroß or Medium-sized Typewriter, and that 800,000 were made between 1953 and 1957. It was apparently a favored typewriter of the likes of Harlan Ellison, John Updike and Patricia Highsmith. Geffken has a whole subsection called the Typewriter Diaries that you'll definitely want to check out if that's your jam.

Meanwhile, on Typewriter Review, Daniel Marleau describes the Olympia SM3 as "a reliable workhorse, from a solid body construction to keys that provide good response and feedback. When you first sit at this thing, you marvel at the beauty and how it exudes a certain egalitarian work ethic. These machines were meant for typing — lots of typing. Rolling paper in for the first time, a reassuring clicking sound is made, like loading a weapon for words. The platen moves with rigid precision."

I'm sure I have a photo of Beembom's Olympia SM3 somewhere in the family photos, but that would involve a search and will have to be a post for another day. 

A bookmark to finally begin the year

I've been in a bad rut to start 2026, and the spiraling state of our nation (to put it mildly) in what should be its celebratory 250th anniversary year certainly is a big contributor to that daily depression.

We have to find ways to keep plowing forward and I'm starting Papergreat's 17th calendar year with some short posts about items I've come across during some recent sorting and decluttering of family ephemera. Every January brings a fresh urge to purge stuff for sanity's sake. I hope this year sees more meaningful progress by me in that regard.

This is a greeting card that was designed to be a bookmark, if you detach the front cover of the card. It's stained and there's a tear at the bottom, but I've fixed that with tape and I'm going to put this in my pile of bookmarks and toss the rest of the card, along with the generic cursive message.

The bookmark was produced by Yorkraft and the card is printed with the following explanatory message: "Hand colored Book-Marks (Lese Ziechen), similar to this, with designs derived from religious symbolism, were used to mark the place many old Pennsylvania Dutch Bibles and Hymnals."

For some information about Yorkraft we turn to the York Daily Record and a 2016 Universal York blog post by June Lloyd. The company dates to at least the mid 1940s and manufactured "decorative signs and novelties, including Pennsylvania Dutch trinkets." Lloyd's post cites a 1946 advertisement that states: 

"YORKRAFT Pennsylvania Dutch… Greeting Cards and Gift items, for inspiration, draw upon a rich store of folklore and folk-arts of the Pennsylvania Dutch who have probably contributed more than any other group, to the Early American Folk Arts. Yorkraft has caught the charm and spirit of their decoration and design, their quaint speech and humor and their picturesque dress and customs, which still persist in Pennsylvania and to some extent in other parts of the country settled by Pennsylvania Dutch folks."

There are hundreds of Yorkraft items currently for sale on eBay, some dating to the late 1970s. I'm actually a little surprised that this is the company's first-ever mention on Papergreat. Items range from a set of blank Amish-themed notecards for less than $10 to faux stained-glass display pieces to Pennsylvania Dutch recipe booklets to a 1969 "Make Love Not War" wooden sign that's pretty damn cool and is listed for $329.99.