Nifty photo postcards of Luray Caverns from 1906

Entrance Avenue
These five postcards feature J.D. Strickler's photographs from 113 years ago of the natural wonder that is Luray Caverns in Virginia. Never mailed, they are part of a 10-card series titled The Beautiful Caverns of Luray. It was, according to the text on the back, possible for the Luray Caverns Corporation to mail the set to any address for 17 cents. (Mailing individual cards at that time was just a penny.)

An article by by C.H. Claudy titled "Some Subterrestrial Photography" in the June 1907 issue of The Photographic Times discusses Strickler's work. Here's an excerpt:

"The making of photographs beneath the surface of the earth is not usually a popular occupation. Not that it is not of itself enjoyable, but because it is so hard to get below the top of terra firma! And when somehow, somewhere, we do get below the surface and take flash lights, what flat and uninteresting pictures we do produce, to be sure!

"In presenting the accompanying pictures of underworld marvels, it is of course evident that the photographer had wonderful material with which to work — nowhere in the three miles of rooms and galliers in the Caverns of Luray could a camera be set up and anything taken which would not be both wonderful and beautiful. On the other hand this particular photographer has displayed a great deal of taste in the selection of his pictures, and shown an excellent appreciation of the force of light and shade, and particularly of contrast in the making of these plates. It is with the more pleasure that I am glad to name him. Mr. J.D. Strickler of Luray, Va., and to praise his excellent work and the keen 'know how' he has displayed in getting his results..."

Despite that heap of praise, Claudy does criticize Strickler's choices and work a fair bit throughout the article. At one point, Claudy writes: "Mr. Strickler has used a long focus lens of twelve inches focal length on an eight by ten plate in most of the pictures. This is a decided mistake from all possible points of view — a wide angle — at least a seven inch lens, being clearly indicated." Ouch.

Here are the other four postcards...

Approach to Ball Room

Saracens Tent

Ball Room Looking Toward Millers Hall

Collins Grotto

Boris' Soviet-era QSL card

This QSL card between UA3-9 in Moscow, USSR, and W3AIT in Frackville, Pennsylvania, was filled out in 1962, at the height of the Cold War. I know that W3AIT was in Frackville, because I have other QSL cards sent to that operator, who was named Melvin C. Reed. He's also listed, with that call sign, in the Fall 1952 Radio Amateur Callbook. If I found the correct Melvin C. Reed on Find A Grave, he lived from 1906 to 1987.

Melvin made a lot of international connections with his ham radio hobby. And that includes this one with Boris in 1962. I wonder if they had a short conversation. Did Boris understand English? Did Melvin understand Russian? Or did they only know enough mutual ham radio lingo in order to log the connection over the airwaves? QSL cards are wonderful ephemeral evidence of past exchanges. But they leave so much that can never be known. I find it fascinating that, in the same year as the Cuban Missile Crisis, someone from a small town in Pennsylvania was connecting directly with a fellow ham enthusiast in Moscow. (Also, since there's no stamp or address on this QSL, I have to assume that Boris sent it to Melvin in an envelope.)

"Old farmhouse in the Black Forest"

Need a vacation? Or maybe just to get away from it all?¹ This 1960s postcard, never mailed, features an Altes Bauernhaus im Schwarzwald (as printed on the back), which translates to "Old farmhouse in the Black Forest."

Living on a quiet, pastoral farm sounds like an ideal life these days. (I suspect, though, that the seasonal maintenance of that huge roof requires a lot of sweat equity, especially after hard winters.) Ashar and I took a farm tour in Lancaster County yesterday, and the tranquility was interrupted only by the occasional insistent bleating of the goats.

There's a red stamp on the back of this card for Hotel Bellevue in Baden-Baden, Germany. Originally, I thought the image on the front of the card was Hotel Bellevue, but I was wrong about that.

If my research and translations are correct, Hotel Bellevue dated to the late 1700s and was once called Grüner Winkel. It was fully rebuilt into a luxury hotel in the late 1800s and held that status through the first half of the 20th century. It served as a military hospital during World War II and never truly bounced back after that. It was converted into a retirement home in 1982.

It's still faring well and appears to be in very good shape. These days, most of it is used for high-end senior living, but there are, once again, some hotel rooms. If you stay there, it's not much of a jaunt to visit the Black Forest...

Related posts

• Old postcard: Homes in Germany's Black Forest region
• "100% hand made" Black Forest Weather House for just $2.99
• "The Valley of Hell" in Germany's Black Forest
• Luggage label from Hotel Europäischer Hof in Baden-Baden

Footnote
1. Please note: You cannot run away from climate change.

Helen's big 1973 adventure in Italy

I need to stay in good practice when it comes to reading the questionable cursive writing of my grandmother (Helen Chandler Adams Ingham). So today I'm challenging myself — with a little help from housemates — to transcribe her message of the back of this postcard that she sent from northern Italy to Wallingford, Pennsylvania, in May 1973.

The card itself shows Ristorante Tre Corone in Verona, Italy. (The restaurant has "helpfully" been circled on the front of the postcard.) But the card was mailed from Bolzano, Italy, which is about 95 miles north of Verona.

In a note to her parents (Howard and Greta), Helen writes:

5/13/73
Bolzano is lovely town — beautiful shops, old castles — aren't I glad it's Sunday!
Met Amer. Express tour at Touring Hotel in Milan yesterday. Today we started at 8:30 — stopped at Lake Garda, took boat across to Sirmione — lovely resort area — then to Verona saw Juliet's balcony?!

[entire indecipherable line, possibly about a beach ... or lunch]

cafe (pictured) — Lasagna — turkey cacciatore [?] on to Bolzano. Venice tomorrow. Rec'd my pkg (ticket) from AAA. No other mail though. See you soon.
Love Helen

Unstaged shelfie just for the halibut 1

Some of these have certainly been blogged about.

At Muskoka Lakes (1917)

I'll write much more about this later, but this year I've been in the slow process of having numerous century-old negatives of family photos scanned and digitized at Camera Center of York. I'm also getting one print of each photo — the first time these photos have been printed, to my knowledge, because I don't recall seeing any of them in family albums.

I just wanted to share this one in a quick post, because it's a gorgeous snapshot. It was from a negative envelope labeled "1917 Muskoka Lakes." There is both a Township of Muskoka Lakes and a Lake Muskoka in Ontario, Canada. It appears to be a spot my ancestors vacationed at a century ago.

I'm fairly certain that the second person from left, in the white hat, is the oft-mentioned Greta Miriam Chandler Adams (1894-1988), my great-grandmother. It's not immediately clear to me who the other folks are, but I might eventually be able to suss out some of their identities.

From the readers: In which Phyllis gets a lot of web traffic

The March 11 Papergreat post "Lamenting what we'll never know about Phyllis J. Stalnaker Harris" has been getting a lot of traffic in the past week, with more than 4,500 pageviews. Most of it — no surprise, I reckon — is from the same kind of Reddit and Twitter posts that inspired me to write about her in the first place.

There have also been some very kind comments left by readers on Phyllis' post:

• Joan, of Ask Joan fame, writes: "I'm glad you tell stories."
• Ingrid Medova writes: "Yes, sad there is not enough respect for this woman."
• Unknown writes: "It does look like she is about to smile in her mugshot."
• Tami writes: "Rest In Peace dear lady."
• Mr Smith writes: "Highlighted by Reddit, given flesh by you. Thank you."
• Siobhan writes: "Her photo was posted this morning on Pictures in History. Thank you for adding to her story."
• Unknown writes: "Thank you for making her something more than a Facebook post that says 'Weed head, tramp.'"

Saturday's postcard: Driving through a redwood: Wendyvee of the awesome Roadside Wonders and possibly the forthcoming memoir Grand Auto Adventures in Brooklyn writes: "There used to be a photo of my grandparents and their car with a Giant Redwood ... lost to the sands of time apparently."

Soviet-era magazine cartoons: Joan writes: "I want a T-shirt of that hedgehog."

Plenty of projects in Pack-o-Fun: Rushd Lady, who is involved with a number of blogs, writes: "I grew up to recycling crafts featured in the Pack-o-Fun and Workbasket magazines. You wouldn't happen to know where Edna or John Clapper were buried do you? I'm a member of Find-a-Grave and I have a 'Creatives' virtual cemetery I would love to add them to."

Alas, I do not know where those two individuals are buried.

Fairy tale food & drink of Ruth Manning-Sanders: Joan writes: "I most enjoy 'wine in a sack.' But also radishes. And cabbage."

Bookplate inside "The Angry Planet": "Mark Felt," Stealth Research Assistant and Executive Vice President in Charge of Ephemera Reunions, writes: "Dr. Sally's youngest daughter, Lesa Lillibridge of Kent, Ohio, would be proud of the posting of her father's bookplate. Bless Dr. Sally's memory."

The Moorestown Mall and its questionable Monkey Cage: Wendyvee, commenting on Facebook, writes: "My college roomie had memories of them from when she was really little. I think that they had ducks in the 'mall fountains' too."

1970s gang graffiti inside a 1928 book of plays: Stewart lil writes: "Is this for sale by any chance?"

I'm not sure if I still have it! This post was way back in 2012, another lifetime ago. The days of keeping everything I've posted passed a long time ago. With nearly 3,000 posts, you just can't keep it all. But this was was unique enough that there's at least a chance I still have it ... somewhere.

Hans Gerhard Sørensen's cover art for "A Brief History of Norway": Unknown writes: "Looking for a list of Hans Gerhard Sorensen's prints and value so I know how to insure them."

Alas, I believe you would need to an expert for that. I am clearly just a generalist and amateur.

* * *
Bonus: Spam comment of the month

On "Old business card for Hayes Flying Service":

"Would you choose a pun-filled name for your business? Are puns effective in attracting consumers to your brand? We look at how puns can actually be beneficial clicking here your business and brand, and how it can build your consumer base through the power of humour!"

Book cover: "Syrian Yankee"

• Title: Syrian Yankee
• Author: Salom Rizk (1908-1973)
• Dust jacket artist: Unknown
• Publisher: Doubleday & Company
• Publication year: 1954 for this edition. Book was first published in 1943.
• Original price: $2.50
• Provenance: At some point it was signed on the first page by the author. Book ended up at Canaday's Book Barn in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. It had a listed price of $12.50, but I picked it up for a steep discount during the store's closing sale.
• Pages: 317
• Format: Hardcover
• Front cover blurb: "This autobiography tells of the Americanization of Salom Rizk, a Syrian orphan who came from a land of poverty and oppression to the land of opportunity and freedom. One out of nameless millions, Rizk reveals why he loves his adopted country."
• First sentence: Nearly all the things that happened when I was a boy, in the places beyond our hills — in Lebanon and Palestine and Turkey, and in the far places over the sea — I didn't know anything about or even dimly suspect because we had no books or newspapers in our village.
• Last sentence: You can't beat the people who built and are still building this America.
• Random segment from the middle #1: "The Republican party got the country into this fix," the Mason City businessman said.
• Random segment from the middle #2: "Wall Street or the Republic party. What's the difference? Wall Street's got a strangle hold on the Republicans, and they run the party to suit themselves."
• Random segment from the middle #3: "Wall Street knows there's only one way to get power and that's to get votes, farm votes and labor votes. They have to hoodwink you farmers into believing that the Republican party is the farmer's party, and they have to hoodwink the laboring man into thinking the Republican party is the laboring man's party."
• Random segment from the middle #4: "You talk as if the Republican party was a closed conspiracy against the public interest," Larry's father retorted.
• Random segment from the middle #5: "Sons of wild jackasses, all of them," cried the Socialist.
• Were those actually random? No.
• Goodreads rating: 3.27 stars (out of 5.0)
• Amazon rating: 5.0 stars (out of 5.0)
• Amazon review excerpt #1: In 2003, Thomas Leavitt wrote: "This is truly a tale of America at its best, the bright and shining beacon of hope for so many people for so long. It is sad to see how tarnished that image has become in many people's minds."
• Amazon review excerpt #2: In 2011, Ashor wrote: "This book should taught in schools for the American youth to show them what other societies are missing, how we became a spoiled and resource-abusing society."
• Amazon review excerpt #3: In 2017, PJ wrote: "It's amazing how ... Salom Rizk was received AND treated back then, vs. today's attitude by the WH towards Syrians. This 180 in temperament [and] acceptance of one another has become the shame of this Nation."
• About Rizk: The well-sourced Wikipedia page on this author has a few interesting points about Rizk and Syrian Yankee:
  
  • "The book has been called 'a classic of the immigrant biography genre', especially for the way Rizk's story portrays the American Dream and the virtues of cultural assimilation at the expense of his home country, which he finds loathsome when he returns for a visit."
  • "Rizk's description of youth is interesting for several reasons: First, it was not common at the time for Syrian immigrants to depict their journey to the United States. Second, Rizk leaves out the obvious fact that his native language is Arabic and distances himself from the Muslim aspects of Syrian culture. Third, despite being dazzled by New York City, Rizk's depiction of America 'resembles nothing so much as Hell'; it is not until he returns to his homeland and sees the problems facing both the Middle East and Nazi-era Europe (including the large numbers of Jewish refugees to Palestine) that he recognizes the fulfillment of his American Dream and begins to become a vocal advocate for American values, using his own immigrant status as the grounds for his expertise."
  • "Eventually, with the rise of ethnic pride movements in the latter half of the century, Arab American writers realized that Rizk's willingness to criticize his native culture was counter-productive, reinforcing ugly stereotypes and making Arab American readers feel even less free. Rizk thus stands as a testament to his age, to the changing tides of Arab American history and its vacillation between assimilation and diversity."
• Final note: Before the Trump administration began to close America's doors to immigration, many 21st century refugees from Syria, and other nations, were coming to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.