Unmailed vintage postcard to "soldier boy"

For our Saturday afternoon "Intermission," here's an old postcard that was written out, but never stamped or postmarked. Perhaps it was hand-delivered. Perhaps it went into a drawer and was utterly forgotten ... until now.

The front of the card features a photograph of a woman playing a piano while a man sits and listens. They are in a well-furnished and well-decorated room. An odd filter has been applied to the image. It's green at the top and red at the bottom, and neither color does much to enhance the photo. It reminds me of stories I've heard about three-color filters that people could apply to the front of their black-and-white televisions, to make the broadcast appear in "color."¹

The postcard was addressed to Mr. R.R. Daire (or possibly R.R. Gaire) of 843 West 34th Street in Baltimore, Maryland. The cursive note on the split-back card states:

"Dear Friend - I rec'd your card was very glad to hear from my soldier boy Lovingly Yours Virgie"

Footnote
1. Tiffanie, writing on her Truly Skrumptious blog in November 2012, discussed the "Instant Color TV Screen." An excerpt:

"It actually sort of worked for scenery, but obviously failed with people, especially close ups of their heads! It was a lot of fun trying though, and we were actually happy to have ours, over plain black and white. Many of you may not believe that, but it’s true, as kids we had a lot of fun with it. The same way kids these days love playing with cell phones to be like adults, we liked to pretend we had a real color TV."

Illustration: "Revolving Poker Rack" from Pacific Game Company

This is the groovy illustration, chock full of card players in period attire, that's pasted to the top of a box that once held a poker rack and 200 chips. "Revolving Poker Rack" was sold by Pacific Game Company of North Hollywood, California — sometime in the early 1970s, I'm guessing.

I don't think Pacific Game Company is still in business. The latest reference I can find to it is around 1980. Some interesting chapters of its history include an elaborate 1973 game called Columbus Was Wrong and an early 1960s chess set that featured pieces (designed by Peter Ganine) that were also used as props on Star Trek, for its famous Tri-Dimensional Chess.¹

People selling this vintage poker rack these days try to woo potential buyers by labeling it as a "Mad Men Era Poker Rack." I guess this time period isn't simply the late 1960s or early 1970s any more. It's just The Mad Men Era.² Redo the history books.

This box also came with a little slip of paper telling people to address any issues they had with the poker rack to A. Kray of Pacific Game Company.

I wonder how much weekly mail Kray received. And if it included the "complete facts," as requested. And if any of it still exists.

Footnotes

1. The Pacific Game Company chess set in question was called "Sculptured Chess" or "Gothic" and was issued in 1961. On the website askmisterscience.com, the author lambasts Peter Ganine's design not once, but twice.

On a page titled "Chess Sets From Hell," the writer states: "At the top of my list is an aberration I call the Gothic, after its most ubiquitous and egregious incarnation, Sculptured Chess by Ganine "Gothic" (# 1475, the Salon Edition), from Pacific Game Company of North Hollywood. ... Pacific Games must have sold buckets of these, as they're thick as cockroaches on eBay."

And on a page titled "'Gothic' and similar busts," the writer, while also giving a detailed history of these chess pieces, states: "These seem to have been popular, but they always gave me the nerdles. ... The basic design is still as ugly as the aft end of a baboon, no matter what they colored it (remember, fancy colors didn't help the baboon's image either)."

Meanwhile, for a great history of the use of these Pacific Game Company Gothic chess pieces on Star Trek, check out this page from Carolus Chess.

2. By the way, as we near the final episode of Mad Men (which I don't watch), the most far-out fan theory is that Don Draper will morph into D.B. Cooper in the finale. That would be something.

Rocketing York's hopes, dreams and ephemera into outer space (sort of)

During one of my lunch-time breaks from jury duty this week in York¹, I came across a curious storefront a few doors down from York's Continental Square.

The makeshift banner read "Spaceship York." Inside, the walls were covered with white sheets of paper filled with people's hopes, dreams and outer-space drawings.² On a tabletop, there were articles about some of the crazier and more far-out episodes of humankind's history of reaching for the stars.³

Oh, and there were free postcards (pictured at the top of this post). So I thought that was super cool, of course.

In the back of the small room, surrounded by carpentry tools, was The Spaceship, which is nearing completion.

It's not a functional spaceship. At least, I don't think it is. The mostly-wooden craft — which looks inspired by the likes of Jules Verne and Georges Méliès — is the artistic creation of "Chief Astronaut, Engineer, Mechanic, and Director" William Chambers, who is in the midst of a 2½-month project to launch the spacecraft and his collected ephemera into orbit.

When I visited on Tuesday, Chambers was working on the hatch and windows. Because if you're getting shot into space, you kind of want to see where you're going⁴, lest you crash into Jupiter or something.

Actual space travel isn't the point, of course. Mostly, Chambers is interested in where people are hoping to go. Their dreams for themselves and their city.

"In our world today, people don't go to school to dream anymore," he told The York Dispatch last month. "And sometimes, as adults, we're out of practice."

These are some of the dreams that children and adults have written down on those big white sheets of paper while at Spaceship York:

• I Dream of A world where Our Eyes Can Meet In Trust And Love, And The Warmth of our Greeting Matches The Depth of our Souls.
• MY Dream is that one Day Man Kind will realize we are all we have and there is no Help coming from anyware Else any time soon.
• My dream is that my son lives a happy full life. And follow all his dream's where ever they may take him.
• My Dream is to met an alein
• My dream is to write A Novel.
• I want to see the world's priorities shift from a love of things to a love of people, thus ensuring safety, health, and abundance for everyone.
• stuff would cost less for everybody
• My Dream Is To Ride A Dragon
• To find life in other worlds. To learn about other life systems. To use that knowledge here.
• I want to know that the pursuit of space exploration isn't driven because we're running out of natural resources ... Instead, I'd love to know that we're going to show our mistakes & how we managed to 'Fix' Them so that others don't Fall in the same hole ... go vegan!!

All of the dreams are scanned and posted at the Spaceship York website — timeandspacecollaborative.org. But, if you're a southcentral Pennsylvanian, you should really go see it in person if you have a chance this month. Spaceship York, supported by the Cultural Alliance of York County, is located at 9 West Market Street in York.

"Lift off" is scheduled for June 5.

According to an article in the York Daily Record/Sunday News:

"After the spaceship launches, Chambers hopes it lands somewhere where he can find it. He wants to take the crashed remnants with him on the road, and maybe start conversations with people about the project itself. He hopes, if nothing else, Spaceship York encourages people to reach for the stars."

Update

• Find out how Spaceship York turned out

Related: For students and dreamers

• Unschool Rules: Best resources for space and solar-system study

Footnotes
1. Days of jury duty: Four. Number of trials chosen for: Zero. So I didn't get to live out any 12 Angry Men moments. ... I was, however, able to finish reading both The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash during my many hours in the jury waiting room.
2. Many of which featured Cat Astronauts. Because why not?
3. Yes, we're talking about you, Wan Hu.
4. Even if you're a Cat Astronaut, you'd want a window.

Reading suggestions for a rainy and foggy mid-March weekend

I've been doing a poor job lately of providing actual content for the blog, so the least I can do is offer up some suggestions for important, cool and silly things to read elsewhere on the internet. This list was compiled over the past couple of months. Hopefully there's something here for everyone.

And stick with me, please, I promise there will be some new ephemera posts down the road.

Serious stuff

• The Atlantic: "A Brewing Problem" by James Hamblin (The terrifying cautionary tale of John Sylvan and the Keurig K-Cups. Almost 1 in 3 American homes now has a pod-based coffee machine. The cups are STILL not recyclable or biodegradable. Billions of them end up in landfills each year.)
• The Washington Post: "The terrible loneliness of growing up poor in Robert Putnam’s America" by Emily Badger
• Roads & Kingdoms: "To live, the oyster must die" by Oliver Bullough
• The Atlantic: "How Spelling Keeps Kids From Learning" by Luba Vangelova (Mastering English requires abilities that most children don’t develop until they're pre-teens.)
• Slate: "The United States of Megadrought: If you think that California is dry now, wait till the 2050s" by Eric Holthaus
• The Atlantic: "Finland, Home of the $103,000 Speeding Ticket" by Joe Pinsker (Most of Scandinavia determines fines based on income. Could such a system work in the U.S.? This story dovetails in some interesting and important ways with NPR's "Guilty and Charged" series.)
• The New York Times Magazine: "The wreck of the Kulluk" by McKenzie Funk
• The Hill: "'Father of the Internet' mounts defense of hard copies" by Elise Viebeck
• Narratively: "The last eco-warrior" by Aaron Kase

Not-so-serious stuff

• Grantland: "The Grantland Q&A: Errol Morris" by Alex Pappademas
• Huffington Post: "Vincent Van Gogh May Have Hidden 'The Last Supper' Within One Of His Most Famous Paintings" by Todd Van Luling
• The Atlantic: "1985: The Last Great Year in Film for Kids and Young Adults" by Garin Pirnia
• The Millions: "A Thousand Hands Will Grasp You with Warm Desire: On the Persistence of Physical Books" by Alix Christie
• The Spark: "Our Lacks, in the Shape of Fairy Tales" by Joel Hans
• Longreads: "The Holy Junk Heap" by Adina Hoffman & Peter Cole (Some 300,000 Jewish documents were hidden in a closet in Cairo for hundreds of years. They were discovered by the lady adventurer twins Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson and the legendary Rabbinical scholar Solomon Schechter.)
• LA Weekly: "Some Hollywood Extras Suffer, But Others Are Rolling In It" by Hillel Aron
• Tokyo Desu: "8 Hilariously Nonthreatening Monsters from Japanese Folklore"
• Gizmodo: "The Gorgeous Typeface That Drove Men Mad and Sparked a 100-Year Mystery" by Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan
• LA Times: "REVIEW: It's game time for the history of Monopoly" by Heller McAlpin (Related post: Board for Parker Brothers' 1936 version of the game Finance)
• The Guardian: "The Great Moon Hoax and the Christian Philosopher" by Rebekah Higgitt
• The New York Times Magazine: "My Dad, the Pornographer" by Chris Offutt (Don't be put off by the subject matter. This is an amazing read.)
• ListVerse: "10 Disturbing Tales From Scandinavian Folklore" by Gregory Myers
• Vermicious: "Forgotten TV: Star Maidens" by John Seven (Excerpt: "The 1975-76 German/English co-production Star Maidens, without any doubt, is the worst science fiction television series ever made, no contest. This is not up for argument. If you think it is, you should step away, because you are wrong.")
• The Quill of Victory: "Marathon-on, Mr. Movie" (memories of Philadelphia late-night radio legend Steve Friedman) by Dan Weckerly

Book cover: "Six Little Bunkers at Miller Ned's"

• Title: Six Little Bunkers at Miller Ned's
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 246
• Author: Laura Lee Hope (pseudonym)
• Illustrator: Walter S. Rogers
• Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap, New York
• Year: 1924
• Notes: "Six Little Bunkers" was a 14-book series published by the Stratemeyer Syndicate between 1918 and 1930. ... The series was described thusly in this advertising copy from Grosset & Dunlap:
  

  "Delightful stories for little boys and girls which sprung into immediate popularity. To know the six little Bunkers is to take them at once to your heart, they are so intensely human, so full of fun. Each story has a little plot of its own -- one that can be easily followed -- and all are written in Miss Hope's most entertaining manner. Clean, wholesome volumes which ought to be on the bookshelf of every child in the land."

  ... All of the books in the series involved the six children being at someone's place. Other books had them at Aunt Jo's, Grandpa Ford's, Cowboy Jack's, Mammy June's, Indian John's, Happy Jim's and Lighthouse Nell's, for example. ... The children were named Mun Bun, Russ, Rose, Violet (Vi), Margy and Laddie. Vi and Laddie were twins. Rose was the oldest girl. Laddie liked to speak in riddles. Margy was a friend to stray cats. Mun Bun's full name was Munroe Ford Bunker.
  
• Excerpt:
  

  "The six little Bunkers were also growing — growing fat and sturdy — and they were getting to be as tanned and brown as a russet shoe, so Daddy Bunker said. For they played out in the sunshine and fresh air all day long. That is, when the weather was good. When it rained they played in the house, the barn, or in the mill."

1910 postcard to Conyngham: "I'm going to take a trip."

The vintage joke postcard — and it's a bit of a cruel prank that's pictured — was published by Bamforth & Co. of Holmfirth, England, and New York.¹ It was mailed in January 1910 from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, to Conyngham, Pennsylvania, a small borough in Luzerne County that is named after American Revolution hero Captain Gustavus Conyngham (pictured at right).²

The postcard was addressed to Albert G. Harvey and the message on the back states:

"Look for me Saturday Evening on the 8 O'clock train. I expect Uncle Frank will be with me. Uncle James."

Footnotes
1. Previous posts featuring Bamforth & Co. postcards include:

• #27: That's it. Everyone go to bed. (Postcard Blogathon 2013)
• 1908 postcard: "TOO BUSY TO WRITE."

2. Fun fact: Conyngham's sister village is Drums.