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I've been getting a ton o' spam lately.  I suppose I should be flattered, except I suspect it's just some guy sitting in an internet cafe somewhere in Asia.  Or maybe Paris, tucked away in a garret corner in an apartment building on Rue Simon-Bolivar, gulping down cups of strong black coffee and chain smoking unfiltered Turkish cigarettes, I don't know.  This person really, really wants me to look at their website.  And of course I am extremely hesitant to do that.  You can understand.

I hate to do this, but I have to moderate all the comments, at least for a while.  I had been moderating them on posts over 2 weeks old, but now I have to do it for all of them.

I'll check comments often, so if anybody has anything to say, please do.  As long as you're not trying to sell me something, I'll post it & respond.

Comic Postcard - Boarding House Table Manners

 

I like postcards for lots of reasons - sometimes they provide views of things that don't exist anymore, sometimes, especially in the case of comics, they're a little odd. 

 

This is a nice colorful comic postcard, postmarked in 1913 - the state is Florida, but I can't read the city - addressed to Miss Nellie Herford, Marshall, MO., in care of Ben Hur Stock Farms.  The men in the postcard are embossed.

 

This card shows what is probably a sleazy character trying to get in good with whoever is top dog a a boarding house, with instructions on how to get a better selection of food.  Is it a comment on the human condition?  Probably not.  But for some reason I like it.

 

This looks like it may be part of a whole series of cards of this nature, but I don't know that for sure. 

 

 

 

 

1950s Car Comic - 18 Miles Per Gallon

This is a standard/chrome postcard that just screams 1950s - though there is no date on it.  It touches a bit on relationships, and the abilities of automobiles at the time.  This one has run out of gas, and the caption is the wife complaining about her husband insisting the car would get 18 MPG. The husband is in the distance running off to find some gas, while the wife waits in the car reading a book.   This postcard is also artist signed - "Frye".

In the 1950s, 18 MPG for most cars in the USA would have been considered pretty good.  Maybe even better than pretty good - gas was cheap and mileage was not usually a consideration.  I got my first car in the 1970s (it was used, from 1966) and it only got 16 miles per gallon in the best of conditions, and I thought that was pretty ok.

When I was living in Germany, I tried to play a little mind game:  I'd try to figure out kilometers per liter and convert that to miles per gallon.  It's not easy. Gasoline was much more expensive in Germany, and cars, as a rule, were smaller and more fuel efficient, but I could never quite figure out my "mileage" to my satisfaction. Eventually I got to the point where I just accepted the liters and kilometers for what they were, and quit worrying about miles and gallons.

So, for those of you who may not be familiar with USA's version of the Imperial System of Measurements, 18 miles to the gallon is terrible mileage by today's standards, at least for a normal family car.  That was not the case when this postcard was created.