The Other Side of Postcards

A couple of months ago I gave a talk to the local genealogical society.  I chose to talk about postcards, not because I thought any of them would be interested in collecting postcards but because of the information on their writing side (their "other side").  The things people wrote about provide a wealth of information about the life and times of the people that wrote them.

For most collectors, postcards are divided into categories such as holiday, comic, romantic, real photo, sports, patriotic, etc.  I looked on the internet but I couldn't find where anyone had categorized postcards by their messages - so I made up my own categories.  Like postcards from people with little to say...

 

 Some had even less to say...

But the most interesting showed what life

was like at the time.  This next example speaks of illness and death.  This is a little hard to read so here's the main part of the message: "...Aunt Lamire had bad luck.  She lost little Hilda & Norman in four day.  Norman died on the 20 of Jan. & Hilda the 23 Jan and nobody was about to go there they had scarlet fever and Diptheria..."

 Some of the "news" in postcards is not nearly as serious...

"... I hope its nice Easter although I have not got my new hat ..."

There are hundreds of postcards for sale at Antiques on Main so come in and see if you can find some that interest you.

TV Lamps

That might be a lamp on the right on top of the TV.

 

I'm a Baby Boomer so I remember when we got our first TV in 1955, when I was 6 years  old.  I also remember Mom warning us we would go blind or something like that if we sat too close to the TV or watched it in the dark.  These early TV sets had pretty dim images, and we were in an era of "going to the movies".  We were used to watching movies in a darkened theater, so why not do the same at home? Well... even the experts agreed with Mom.  The remedy was to place a lamp on or near the TV to provide indirect lighting (and somehow protect our eyesight).  And an industry was born - TV lamps.  These lamps became an important decorative home accent and zillions of styles were produced: cats, deer, panthers, fish, birds, dogs, ships, covered wagons, horses, people, shells, etc. etc.

In case you wish you still had one of the old TV lamps, now is your chance.  We have lots of them in the store - since one of the dealers bought a large collection of them recently.  Here's a sampling of them.  Come in and get one before they're gone.