You Can't Get Much for 12.5¢ In This World

I hit the postcard jackpot on Saturday, during a stop at a resale shop we visit sometimes. They have a couple of shoe boxes of postcards for sale at a quarter each, which isn't bad. But when we dropped by, everything in the shop was half price. So each card was only a bit. What else can you get for a bit? Even a shave and a haircut is six bits. Or two bits, sources vary.

So I got $10 worth. A few cards are written on, but most are virgins. A handful are pre-World War I, most mid-20th century. Nothing looks in shape to be collectible, but all of them are mailable, which is what I will eventually do with most of them. The images include hotels and motels, natural wonders, Euro-churches and palaces, streetscapes, monuments, paintings, college campuses, a hospital or two, and other oddities.

This is a motel card, the kind motels used to offer as bits of marketing. The place looks forlorn.

Note that the name of the motel is blacked out. That wasn't an accident. On the other side of the card "MIKE'S" was handwritten to replace [Blotted Out Name] MOTEL and TRAILER PARK. A new phone number was added by hand, and it was done long enough ago that the seven-digit number has no area code. In fact, the seven-digit number seems to be replacing a four digit phone number.

So it could be that Mike bought an old motel (in Detroit, Oregon) and a lot of old cards came with it. Rather than creating new cards, he just changed the old ones. What was the old name? Bates, maybe.