Next Voyage for the Swan: Faroe Islands

Got another postcard from Ed today. His cards can be counted on to be from far-flung places I’m unlikely to visit. Sure enough, today’s missive from the Shetland Islands, since he’s on a long tour of near-Arctic places best visited in August.

I’m more likely to visit the Shetlands than, say, Uganda, but even getting to Scotland, much less remote islands to the north, would be something of an achievement. It’s a lovely card, one of the long ones (8.5 x 3.5 inches, or more likely in the EU, 21.5 cm x 9 cm). The image is a waterside view of Lerwick, capital of the islands, looking very Nordic, or maybe a Scot-Nordic blend. The back of the card simply says The Swan.

There’s no other explanation of that, so I had to look it up. It’s the sailing ship in the picture, near the right side of the card: a restored vessel that the SwanTrust calls “one of the finest boats among the Scottish fishing fleet, and… the largest ever built at Lerwick in Shetland… The Swan Trust offers voyages around the Shetland Islands, and to other destinations such as Faroe, Norway, Iceland and Amsterdam.”

Ed mailed it on July 30, so that’s only four days in transit, a minor marvel by itself. It costs 87p to send a long card from the Shetlands. Her Majesty is still looking not elderly on her stamps, unlike the woman who opened the Olympics last week.

Cavern Inn '72

The ultima of our family trip in the summer of '72 was that classic destination, Carlsbad Caverns NP. The cave was impressive, of course, but I was 11, so just going to stay in a motel somewhere was fun. We ended up at the Cavern Inn Motel in Whites City.

The back of the card is incredibly busy, with bullet-pointed lists of motel amenities (including "clean mountain air" and "sky ride to Indian Cliff House"), information about the national park (hours and admission), and a map. There's barely any room to write a message on the oversized postcard.

I was glad to learn that Carlsbad Caverns charged $1.50 admission at the time for everyone over 16, which means my visit didn't cost anything. These days, over 15 admission is $6 for admission without a guide, which is what I think we did, so in real terms cave admission is cheaper than it was in the early '70s, since $1.50 in 1972 equals about $8 now. That's assuming the card wasn't that old when we got it, which is a fair bet since it's got both a zip code and an area code on it, and besides, look how important orange and aqua are to the color scheme.

Silver Surf Motel '73

It's postcard week. Why not? It's a gray chilled February and I have a lot of regular work to do, both of which cut into going there and seeing that, much less writing about it.

Back in the summer of 1973, during a family trip to California, we spent the night in San Simeon, with the idea of visiting the Hearst Castle the next day. But it turned out that without reservations, the wait to get in would have been many hours, so we went on up to coast to San Francisco. One of these days, if I live long enough, I'll drive up the California coast again and make sure I have reservations to get into Xanadu.

(I checked the Hearst Castle web site today and discovered that it "will relive its Hollywood heydays of the 1920s and ’30s for one star-studded night during the 'Hollywood to Hearst Castle' event on Friday, March 9th." Among other things, the event will include a screening of Citizen Kane, which was not known to be William Randolph Hearst's favorite movie. Heh-heh.)

We stayed at the Silver Surf Motel that night. Our single souvenir from the visit to San Simeon is this postcard, a relic of the time when hotels and motels provided postcards and stationery to guests, supposedly as a convenience but of course really as marketing. The marketing effort has certainly worked in this case: the place is getting a mention almost 40 years later.

I don't remember much about the Silver Surf, specifically -- all the motels I visited before ca. 1980 have fused into a single memory of a room with shag carpets, a color TV with bad horizontal control, orange and aqua furniture, a bottle opener attached near the sink, a paper Sanitized For Your Protection ribbon, and occasionally Magic Fingers. The back of the postcard says, "a charming garden motel... 40 attractive ocean view rooms... enclosed heated pool... putting green... children's playground... coffee and TV in rooms... 3 restaurants and cocktail lounge adjacent... all major credit cards." That last one included BankAmericard and Carte Blanche, by gar.

The Silver Surf Motel is still around. Except for the motel marquee and the color schemes, its web site pics don't look that different than on the postcard.

A Fergus' Ark Two-Color Postcard, With Commentary

My brother Jay recently sent me a batch of blank postcards. I was glad to get them, since my supply is down to only a few hundred. The nearby resale shop that used to sell me cards at 25¢ each, or even 12.5¢ on sale days, has jacked up the price to $2 and $3 a card. At that price, forget it.

One of the cards he sent depicts Fergus' Ark, a floating seafood restaurant formerly in Wilmington, NC. The card must be 50 years old, and produced as cheaply as a color card can be -- a two-color printing job, which just screams cheap.

Note the writing on the card. Someone made a comment on the restaurant, presumably after a visit, and it wasn't favorable. "ordinary no good no atmosphere expensive for what one gets"

This is scanned from the back of the card. Not the entire back, which has a space for writing a message and a address like any postcard, but only a corner of the card. The mascot fish wears a top hat and carries a cane, for that touch of piscine class.

The Cafe Fear Museum web site tells me that "the first Fergus’ Ark (1952-1965) was a floating restaurant moored at the foot of Princess Street in Wilmington. The ship the Ark, originally named the General Frederick C. Hodgkins, was built in Wilmington in the early 1920s. According to the restaurant’s menu, the Ark had been a banana boat, a floating casino, a quarter boat for members U.S. Coast Guard in World War II, and, in 1946, the U.S. Maritime Commission’s office space. Then Ivon Eldridge Fergus (1914-1998) bought the Ark in September 1951 and converted it into a restaurant.

"The first Fergus’ Ark closed in February 1965 so that a coast guard facility could be built in its place. Mr. Fergus then opened a Fergus Ark on Market Street and two others on Carolina Beach Road and Oleander Drive. At one point, Fergus owned four restaurants... As for the Ark, it was initially sold to a Florida businessman. Over the next decades, it changed hands a number of times yet it was still afloat in the 1990s, serving as the office of a Florida boating supply company."

Among the Bills and Circulars

This postcard arrived from the poet Geof Huth last week.

28 January 2012

"Dees ----------------

The reverse of this card... I used to practice three poems that were physical in nature, three poems that I could not start over because I was creating each onto surfaces that I had only one copy of, so this is colorful, messy, exact, crayoned, inked & impressed onto & tomorrow I may begin another one of these. Geof.

Item From Someone Else's Past: Dinner at the Sanitarium, 1915

A few months ago I practically cleaned out the postcard bin at a nearby resale shop, since the cards were going to 12.5¢ each. A card for a bit, in other words, and there isn't too much you can get for a bit. Even a shave and a haircut used to be two, or maybe six.

One of the cards was this one, vintage early 20th century, a picture of the famed Sanitarium at Battle Creek, Mich. It was never mailed as a postcard, so I was planning on sending it to someone, when I saw the writing on the front of the card.

It says: "Ate dinner here on Tuesday, Aug. 10, '15 Daddy." Interesting that "Daddy" wrote his message on the front, and I can only speculate that perhaps he stuck the card in a letter he mailed home, rather than mailing the card itself. Who was "Daddy"? What was he doing in peaceful Battle Creek that summer day 95 years ago, as the world burned in far-off Europe? Was he a health-food enthusiast eager at long last to try Dr. Kellogg's formulations, or simply curious to see what the health nuts at the San would serve him?

I'll never know. Speculation will have to do. My guess about the card's provenance is the following: "Daddy" sent the card home, his kids looked at it for a moment and then got back to the 1915 equivalent of Xbox, and it was kept at his house for years. When "Daddy" and his wife were at last gone, the card passed to one of the children, who likewise kept to stored away for sentimental reasons. Closer to our time, the child, now an old man or woman, died and the card went to one of "Daddy's" grandchildren, who also kept it for reasons of sentiment, maybe remembering his or her grandfather in the wispy way I remember my mother's father.

In our time, "Daddy's" grandchild came to the end of his or her life not long ago, leaving behind children with no memory or sentimental notion of a fellow who passed through Battle Creek in the summer of 1915. "Donate them to the resale shop," was a spouse's suggestion regarding a stack of old postcards, along with some other unwanted items.

There may be no writing on the back of the card, but the printing does say that it's an Octochrome, with a serial number 38846. Goggle that name and that number and the result is -- nothing. However, according to the web site of the Metropolitan Postcard Club of New York City, "an Octochrome is a trade name for a type of postcard distributed by the American News Company that was printed using four-color continuous tone lithography. These cards are characterized by a sharp look with hard clean colors that emphasize blues and reds. They were printed in Germany."

The United States was still neutral in 1915, of course, but I have to wonder whether the American News Co. had its supply of postcards from Germany disrupted by the war. Probably. I figure the one I have, which was acquired by "Daddy" in 1915, was manufactured just before the war.

But No Postcards From Nietzsche

The verb used to be "surfing" the Internet -- how quaintly '90s -- but it's more like clearing your way through undergrowth with a machete. If you're not paying much attention, the path you've cleared will disappear again, and you won't be able to remember how you got there; and if you don't bookmark, you might never come that way again.

So how did I find the Nietzsche Family Circus? Only a few hours after I found it, I don't remember. "The Nietzsche Family Circus pairs a randomized Family Circus cartoon with a randomized Friedrich Nietzsche quote," says the site. "Refresh the page to see a new comic..."

I had to spend a few minutes with that. The best pairing I randomly created featured the eldest child, whatever his name is, standing in his pajamas next to a pile of presents under a Christmas tree on Christmas morning, saying, "God is dead." Was that really randomized?

The Free-Floating Dysfunctional Family Circus Archive v1.1.2, on the other hand, isn't randomized. It's astonishing how many dysfunctional captions there are.

I visited the resale-shop postcard bin today. Not my first visit there, but I try to hit the periodic half-off storewide sales, when the cards are 12.5 cents each. Can't beat that. Except today, when everything in the store was 75 percent off. Cards were 6.25 cents each. I bought 50.

Some depict places I've been, others do not, and a few are novelty cards. Out of 50, I bought two previously mailed cards without looking at them too closely. But I did see that they feature archetypical postcard messages, that is, along the lines of "we are here, it's beautiful here, we like it, see you later."

That shorthand is so well known that Jimmy Buffett was able to use for his own comic ends as recently as 1981 in a song called "The Weather Is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful." But I suspect that future generations -- as soon as my daughters' cohorts -- won't be familiar with it.

One card was of Niagara Falls, sent by a Mrs. Wallace to a Mr. & Mrs. Joe Van of Green Bay, Wisconsin.

The other was of the Blue Ridge Parkway, sent by Viola to Mr. & Mrs. H. Dede of Floral Park, New York.

On closer examination, the really astonishing thing is that these two cards were mailed within days of each other in July 1970 -- one definitely the 21st of that month, according to the postmark, the other maybe the 16th or the 18th, since the postmark is incomplete.

That by itself isn't astonishing. But what were they both doing in the same box in the same shop at the same time, considering that they went to different people in different states 40 years ago? Moreover, I picked them more-or-less at random out of several hundred cards. How did this happen? I'll never know.