High Tech, Bye Tech

     Once upon a time, when I was young, I was given a digital watch.  Digital wristwatches were a VBD (Very Big Deal), as this technology was still very new and seen only on the arms of those who were AOTC (Ahead of the Curve).  It was such a new technology that, like most new things, it was exceedingly expensive.  Sears Roebuck, the source of my watch, in fact offered a cheaper and more reliable alternative, which is what I received.  It was actually an analog wristwatch where the gears inside had been designed so that instead of turning hands on a face, they turned discs under a face.  At 8:99, these discs pulled the eight, a zero, and another zero under the openings for hours and minutes, and, as sixty seconds ticked away, gradually pulled up a 1 to replace to the second zero.  It was ingenious, intricate, and obsolete within a few weeks.  The LEWD display was refined to a point at which it appears on most of our devices (Digital watches were for a short time available for a dollar in vending machines, but this was still in the day when putting four quarters into a vending machine spoke of Conspicuous Consumption.)  All the work which went into producing an analog digital watch was pushed aside as the world moved on.

     History is filled with such examples of high tech wonders which are now utterly, utterly consigned to the back shelves of closets.  I never owned a beeper, nor yet a Blackberry, but I did own a portable word processor.  Word Processing goes way back to the nineteenth century: businesses desperately wanted devices which could produce copies of letters without someone having to copy them longhand.  (Yes, for years people filed letters by putting them under tracing paper in a ledger and tracing the entire letter.  If you have an Abraham Lincoln letter which is on transparent paper with a big blue number up in the corner, you may, er, want to reconsider your retirement plans.)

     You may check the history of word processing devices elsewhere, how the word processing typewriter was supposed to be an essential for any high-tech office (t was a typewriter which could record keystrokes on magnetic tape, so a letter someone else had been written could be called up and edited).  The glory days of the word processor, as far as retail stores are concerned, was the period between the invention of the personal computer and the realization that a personal computer would be useful to someone who was NOT a techno-geek.  My word processor was a device about the size of a three-ring binder, with a screen which showed about 600 characters at a time (you scrolled to see longer documents) and could store nearly a hundred pages of material in its memory.  It was ideal for people who wanted to write letters or short stories on the go.  It could be connected to someone’s computer printer and print pages, too (otherwise, why bother?)

     You know what happened.  The personal computer took over the market, with its word processing software.  The portable word processor lingered a while, for people to use on a bus or airplane (the battery was good for a whole hour) until phones and tablets took their place.  (My word processor would NOT, for example, hook up to the Internet so I could send my prose elsewhere.  The Internet as we know it hadn’t been invented yet.)

     But the greatest niche invention of my youth is one so thoroughly forgotten now that a quick Internet search turned up no references to it whatsoever.  It was an educational product which was so fascinating in itself that I remember not one second of the content, though I remember the technology very well.

    Those of my generation will remember what watching an educational film in class meant.  The shades would be pulled, the lights would be switched off, and then the teacher, or some tech savvy kid, would thread the film through the sprockets, fit it into the take-up reel, and switch on the projector.  If everything worked, the sound would blare, the picture would appear on the screen, and the film would collect on that all-important take-up reel (and not coil into piles on the floor,.)  Afterward, the whole thing would need to be done backward so the movie would be on its original reel.  (Some of you from the generation which did this on videocassette, at least, will remember rewinding.)

     This was a LOT of work, and, of course, so a technology was sought which would avoid all this.  Different kinds of film loops were used, which at least obviated the necessity for rewinding, but few of these caught on until some genius came up with the film loop cartridge.  Suddenly, just about any moron could show a film: you took the cartridge, jammed it into the back of the projector, and pressed “PLAY”.  The cartridges were not big: about one minute’s worth of movie was all that could be easily stored in a cartridge.  But that was enough for some purposes: in shop class or a science lab, one process could be shown over and over (since the loop would repeat until switched off.)  It could be viewed in limited space: no longer did that tech-savvy student also have to set up a screen.  One could sit in a cubicle and watch instructions on how to light a Bunsen burner a hundred times in a row, if that amused you.

     The other niche market for this technology weas, of course, pornography, where watching the same procedure over and over…okay, I thought you’d get it.

     Less than three years after this appeared in my chemistry class, the videocassette came to my school.  Now up to eight hours of material could be slid into a slot on a device and, provided your tech-savvy kid hooked up the TV properly, could be watched straight through.  The ability to watch one minute of film over and over seemed suddenly less magic. The loop cartridge projector joined the analog digital watch and the laptop word processor in the hall of Great Forgotten Inventions.  (Maybe some time we’ll discuss wire recordings, or that chap who invented a way of recording sound long before Edison played his first phonograph.  If the chap had just thought of a way to play back his recordings….)

A Few More Lines

    In the interests of full disclosure, which seems to be all the rage, I should let you know that I have by no means exhausted my supply of fishing postcards.  The subject was a good seller, and cartoonists sought (though they failed at least as often as fishermen) to come up with a new angle on angling.  So there are plenty more postcards in the sea, if you can untangle my metaphor.  Thank you: watch out for the hook.  And my own inventory has hardly any of that wildly popular rppc phenomenon, where a photographically altered fish was rearing its head in the pond or resting on the back of a truck.  And then there are the “Here’s my catch” rppc, with…but why spoil the sport for you.  You can go in quest of others.

     But we have run the gamut of emotions in the world of fishing, from the big one that got away to the little one that was all we had to show for our efforts.  Some viewers may have wondered, through it all, “Well, what’s the point?  Why not just go BUY a fish at the market?”

     So we will sum up by considering Fishing Fever, as discussed above.    There are people for whom fishing is simply the apex of existence, a thing to be relished while doing it, and to be dreamed of when not.  It is their concept of Nirvana.

     For those who live in a part of the world where fishing is seasonal, the off season is a time of anticipation.  Training may start in the dead of winter.

     And the whole household is turned over to an indulgence of the passion for fishing.

     When fishing is in season, any excuse to get out there on the lake or river will do, and all other interests must take second place.

     And once out on a fishing trip, nothing must be allowed to break in on one’s enjoyment of the sport.

     Not even, as examined in these two cards, if one’s pipe goes out.

     Patience is not always considered a virtue,

          But hope is a constant.

N     ow, of course, some people fish as a form of competition.  Not for them the quiet contemplation or the pitting of human wits against the forces of nature.  They’re in it for the recognition of their loved ones.

     Which is sometimes hard to get.    

     But the possibility is always there, that one may achieve a place in the memories of fishermen yet to come.

     Those of us on the outside cannot really understand those who pursue the eternal fish.  Bur, as noted, for some people, fishing is real life, and anything else is superfluous.  In the pursuit of happiness, they have found a pursuit which is happiness, and I can’t knock that.

     And I got through this whole column without mentioning that some people are hooked on it.

Fish Optional

     Somewhere around number nine thousand six hundred thirty-seven on my list of things to worry about when I go to bed at night is the thought that a distant civilization of which we know nothing will one day come to Earth and, finding the inhabitants all dead from eating too much tapioca meat loaf, will have to judge us by our postcards.  They will find that dogs were primarily occupied in soaking trees, husbands were uniformly unfaithful, wives were good shots with rolling pins, children stole jam, and everyone who could steal time for it went fishing.

     I simply assume that every hotel or motel or general store within twenty miles of a pond or river stocked fishing postcards.  Maybe every cartoonist, deep inside, would rather be sitting on a dock or a riverbank, watching for a bounce on the line.  But the sheer number and variety of postcards would lead an alien observer, devoid of other information, to conclude that humanity became extinct because it was more interesting in catching the elusive trout than it was in…but we’ll get to that.

     We have already discussed catching The Big One.  For every soul who goes fishing, this is a great dream, but most would settle simply for catching a whole lot of fish.  And if everybody in the party catches their limit, as hinted above, it has been a successful trip.  Consider the plight this chap finds himself in: sometimes you just can’t fish fast enough.

     You simply have to be prepared for some of the worst dangers of fishing, like that slow ride home when your car is simply weighed down by the size of your catch.

     Or the dangers of your friends not believing the trouble you had on your last trip.

     Sometimes, though, in spite of everything,  fisherman will find himself coming home with a refreshingly light load (and a nasty grudge.)

     Of course, it’s not just the fish which can be terrifyingly amazing on such days.  (Look at that worm, for example.)

     Some fishermen, in fact, find the whole business of catching all those fish so exhausting that they decide THEIR fishing trip will not risk any such thing.

     Others, through careful planning, manage to have a nice time on the boat.  Just calculate which supplies to take with you, and you will not find yourself running into the difficulties suffered by other fishermen on this page.

     Thus you can simply relax while on your vacation.

     Other men take a more assertive approach.  The catching of fish can still be completely inessential to a successful fishing trip.  (Though one must be just as prepared for missing out on your quarry.)

     By the way, as mentioned in our previous visit, women fish, too.

     In fact, most postcards will agree that it’s a sport which everyone can enjoy.

     Coming Soon: Summing Up Fishing Postcards (for now)

Angling for Adventure

    I know how disappointed you were on Friday, thinking we had wrapped up our discussion of fishing postcards so soon.  Well, be of good cheer, Pecan Chowder, we have not yet covered the full scope of the fishing postcard.  (I’m not sure it CAN be covered at this point, as the pool of knowledge is about the size of lake Michigan by now, but we’ll make another fishing trip.)

     There is considerable disagreement in the world of fishing over whether the practice is best done alone, or with a friend or two.  Misery loves company, after all, and, as experts across the world have pointed out that not catching a fish while fishing is more palatable if you’ve had a chance to talk for hours with a friend.  Others claim you don’t need a friend to be present with a pole to talk for hours, and these people tend to become postcard cartoonists.

    After all, as observed in the card at the top of this column, a partner can turn out to be a distraction when you’re busy.  Or a distraction generally, as seen below.

    The ideal companion on a fishing trip, of course, is one who can be useful.

    It can be even more of a distraction, though sometimes a pleasant one, if you are taking along a complete novice, who has to learn from your example how fishing is meant to be practiced.

    Though you can’t really get away with a grumble of “Beginner’s Luck”.

    There is no reason, despite the postcards above, that a woman cannot fish as avidly and intently as a man.  This can be seen in the way THEY react to taking along a guest.

    Some fisherfolk just LIKE solitude, though, independent of any annoyance caused by a companion.  Being alone provides time for contemplation of life’s mysteries (wearing white after Labor Day, say, what song the sirens sang, or Mr. Spock’s first name).  When alone, they claim, you just see things that you don’t notice if there’s another person along.  This has nothing to do with what you brought along for refreshments, but that may have some bearing on the matter,

    It’s not all just dreamy little dreams in the world of nature, you see.  There are nightmares as well.

    Of course, dreams are eternal, and the number of postcards treating of this particular fantasy are legion, covering what sort of bait one should be using, and whether you can actually take this catch home to the wife.

    Although, as mentioned hereintofore, women fish, too.

    Coming soon: Friday is Fish Day.

Rabbit Hole Postcard

    I know, I know.  Calm down.  We’ll get back to the ancient jokes one day, I promise.  Maybe next Monday will do.  But I have this postcard I listed for sale, and I was so impressed at the hoops it made me jump through, I wanted to get it all down on paper as an example of what pop culture can do to a person.

    Mabel Lucie Attwell, was an artist who became famous for pictures of cute children (which she claimed were based on her own daughter; NO ONE is that cute.)  By the 1920s, she was popular enough that her name was being highlighted on the cards for sale, so you knew you were getting the REAL Mabel Lucie Attwell.  Her drawings stayed popular through two World Wars, and were still in demand—on postcards, calendars, dishes, dolls, and what have you—when she died in the 1960s, and her daughter took over the licensing.  Mabel Lucie Attwell was, and remains in the world of postcard collecting, a VBD (Very big Deal.)

    But this one includes not just the names of the publisher (Valentine) and the artist, but also promotes the fact that the character being spanked is named Snookums, and that this is one of a series of Snookums cards being illustrated by Mabel Lucie Attwell.  Very nice: so the kid’s name is Snookums, a fairly standard stock name for a small child in pop culture.  THIS Snookums, however, with a trademarked hairstyle (kinda stolen from the Kewpies, but hair is hair) appears on the card courtesy of Universal Pictures.

     Well, that was mildly interesting.  And as I could not read the date on the postmark, which is a nice thing to know when selling the postcard (if the post office said it was mailed in 1930, it is unlikely to be a facsimile printed in 2019).  So I looked up the career of Snookums in motion pictures.

     The fund of bygone media, YouTube, does NOT have any of the THIRTY motion pictures about Snookums, live action comedies involving a baby with that exceedingly annoying hairdo.  The movies focused on Sunny Jim McKean, as Snookums starting at the age of about eighteen months.  Snookums grew up as Sunny Jim did, and both Snookums and Sunny Jim made the transition to Talkies.  At the age of six, however, he retired, perhaps because he or someone at Stern Brothers, who made the films which were then distributed by Universal, decided he was getting too old for baby roles.  His subsequent story is no more cheerful than that of most child stars, as he died of an infection when he was eight.

    But with that depressing note we do NOT say goodbye to Snookums.    The movies were actually a licensed spin-ioff of a popular comic strip, which began in 1904 as The Newlyweds, and, after a few years, became The newlyweds and Their Darling Child Snookums.  (Or and Their Only Child or and Snookums.  Titles of comic strips were less stable in those days.)  The title raises my eyebrows, but I suppose if you’d been reading the strip, the first family-based comic strip, since 1904, you were wondering already how many years the couple could go on being Newlyweds.  (I suppose their last name could have been Newlywed.)  The stri[p was an early hit for George Mcmanus, a prolific and skillful comic strip artist who tossed off comic strips left and right (Another series of his, Let George Do It, was spun off into a film series, too, and one of the actors who played George also played Snookums’s father in several of THOSE pictures.)

    George McManus made his biggest hit, however, with a tale of ethnic diversity and social upheaval with Bringing Up Father, which was being made into silent movies a good ten years before Snookums, and whose leading stars, Maggie and Jiggs, have their own history in American culture.  But that’s a whole nother story.

    I have not yet delved into several further lines of research suggested by this saga.  Why “Snookums” as a kid’s name?  Is he related at all to Fanny Brice’s Baby Snooks?  Did the makers of Force Cereal object to a kid using the name of their advertising mascot, Sunny Jim?  (Mickey Rooney’s original movie name was the object of a lawsuit from another comic strip.)   And about that hairdo: Snookums was in comics pages before Rose O’Neill drew her Kewpies, but, really, neither of them indulged quite so consistently in gravity-defying hair.  But if we keep digging into pop culture, we’ll be demanding popcorn Pop-Tarts.  Let’s all go listen to Mozart for a while.

Hook, Line, Stinker

    In our last thrilling episode, as no doubt you recall, we discussed the extremely popular fishing postcard, and the tales it told of the success of the folks who dedicated their time and effort to the sport.  Cards extolled the joys of heading out at dawn to return with quite reasonable (record-breaking) castches.

     But the postcard cartoonists were well aware that the opposite luck is just as likely.  Well, maybe more than likelyu.  Well, maybe standard.  (The only fish I ever caught had to be thrown back, being rather smaller than the little finger of the nine year-old fisherman I was.  This struck me as mighty poor sport, and though my father had spent a tidy sum of money on fishing equipment, I don’t recall using it again.)

    So the cartoonists admitted that sometimes the luck just wasn’t with you.

    Part of the problem could be having to share the waters with other, less focused individuals.

     Sometimes your own equipment gave you troubles.

     And often, it was a combination of your equipment and your own efforts.

     We have mentioned before that the sitting area of a human being was of great interest to your average postcard artist, so the number of bottoms hooked by unlucky fishermen goes far beyond what we can cover in this space.  (In fact, the number of bottoms uncovered by a lucky cast…but that’s a whole nother blog.)

     Perhaps it was best to fish with a group, so that each person could handle another sorry aspect of the piscatorial passion.

     Because sometimes it seemed that nature itself was in league with your quarry.

     Even your equipment could be working with the enemy.

     At the end of the day, of course, it was what you caught that counted, not the trials and tribulations on the way to the trophy.

     Even if sometimes the law stepped in to tell you you hadn’t done as well as you thought.

     You could still wind up with a catch that was, well, impressive.

     Then, too, perhaps what mattered to the friends to whom you were writing was not how your day went, but  how you told the story.

     Coming soon: even more perils for fishing folk

Jokes About Poles

     I think the time has come to address the five hundred pound walrus in the room.

     There was a time, hinted at hereintofore, when people sent postcards the way we send texts: it was a quick, easy, cheap method of communication.  But times changed.  The number of postal deliveries declined, the price of a postcard stamp went from a penny to two, and, what with one thing and another, a generation grew up which saw postcards as something for special occasions.

     Chief among these special occasions was the vacation trip.  “Send a postcard!” was the common phrase in goodbyes when your cousin or neighbor was headed out for adventures in the Cotswolds, Adirondacks, or Alps.  For a couple of solid decades, sending postcards back from a trip was simply your duty as a human being.  There was an art to buying postcards, like so many of life’s little pleasures, and, as with every art, some people lacked any perception at all.  This is why there are so many postcards of boring hotels and even more boring hotel rooms.  One of the largest categories of postcards we used to get at the Book Fair was the painting: people would stop and buy a picture of every picture they’d seen in the museum.  No need to deny it, or blush: I did it myself once upon a time.  We all did.

     But what we are going to consider in this column, and in several columns thereafter, is the fact that anyone who was NOT going to a boring hotel to dine at fine tables (also visible on postcards( and visit museums was instead going to some little cabin on a lake, where they intended to enjoy a little fishing.  I think there are more fishing postcards in this little assembly than there are on any other subject, even if you include all the dogs and trees in with the outhouse jokes for a general Potty Joke section.

     People who go fishing are just as likely to engage in a certain round of expected activities as dogs at fire hydrants or rooster in chicken yards.  One of those activities is, of course, to lie.  More than one postcard asks the philosophical question “Do all fishermen lie, or do all liars fish?”  The answer to that is one for the ages, like Mr. Spock’s first name.

     But fishermen are expected to lie, to an extent that whenever they DO accidentally tell the truth, they get no respect.

     Even among liars, there are some who have greater physical ability for the sport.

     And they may admit this all themselves, though they all dream of graduating from people who can only LIE about big fish.

     OF course, another theme of the fishing postcard is catching the Big Fish  It’s good publicity for the place where you’re fishing to let people know you can catch…well, bigger fish than this.

     No, I mean really big fish.

     I’m talking about the really big ones, the ones you brag about.  Not as puny as this.

     Something big enough to present a REAL challenge to a genuine sportsman, and not such dabblers  in the water as we see here.

    It’s not really all that good for publicity to show so many fish of insignificant size, though I suppose if one brags how MANY one catches, one could get away with such stuff.

    No, not the ones you cut up for bait.  The BIG fish, big enough to satisfy a storyteller at the bar or barbershop.

     There ARE postcards with really big fish: the kind that today you’d be proud to post of Facebook.  I don’t know why they keep showing off these….

     See?  Eventually you can get out to where a real sport fish is available.  Next time, we’ll consider the other kinds of fishing luck.

History Quiz

Ah, Monday, Monday.  Time for another attempt to get some use  from this book I composed once upon a time, asking for the punchlines to certain ancient, ancient jokes.

    The school year approaches.  For many years, my school district observed a sort of gradual re-entry system, starting classes the Wednesday before Labor Day, so kids had a three day week followed by a four day week and THEN got into the Monday through Friday routine.    These were, by the by, the folks who provided me with those book order forms every month, where I could buy more and more joke books.  Who says you don’t learn anything in school?  Herewith, some of the japes I read over and over in those days when we scratched on rock notebooks with our stone pencils.

J1.Miss Sunshine watched her prize pupil stroll into the classroom well after the bell.  “Tommy!” she snapped.  “You should have been here half an hour ago!”

    “Why?” he replied.  “(          )”

J2.”And yesterday you missed school,” she went on.

    Tommy said, “(         )”

J3.Jennifer: “Teacher, would you punish someone for something they didn’t do?”

     Miss Sunshine: “Certainly not!”

     Jennifer: “Good.  (          ).”

J4. Miss Sunshine: “Class, we will have only half a day of school this morning.”

     Students: “Yay!”

     Miss Sunshine: “Quiet please.  (          ).”

J5.It was Nathaniel’s first day of Kindergarten, and his mother sent a note with him for the teacher.  “Nathaniel is a very sensitive child,” it said. “So if he misbehaves, don’t hit him.  (          ).”

J6.”Tommy, you were supposed to draw a picture of a stagecoach.  But all I see is a pair of horses.”

     “Sure, “ said Tommy, “The horses (         ).”

J7.”Well, now I see the stagecoach, but it doesn’t have any wheels.  What’s going to hold it up?”

     “(          )” said Tommy.

J8.Tommy: “I don’t think Columbus was such a big deal!”

     Miss Sunshine: “He discovered America!”

     Tommy: “Big deal.  (         ).”

J9. Miss Sunshine marched Tommy to the principal’s office.  “What now?” sighed the principal.

    “I asked him who shot Abraham Lincoln, and he answered ‘Well, I didn’t’,” said the indignant teacher.

    The principal fixed a stern gaze on the young man.  “Listen to me, and listen well, my boy.  (          )!”

J10.Miss Sunshine: “Tommy, where was the Declaration of independence signed?”

     Tommy: “(          ).”

J11.Miss Sunshine: “Tommy, when was the City of Rome founded?”

     Tommy: “(          )”

J12:Miss Sunshine: “Tommy, name as many states as you can.”

     Tommy: “North Hampshire, New Dakota….”

     Miss Sunshine: “The very idea!  When I was your age, I could name all the states in alphabetical order!”

     Tommy: “Big deal.  (          ).”

     Classroom comedy, by the way, goes back at LEAST to the days of vaudeville, when young comics (George Jessell, the Marx Brothers) got their break playing students in a classroom, delivering some of these very ANSWERS

A1.What happened?

A2.Not really

A3.I didn’t do my homework.

A4.We will have the other half this afternoon.

A5.Hit the boy next to him.  This will impress Nathaniel.

A6.will draw the coach

A7.Outlaws

A8.It’s so big, how could anybody miss it?

A9.If you did it, you admit it right now

A10.At the bottom

A11.I didn’t even know it was losted.

A12.There were only thirteen of them then

Did They Mean That?

    So in this column, I take my reputation as a scholar of elderly humor in my hands, and carry it gently through a minefield of postcards where I have to admit I may not be getting ALL the joke.    Perhaps the publishers of these cards intended more naughtiness than is coming through, and perhaps they did not.  Am I completely missing the gag, obvious in its day, or do I simply have a dirty mind, and, like viewers of the postcards ion one of last week’s columns, am I seeing more than was originally put in the picture.

    I have no doubts at all, by the way, about the card at the top of this column.  I just wanted to acknowledge that the classic Bamforth seaside postcard has not played a part in this series.  That is because Bamforth deserves a blog or two of its own.  Yes, they ALWAYS meant it.

    Now, we have discussed this gentleman before, and I admit I still haven’t QUITE gotten the joke.  He still looks fairly unconcerned for someone telling his date that his antenna…I just think they could have worked on this caption a little longer and made it more obvious, or less obvious, or something.  Maybe they did, and the censors wouldn’t allow it.

    Here I’m pretty sure I am just soured on this joke by George Ade.  The card is a simple pleasantry based on the idea that the lady inside the barrel is naked.  Not only does the play on words make this obvious, but barrels were the natural attire of people who found themselves deprived of their clothes.  It was a standard trope of slapstick, though it died as we moved into a world in which barrels were harder to find.  George Ade, however, associated the slang expressions “chicken” and “chick” with sex trafficking, and I think it is that alone that makes we wonder WHY the young smiling lady is crouching in a barrel in the middle of a meadow.

    Speaking of ladies in a meadow, here is a much later card where I wonder what’s in the minds of these two tourists who are plainly there to check out the farm lad’s backside.  Considering what he’s doing at the moment, are they suggesting they…of course not.  Just overthinking things again.  It’s Friday, and we’re tired.

    We move on to one I just don’t understand at all.  Or at least I think I don’t.  Are we just straight out suggesting the gentleman in the back there is a pimp, or, worse, a theatrical agent?  I can’t see him as a gigolo, nor can I see why the young lady would need to pay…you tell me.

    Let’s head out to the seaside again.  This card came out into a mid-century America which would certainly never have entertained the notion that the lady was suggesting anything but sharing her flotation device.  I am sure nothing else was intended.  Absolutely sure of it.  No, really.  Don’t know why I even included this picture.

    We have spoken before of how often babies in postcards were shown naked, or nearly so.  But this is a card of nearly a hundred years ago, and surely the whole enterprise, now a large business, of letting adults play dress=up in this particular fashion couldn’t have…. No, this is just a cute simple joke based on a simple expression.  (When I put this one up for sale, it set a new record for fastest purchase.  But, again, that’s probably us, and not the publishers)

    Oh well.  One just has to admit, sometimes, that one is lacking in understanding.  Or other things, like this charmingly non-specific gentleman.  Maybe you’ll explain it all to me when I’m older.

Yeah, They Meant That

    Last week, we considered a few postcards from days gone by which might today be considered dirtier than they were originally intended.  This was not meant to be some sort of argument that our ancestors were clueless when it came to sex.  How do you think they got to be ancestors, after all?

    So I thought today we might consider a few suggestive postcards which were intended to suggest exactly what they seem to suggest.  These are not the naughtiest postcards I have encountered—in all ages there are special wares for distribution among people who shared a taste for more obvious naughtiness (the type who run out the door when puns fly innuendo.  Sorry.)  These are just the SUGGESTIVE postcards.

    The seaside, besides being the traditional place for buying and selling naughty postcards, was also a source of suggestion, being a place where people might spy each other in minimal attire, even if, as at most beaches, ropes were set up to divide the insecurely clad women from the insecurely clad men.  The fine old message above was used on a number of such cards, always to easily understood effect.

    As bathing suit styles changed, jokes changed to fit them, sometimes very tightly.

    Some postcard artists were cads enough to suggest that ladies were scantily clad to attract the attention of the opposite sex: a shocking assumption, of course, but not as shocking as those who suggested an insecurely clad lady might be dressed for business, as with this career woman asking you to send her a letter.

    Such suggestions about the fashionably dressed go back to nearly the turn of the last century.

    Whereas by the 1920s, there were actually suggestions about how she could afford to be fashionably dressed in the first place.

    I don’t know if you recognize THIS executive young lady, who is doing the suggesting herself (with the artist tossing in another slam for the young man by having him hold up a bouquet if oansies, suggesting he won’t be able to manage either of her expectations) but I believe this is the one we saw in the bathtub a few columns ago.  She got around, I guess.

    Say, to go back to our last column discussing old jokes, do you know what the newlyweds always choose for their salad course?  Lettuce alone.  Anyway, in an era when a lot of people were pushing the idea that producing children was the only reason to….

    Speaking of children, it’s a little shocking how often our Edwardian ancestors included them in the naughty postcards.  Of course, as everyone in this picture finds humorous, the scorekeeper (marker) is simply announcing the score correctly.  In billiards, the person shooting is known as the Striker, and if that person is coming in second, then the way to announce the score must include the wortri Striker behind”.

    And yet, itr is shocking how many young street kids in early twentieth century postcards are incurable upskirt peekers.  Most of these are a little more subtle than this specimen, and even though it is the lad’s job to be where he is…well, thank heaven this was a phenomenon of the 1910s, and we did not repeat that sort of joke in later….

    Coming soon: DID they mean it?