A double post, here, to make up for lost time...this one will piggyback on the Capital City Desk (which see), as I've been wont to do of late.
In a recent post there, Lisa mentioned that the younger set now eschews email as a communicative device in favor of more circumscribed connections...i.e., blogs, MySpace, LiveJournal, etc. Email, it seems, is too bogged down with spam. (Not SPAM spam, of course, but netspam. If it were SPAMspam, it would be tasty and full of delightful chemical-laden recipes and I would reproduce them here for your dining pleasure.)
Another Capital City Desk reader pointed out that real mail (now derisively known as snail mail) is more full of its own version of spam than email could ever hope. The correspondent stated that "for every piece of mail I actually read there are three that I throw out immediately." If that's all the snail-spam she gets, I congratulate her. The junk mail I receive on a daily basis must be enough to kill a patch of rainforest the size of South Carolina.
Back in the Dark Ages, when I was still in college, communication by mail was still pretty important. At the W&M of the late '80s, there still weren't phones in every room and while a lot of people had some form of computer, the Net was still infantile at best and email didn't really exist. If you got word from home, it usually came by mail. If you did need to contact somebody quickly, though, there were plenty of phones around that you could use.
Lisa pointed out that she does tend to receive some occasional "real" mail: mostly from family and friends, myself included, who like to send postcards on vacation.
I am, and have always been, obsessed with postcards. I love the cheery, happy views they offer of places that are not always cheery and happy themselves. To me, they were always something reserved for vacationers--whenever people went on a trip, they sent postcards to everyone back home. To this day, I send a plethora (I love that word) of postcards whenever I travel, despite the facts that (a) I rarely travel anyplace new and (b) most of the people to whom I send postcards have either (b') been there themselves or (b'') seen my postcard views two hundred times. What new views of Rehoboth can possibly be offered up? Crimony, the whole blinkin' town has barely changed for forty years, and the Atlantic Ocean has looked the same for a very long time. However, I do send the occasional "pin-up" postcard of the Beach Patrol to some people, and the beef-and-cheesecake does change every year.
Postcards were once an extremely important form of communication. Now resigned to a small part of the Postal Service's job (which appears to be mostly consumed with credit card offers, these days), postcards once offered a viable form of human contact. They were cheaper to mail than a letter and allowed you to get a quick point across. In an era when most big-city neighborhoods had two mail deliveries daily, they were also fairly efficient.
Over the years, I have collected acres of postcards. Many of the newer ones were sent to me at some time, but I've also amassed a fair collection of older ones as well. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most big institutions--hotels, department stores, theatres--had postcards readily available for customers. I have one card of about 1910 showing Stewart's department store in Baltimore. The message reads "Meet me in the music department tomorrow." Evidently, a postcard was an efficient missive. The recipient would have received the card on the same day it was mailed from downtown, in time to make plans for lunch on the next day.
Naturally, postcards even at the turn of the last century were considered a tourist item as well, and the resulting cliches were formed rather early. I was browsing through my collection earlier tonight and found one card of the Munsey Building in downtown Baltimore. It was mailed to someone in Duncansville, Penn'a. , which is not too far from Altoona. (The Munsey Building, by the way, is one of Baltimore's older and more boring skyscrapers. It was conceived by the famous firm of McKim, Mead and White. That firm was one of the most renowned architectural concerns of its time, but given their contributions to Baltimore, I've never been able to establish exactly why.) The printed blurb on the back of the card rattles on about the building and its amenities. The written message? "this is a grand place wish you were here"
Hmm...well, certainly to someone in Duncansville, the Baltimore of 1916 must have been rather impressive.
Just to illustrate, though, the workaday nature of the postcard once upon I time, I present this gem. It is written clumsily in pencil, on the back of a card I bought specifically because it illustrates one of my favorite theatres of all time (the now-beautifully-restored HIPPODROME). It is addressed to Mrs. Uriah Fritz of Linwood, Maryland (that's in Carroll county). This is a card written not as an invitation nor as a souvenir. It reads, verbatim:
Dear Sister you can get your butter and Uriah shirts done to you can get them Some winter time. how are you all we have colds with love Mildred
Hmm. So much for the Hipp's aspirations as a First-Class Theatre de Luxe.
In a recent post there, Lisa mentioned that the younger set now eschews email as a communicative device in favor of more circumscribed connections...i.e., blogs, MySpace, LiveJournal, etc. Email, it seems, is too bogged down with spam. (Not SPAM spam, of course, but netspam. If it were SPAMspam, it would be tasty and full of delightful chemical-laden recipes and I would reproduce them here for your dining pleasure.)
Another Capital City Desk reader pointed out that real mail (now derisively known as snail mail) is more full of its own version of spam than email could ever hope. The correspondent stated that "for every piece of mail I actually read there are three that I throw out immediately." If that's all the snail-spam she gets, I congratulate her. The junk mail I receive on a daily basis must be enough to kill a patch of rainforest the size of South Carolina.
Back in the Dark Ages, when I was still in college, communication by mail was still pretty important. At the W&M of the late '80s, there still weren't phones in every room and while a lot of people had some form of computer, the Net was still infantile at best and email didn't really exist. If you got word from home, it usually came by mail. If you did need to contact somebody quickly, though, there were plenty of phones around that you could use.
Lisa pointed out that she does tend to receive some occasional "real" mail: mostly from family and friends, myself included, who like to send postcards on vacation.
I am, and have always been, obsessed with postcards. I love the cheery, happy views they offer of places that are not always cheery and happy themselves. To me, they were always something reserved for vacationers--whenever people went on a trip, they sent postcards to everyone back home. To this day, I send a plethora (I love that word) of postcards whenever I travel, despite the facts that (a) I rarely travel anyplace new and (b) most of the people to whom I send postcards have either (b') been there themselves or (b'') seen my postcard views two hundred times. What new views of Rehoboth can possibly be offered up? Crimony, the whole blinkin' town has barely changed for forty years, and the Atlantic Ocean has looked the same for a very long time. However, I do send the occasional "pin-up" postcard of the Beach Patrol to some people, and the beef-and-cheesecake does change every year.
Postcards were once an extremely important form of communication. Now resigned to a small part of the Postal Service's job (which appears to be mostly consumed with credit card offers, these days), postcards once offered a viable form of human contact. They were cheaper to mail than a letter and allowed you to get a quick point across. In an era when most big-city neighborhoods had two mail deliveries daily, they were also fairly efficient.
Over the years, I have collected acres of postcards. Many of the newer ones were sent to me at some time, but I've also amassed a fair collection of older ones as well. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most big institutions--hotels, department stores, theatres--had postcards readily available for customers. I have one card of about 1910 showing Stewart's department store in Baltimore. The message reads "Meet me in the music department tomorrow." Evidently, a postcard was an efficient missive. The recipient would have received the card on the same day it was mailed from downtown, in time to make plans for lunch on the next day.
Naturally, postcards even at the turn of the last century were considered a tourist item as well, and the resulting cliches were formed rather early. I was browsing through my collection earlier tonight and found one card of the Munsey Building in downtown Baltimore. It was mailed to someone in Duncansville, Penn'a. , which is not too far from Altoona. (The Munsey Building, by the way, is one of Baltimore's older and more boring skyscrapers. It was conceived by the famous firm of McKim, Mead and White. That firm was one of the most renowned architectural concerns of its time, but given their contributions to Baltimore, I've never been able to establish exactly why.) The printed blurb on the back of the card rattles on about the building and its amenities. The written message? "this is a grand place wish you were here"
Hmm...well, certainly to someone in Duncansville, the Baltimore of 1916 must have been rather impressive.
Just to illustrate, though, the workaday nature of the postcard once upon I time, I present this gem. It is written clumsily in pencil, on the back of a card I bought specifically because it illustrates one of my favorite theatres of all time (the now-beautifully-restored HIPPODROME). It is addressed to Mrs. Uriah Fritz of Linwood, Maryland (that's in Carroll county). This is a card written not as an invitation nor as a souvenir. It reads, verbatim:
Dear Sister you can get your butter and Uriah shirts done to you can get them Some winter time. how are you all we have colds with love Mildred
Hmm. So much for the Hipp's aspirations as a First-Class Theatre de Luxe.
posted by Daniel | 12:40 AM
1 Comments:
Technologies in South Hadley in the 80s: metal keys, hall phones, boom boxes, electric typewrites, distant computer labs with IBM PCs with a word processing program called Xyrite (as I recall), some CD players, some room phones, and a very few PCs in anyone's dorm room.
The technology that made me go WOW when I was there for my last reunion: the one-card thingies they use to get into buildings (the dorm rooms have metal keys), purchase soda, eat in the dining halls, buy things on and off campus, and to do a load of wash. Oh, I'm sure it was a copy card, too. I recall the exotic functions, best.
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