Toastcards

I’ll admit that I can’t read the back of this one as well as I’d like, but I love that someone took a postcard from a random hotel then made sure to mention on the front that while it’s not their hotel, it is also fashionable, and that their room is somewhere off to the bottom right.

I have no idea how, but while I was hanging around in an antique store for the first and probably only time this year, another Johnny card just happened to be at the bottom of a wrapped stack of old hotel postcards.

When I found the first one I pictured him as an extremely 1950′s teen on a road trip, but it turns out he was possibly a traveling salesperson for his parent’s cookie distributing company, being run out of their house. The story of Johnny gets a lot sadder from there, though.

This might have been free like the motel ones, but it’s more fun to think a highway rest stop was exciting enough at some point to get it’s own souvenir specifically made for bragging to someone else that you had been there.

I probably could have scanned something more interesting, but here’s the only card I’ve been able to find from where I grew up. And according to someone who was alive when the motel still existed, it might not have even been in Berkley at all. But at least it sounds like Frank had a nice trip.

I randomly got three whole notes in one day, so to celebrate here’s some examples of a mildly interesting thing I’ve come across: postmarks that passive aggressively nag you for writing an address wrong.

Not a postcard, but I was pretty sure no one else wanted this so I bid and can now get two whole dollars off my stay if I ever magically teleport to 1960′s Oregon.

I haven’t found any cards for the mall I worked at once, so here’s two views of the hotel next door. You can also see the giant K-Mart Castle while it was still their world headquarters and not just owned by the mall to use for black friday parking.

I know there’s at least one card in existence with the extremely 70′s original mall interior, but what I don’t know is why I have a burning desire to find it despite only having worked there less than five years ago. And not even enjoying it.

This was probably the only Japanese restaurant in the world named Dutch’s, and today it’s a grass field directly in the flight path of a runway since Mitchell Field became an international airport.