I'm back! And I will tell you right now, six-thirty came awfully damn early this morning.
So! I was in an antique store in Ithaca the other weekend. I went picking through the three-for-a-buck postcard box, and chose three that had interesting graphics.
Imagine my surprise when I got home and discovered that all three were addressed to a "Miss Gladys Bailey". Only one had an address - R.R. No 3, Newark Valley, Tioga Co., NY.
Newark Valley is about thirty-ish miles from Ithaca, and approximately the same distance from my house.
Only one card has a postmark, which reads May 1916.
Dear Miss Gladys Bailey: I've got your postcards. I hope you had a good life. I wonder if you married and had kids. Did you like living in Newark Valley? Did you live there for a long time?
I wish I could get her postcards back to her.
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4 comments:
I always feel the same way when I run across those kinds of post cards...to mention that it was so sweet back then that people took the time to send things like that, which seems so rare now-a-days (except for us, of course!)
I occasionally buy old photographs, and I always wonder why they were discarded. Yeah, probably part of an estate, but hey, this was somebody's ancestor. Why didn't the family keep it?
Maybe there was a family feud. Maybe the photos in antiques stores are of people the rest of the family hated?
"GOD, here's a photo of Great Uncle Frank, that asshole. Put it in the Goodwill pile."
I can't imagine chucking a photo, otherwise ...
Lovely. It's nice to have a piece of someone's personal history.
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