Each Sunday, Christine, at The Daily Postcard, posts a card showing streetcars. So today I thought I'd surprise her with one I just found in a box of streetcars in Elmira, N.Y. The card was mailed on August 11, 1939 from a grandma to Miss Inez Heffron, who was about to turn 6 years old.
Click on image to see it larger.
The card was published by the The Ruben Publishing Company in Newburgh, N.Y. Not finding anything online about the company. And I know nothing about Elmira or the streetcars.
What I do know about this card is that many of the people are fake. Fake folks. There are a few people who were actually in the photo, but the majority of them were drawn with funny little pointy legs. You might have to look at it larger to get the full effect. Unless perhaps there were people in Elmira in 1939 that looked like this. Nah, didn't think so.
Click on image to see it larger.
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Nice overhead shot. The yellow streetcars remind me of an old joke I heard years ago when I interviewed elderly people about growing up in Brooklyn and Queens in the 1940s: They called the trolleys the banana line, because they came in bunches. I have a feeling that joke was told in every town with a streetcar or trolley line.
ReplyDeleteThanks! This is one of my very favorite streetcar postcards. I have a particular interest in Elmira, Binghamton, Endicott, and some of those other upstate NY towns, so that makes this one especially nice. I posted the same one (but without a message on the back) on November 8 last year. I went back to look and see if I had posted much information about the streetcars there. Not much really, just that it was a transportation hub connecting Rochester and Buffalo with Albany and NYC - and that streetcar service there ended in 1939, the very year your postcard was sent. I like how the fake people's legs taper down to a point.
ReplyDeleteI knew you'd know something about it. Thanks for filling me in. Nowwwwwww...do you speak Japanese? No? Well, we'll keep hoping that someone someday finds the Japanese cards and can give us some answers.
ReplyDeleteLinda, love that joke. I can just imagine it being told. The banana line. I'll have to ask my father if he ever remembers hearing it here on the West Coast.
ReplyDeleteI'm not convinced that this is a photograph, but rather a scene FROM a photograph which was altered on the drawing table. Many of these linens (it is linen, isn't it?) were a step beyond the photograph and enhanced and retouched to arrive at a finished product.
ReplyDeleteDave you are right that this started as a photo and then was altered. Cleaned up the streets, put the fake people in the image, doctored buildings and cars. But no, it's not linen.
ReplyDeleteI have a stack of mysterious Japanese cards too and no translator.
ReplyDeleteThe "gramma was my great gramma and inez is my great aunt. So cool to see this!
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