Diner Monday! I'll post it at the bottom, too.

Today is a special kind of day, because we are getting a pallet of mulch, in bags, on the driveway, and they must be hauled up the steps one at a time. There are 70 bags. Usually it’s a ten-a-bag situation, repeated over and over the first month of the season, but we’re doing it all at once now. I don’t think I need to hit the gym.

I also have three deadlines. I found myself on Friday thinking “well, no big problem, that’s a piece a night over the weekend,” but there’s the small matter of what to write about. One I know. The other two, not so much. Well, just start typing, something will come. Scan the news feeds, find something that will be suitable for a monthly mag, find something else that will be general interest for the Substack. GO.

The Bleat doesn’t count. That’s easy! Postcard show was this weekend, so that means some gripping tales of sitting in a chair and thumbing through boxes of postcards, wondering if this is a dupe. The number of motel postcards amazes me, really. I doubt 10% of the motels survived.

It's not just postcards. Ephmera, too. Good finds, some odd finds.

		I bought for 50 cents a U of M Pocket Appointment Calendar, or PAC. Why?
		Because it had a design on the back that gave me a jolt: hey! I remember that! Hey why not slap that Toffler typeface everywhere. From the era of things that weren’t very good, to be honest

I also found a lot of old B&W photos in need of a rescue and a rehab. I will apply some AI to spiff them up, and you’ll see them in . . . oh, three weeks, if the schedule holds.

		The name on the back of this one set me back, since it’s a Fargo photo, and I was convinced I went to school with his grandson. I even remember the sobriquet he had. The guy took a lot. Hope he’s doing okay. (Update: no relation)

Many other things at cheap, cheap prices. Picked up a 1938 McCall’s for fifty cents. They’re hard to scan and hard to photograph, but I did some work and found some amusing moments.

MeOW.

Tragedy:

Mom wrote back and told her to use Fels Naptha.

Many beautiful things:

Unused. Ancient!

Fewer tables than before. Smaller crowd. One table having a close-out sale. You can feel the hobby fade before your eyes. Most everyone bent over the paper rectangles, shuffling through the stacks, looking for that one card, is in the senior demo. I’ve seen a few “young” folk from time to time, and I got into it when I was in my 40s. But I don’t know how many will care about this archaic scraps in years to come. They'll have no connection to the world they know, and hence, eh, what's the point?

The point is remember the past

Yeah okay sure but why tho

The trademarks of a 100 years ago is our theme this year.

I've no idea how they came up with this name.

Says this Facebook page: "The G.H. Dulle Milling Company was a thriving family owned business in Jefferson City. Gerhard Dulle, a German immigrant, built a two-story mill in 1854." It lasted a hundred years. But! The Dulle familiy was still running the company at the time of this ad.

Okay, I Googled a bit, and lo:

KANRED WHEAT is a pure-line selection from Crimean, one of the hard red winter wheats of the Turkey type imported from southern Russia and grown on large acreages in Kansas and other hard winter-wheat States. The Kanred was developed at the Kansas Agricultural Experiment Station and has been grown commercially during the past five years.

Am I right in thinking that the name came from Kansas, and the Reds?

Ah, always happy to see Frank get a shot at the big leagues.

One of the more unheralded superheroes:

Almost umlauted for extra class.

Frank’s a bad guy, a hijacker. Bargain-basement Bob Crane:

But he’s given a chance to go straight, if he’ll work for the Feds and infiltrate a gangster’s mob.

Something odd about the side of his face.

It is a rote and fairly flat piece. Forrest Tucker is underwhelming as a mob boss. He’s one of those all-business types whose smooth exterior is supposed to hide a violent core, but mostly he seems tired. What we want is the some inadvertent documentary, of course. Not a lot of location shooting for a cheap one like this, but it has a few shots.

The Hotel St. Paul. It’s gone now.

It is not the Hotel St. Paul in St. Paul.

The train station:

Can we find that cover?

Of course. But I can't, because I don't subscribe anmore, and hence don't have access to the New Yorker cover archive. I'll leave you with this: if you're of a certain age, you know the names of the magazines on his left, almost instantly.

As ever: 30 minutes of impromptu . . . things, featuring my hero.

That will do. If it doesn't, there's Matches, Substack around 11ish or so, and the Diner. For free! Because I am an idiot. Generous, but an idiot.