June 29, 2023

Author: Ray Hahn

Desert Plants – Cacti, Date Palms, and Yuccas

Ray Hahn

Desert Plants

Cacti, Date Palms, and Yuccas

I have no love for, nor dislike of cactus!

The “degree of care phrase,” benign neglect was defined the day, more than a quarter century ago, when I won a door prize at a long-ago forgotten faculty-social event. My prize was

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Oh Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

Ray Hahn

Oh Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

This story begins in the living room of my boyhood home on Oak Street. It’s about the first two pieces of music I heard on different radios more than 32 years apart.  

Just a few years after the introduction of 33 1/3

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April 30, 2023, A Fifth Sunday

Ray Hahn

April 30, 2023,
A Fifth Sunday

There was a “Fifth Sunday” in January 2021, on that day Postcard History began a series of articles on unrelated postcards that had short but interesting histories. Today, the fifth Sunday of April 2023, we present three more histories of three unrelated

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Minnie Freeman’s Most Notable Day of Teaching

Ray Hahn

Minnie Freeman’s Most
Notable Day of Teaching

In a genealogy workshop, one of my students was telling a family tale that she heard around 1955 from her grandmother. It was about her Great Uncle’s birth in 1888. Supposedly the birth took place during a weather event frequently referred

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The Story of Edson Keith

Ray Hahn

The Story of Edson Keith

During the early morning of Monday, September 21, 1896, a story was unfolding in Chicago that would fill several pages of the Chicago Daily Tribune and the Chicago Chronicle for the next several days.

Edson Keith, the millionaire banker, merchant prince, and head

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Edward Tuckerman Potter America’s Episcopal Architect

Ray Hahn

Edward Tuckerman Potter

America’s Episcopal Architect

Buckminster Fuller once commented, “When I’m working a project, I never think about beauty, but when I’m finished, if my solution is not beautiful, I know it’s wrong.”

It could be Edward Tuckerman Potter was never wrong!

When Edward Potter decided to

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The Sphinx – the world’s most accomplished witness to history

Ray Hahn

The Sphinx

the world’s most accomplished witness to history

In the parlance of recorded history, the phrase “Witness Tree” is frequently found in after-battle accounts and descriptions of historic or often extraordinary events that occurred at a given site. A favorite use of the phrase comes from times

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The Tragic End of August J. Bulte

Ray Hahn

The Tragic End
of August J. Bulte

The average collector of advertising postcards will, when asked, give you a dozen good reasons for collecting, but the most common is that advertising cards symbolize elements that enhance the curiosity we have in social history. The postcards we examine here

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Portugal – Europe’s Best Kept Secret

Ray Hahn

Portugal

Europe’s Best Kept Secret

Of the forty-four countries in Europe, Portugal ranks fourteenth with a population of just over ten million. Officially the Portuguese Republic includes the offshore archipelago of the Azores and the island of Madeira. (See PostcardHistory.net, Madeira – Isles of the Blessed: January 17,

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The Pageant of Cape Cod

Ray Hahn

The Pageant of Cape Cod

The artwork on this beautiful old postcard is by Gerrit A. Beneker. Beneker’s name on postcards is quite rare. (Within my thirty-five years of collecting, his name has appeared on only two or three other postcards. (One you will see later down this

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