A Tribute to Our Favorite Mailman

I have never mentioned why I host this postcard blog. I love postcards and I've been collecting them for a long time, but this blog also helps to preserve and honor the memory of John Korinek, a man who delivered mail, collected all things beautiful, and was well loved by friends and family. He died on this day last year, and he is greatly missed. Many of the postcards I post were once his. He would be pleased to know that people are looking at them and enjoying them. I made the postcard below...just one, and sent it off to Kerry, the Postmaster in Cornelius, Oregon, who is doing a special Art of the Postcard exhibition at the Cornelius post office. John would have liked that a lot (except for having his picture on  a card!)

Whenever John called our house, he would always say, "This is John, the mailman." Sometimes we would remind him that he had retired several decades ago, but it didn't matter. Mailman had become part of his identity, for better or worse.

John had a studied appreciation for craftsmanship, beauty, and history. In the 1960s, when old buildings, including churches, were being demolished as part of urban renewal, John would do whatever he could to salvage the precious works of devoted craftsmen. When he asked the crew what they planned to do with the stained glass windows, more often than not the answer was, "If you can get them out before we start demolition in the morning, they're yours." Sometimes he would work through the night to salvage windows, as he did at the First Baptist Church of Binghamton (shown below) when it was demolished (postcard image courtesy of www.CardCow.com)

John also believed that any job, no matter how small, deserved to be done well. We miss his warm heart, and we will forever appreciate his strong principles and sense of honor.

Streetcar Sundays - Caracas, Venezuela 1925

This is the 11th installment of Streetcar Sunday, and we're headed off to Caracas, Venezuela, the country's largest city and it capital. In 1900, the population of Caracas was only 100,000, but by 2008 it had grown to over 3 million.

Trams started service in Caracas in 1882 on 29.5 inch gauge tracks. Caracas, like many other places, started out with horse-drawn trams. What differentiates Caracas from other cities is that it didn't initiate the move to electrical trams by replacing the horse-drawn ones. Instead, it started by electrifying its steam railroads, and horse trams provided connections between the various railroad stations.

The first electric trams began service in 1906. In 1907, thirty additional electric trams were ordered from England. The cars were only 24 feet long and just over 5 feet wide; they had to be small to make the turns on the narrow streets of the old town. The car shown above was ordered from J.G. Brill Co. in Philadelphia in 1909, but it had the same dimensions as the earlier cars.

By the early 1920s, gasoline-powered buses arrived on the scene. Even so, additional trams continued to be purchased and tram service continued until 1947.

If you want to read more about the history of trams in Caracas and look at lots of wonderful historic pictures, check out Allen Morrison's website. For information on the current Caracas Metro system, click here. If you want to look at all of the previous posts for Streetcar Sunday, click here.

Merry Christmas from McAllen, Texas

The great thing about this personalized rubber stamp greeting is that it works year after year. For all I know, Ford and Jo are still using it.