Telephone Memo

As we travel around with our cell phones it's hard to imagine what it must have been like to receive only rare phone calls, and always connected by an operator. If you weren't home the phone would just ring and ring until the operator decided the person was not home. I'm not familiar with this kind of phone though. It appears that the speaker and receiver were fixed and you would just stand next to the phone and talk.

It looks like the girls who sent this, Marvel and Mable, pasted their photo over the printed message. They sent the card from Kingston, Missouri to Marnie Howard in Pueblo, Colorado.  I couldn't find much on Marvel, Mable, and Marnie, except that Mable was born in 1900, and her father John was a mail carrier.

Here's the back of the card, with a message that says:

Hello Marnie

Goodby.

Marvel P.

Japan, Hozugawa Rapids

If you want to travel in the tracks of the Prince of Romania and the Prince of Wales in the 1920s, as well as a number of other royal visitors, you may want to take a scenic boat trip down the Hozugawa Rapids in Japan. The scenery is supposed to be beautiful. It's a little hard to tell from black and white postcards, but this old hand-painted one is much more colorful. It was in with the other Hozugawa postcards, so I am assuming that it is the same location, but I can't be sure.

I love how they're all wearing hats.

Here are the backs of the cards in the same order.

Norwegian Talking Hands

We are in need of a Norwegian translation here. Anybody out there speak Norwegian? If so, your help would be greatly appreciated. We can see that it has something to do with the language of the hands. I understand one of them to say "I will always be true to you", but I couldn't tell you with any certainty what the rest of them represent. Of course it might be more fun to make up meanings. In that case I will say that the two black-cuffed hands on the right (jeg falder tilfeie) means 'I fold tinfoil.'

In any case it's a wonderful card.  Thanks to my neighbor, Marilee, who graciously lent me this card to post here. Here's the back of the card.