Cards AND Flowers

"Penney Post Cards & Prairie Flowers" is the book written by Montana's Philip J. Burgess & we just started reading this tome last night (Tuesday) up at the Marias Heritage Center here in Shelby. In the early 1900's sending & saving picture post cards was a prevalent & a deadly boring fad in a million middle class family homes. Yet the plethora of cards printed in the period now forms a solid bank on which to draw some of the most charming &, on occasion, the most horrid mementos ever bequested one generation by another. Vintage post cards from the turn of the century constituted some of the truest visual records ever made of any period-authentic voices out of the past. The comments, anarchic or absurd, pertinent or impertinent are archeological finds. The circumstances, often, one can only guess at. That's according to Walker Evans, published by Basic Books, 1999, by James R. Mellow & writer Burgess says "Hopefully, the reader will find him or herself immersed in the voices & images, & indeed touched by the humanity, of that different time & different place-as I was". We'll have to wait & see on that deal Phillip...we only got through the 1st 24 pages last night at the Heritage Center. See you next Tuesday evening at 6 for MORE Montana History at the Marias Heritage Center