Dear Mother

One of the best things I like about my post card collection is the history that it contains. Most of the steam engines on the front of the cards no longer ply the rails. They have visited the scrap iron yards and are now reincarnated as something else... make you wonder, no? The words printed on the backs of the cards inform us of what the publisher was finding important regarding the scenes on the front. This post card is of a steam engine entering southern California - you can tell because the mandatory orange tree is on the right.

The marketing department at (what is now)Detroit Publishing tells us that the San Gabriel Valley is "undoubtedly the best known portion of Southern California". The beauty of the valley is that it "has been transformed from sterile desert" into something wonderful. Having lived in the desert of Arizona, I have always wondered where one could find a sterile desert. The one I grew up in was full of life, if you knew where to look. Ah, the marketing crew! They sure have a way with words, don't they? The best history on this card, though, was not written by the printer, the publisher nor the marketing department. It was written by Floyd McIntosh.

He is writing to his mother to let her know that he has arrived in North Bend, Oregon from Hilltop, Kansas. Hilltop is an unicorporated section of Greenwood County, Kansas about 6 miles as the crow flies southeast of Madison. North Bend, Oregon is about 50 miles southwest of Eugene on the Pacific coast. That is a trip of over 2000 train miles. Floyd says that "it is sure a nice place." I can only imagine going from a prairie location to the Pacific coast. The contrast must be amazing. And he made the trip in March of 1924; not yet the highlight of passenger travel on the rails. My hat is off to his parents, who let him go and to him who left his parents to go.