Huh?!

The title at the bottom of this post card says, "THRILLING ONE ACT

DRAMA ENTITLED "THE RULER, THE COLLAR AND THE MURPHIES. OR WHY THE SMITHS LEFT HOME AND TRAVELED BY THE NORTHERN PACIFIC RAILWAY." I found this to be a rather enigmatic sentence. I can see the connection between the ruler and the dollar coin; they are there to give perspective to the size of the potatoes. Even having said that, I believe there may have been some "graphic design" liberties being taken regarding the actual sizes of the elements. On the other hand, I have seen some rather large Idaho potatoes. This picture may be legitimate!! No matter. The picture and the phrasing got me to do some research. Here is what I found:
....1) The post card was mailed on May 13, 1910 so I looked up the dollar coin that was circulating in 1910. The coin was 38.1 millimeters (1.5 inches) in diameter - take a look at the ruler and coin; it is accurate! - and 2.4 millimeters thick. It was composed of silver (90%) and copper (10%). The mints in Carson City, Denver, New Orleans, Philadelphia and San Francisco all minted the coin. It is called the Morgan dollar coin because it was designed by George T. Morgan. This website contains lots of information about the history of the dollar coin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan_dollar
....2) Who are the Murphies? My research has shown me that the Murphies being referred to on this post card are NOT PEOPLE at all. It turns out that Murphy is slang for potato! Between 1820 and 1930 4.5 million Irish people immigrated into the United States. Between 1820 and 1860 they were 1/3 of all the immigrants and in the 1840s they were half of all immigrants. Murphy was a common name shared amount the Irish immigrants. People started to say that the Irish were as plentiful as potatoes. The next leap in parlance was to simply call the potatoes Murphies.
....3) The logo in the top right-hand corner is that of the Northern Pacific Railroad. The railroad charter was approved by Congress in 1864 and it stretched from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Northwest. It had almost 11,000 kilometers (6,800 miles) of track when in 1883 former US president Ulysses S. Grant drove in the last spike. The route through the Pacific Northwest took the track right into the heart of potato growing farmland. Thus, using the potato on the front of a post card with their logo makes perfectly good sense. In fact, the phrasing at the bottom, not so subtly, suggests that you follow the Smiths' good example and take the train to the land of potato plenty.

The back of the post card is trying to continue the potato theme.

Spud is another nick-name for potato. And, notice that Doctor Spud is on the Scenic Highway through the Land of Fortune? This is the same location through which the Northern Pacific Railroad just happened to have been laid. This is the entire back of the post card:

One last interesting item on the post card. Look again at the top picture of the front of the post card. There is a small dot in the bottom right-hand corner. I could not make it out with my large magnifying glass, so I blew it with my scanner.

This is what it looks like: I have no idea what it is, except, maybe, the printer's mark. If it is the printer's mark, my guess is that the printer's name started with an S.

Is This Post Card Related to Last Week's Post Cards?

This is a re-run of one of the post cards from last week. I am not, as the title of this post suggests, questioning if this post card is related to last week's; that is obvious. I am showing it here because I would like you to notice a couple of interesting points.
1) The words in the upper left-hand corner say, "The Kind We Raise in".
2) The flat car on which the onions are setting
3) The number on the flat car: "L. S. & M. S. 26 323"
4) The shape of the train car in front of the flat car (presuming the train is traveling to the right)
5) The ratio of sky, blue sea(?), and train track

Now look at this set of post cards:

The words in the upper left-hand corner say, "The Kind We Raise in our State".

The vegetables are sitting on a flat car.

The number of the flat car: "L. S. & M. S. 26 323".

The shape of the train car in front of the flat car is the same.

And the ratio of sky, blue sea, and train track are the same.

The only difference is that the words on the front have add "our State"

When I turn over the card, it is obvious that these three have been printed and published by the same company.

Now let us look at the post card in question:

Doesn't it look awfully familar?

Here are the only differences:

1) The printing of the words is in black ink instead of the original red.
2) It is a white border card. That means that it was printed between 1915 and 1930.
The company that printed the post cards from last week and the three above was only in business from 1912 to 1914.

That means, to me, that another post card company saw the original post cards, thought they were a great idea, and with no worry about copyright infringement (the original company is now gone), went ahead and published these as their series of post cards. This is what the back looks like. No reference to the original publisher at all:

You can see that the new publisher has decided to start their own series: "Freak Vegetables".

I Am Lucky to Have These

Here are two more exaggerated food concept cards. The first one shows a giant potato. The wording tells us that it is "the atmosphere here" that is responsible for the size of the potato, wherever here is - you get to guess, or see on the other side from where the post card was mailed. The bottom one shows two giant onions from wherever... you get to fill in the blank, although there is no line to write on like on the EH Mitchell cards. I am not as excited about the pictures on the fronts of these two cards as I am about what I found on the backs.

The top post card is very ornate and attractive. I wondered which company would draw attention to themselves like that. There is no company name on the card - front or back. I was very disappointed and thought that there is no use in blogging about this post card; there isn't much to say. All I could think about was that I have two copies of that card - one slightly larger than the other. Nothing exciting.

I continued on through Volume 4 of my collection (where the exaggerated pictures post cards are kept). I noticed that the back of the post card with the onions looked familiar. I went back to the potato post card and "Voila!" it had the same "scrolly", fancy design on the back.

It also had some identifying marks at the bottom!! The first mark was this owl and art supplies. I found nothing that corresponded. I greatly depend on the website: http://www.metropostcard.com/metropcpublishers.html for historical information about printers and publishers of post cards. They have done a lot of work and deserve even more credit for that work. There was nothing with the owl logo or Gold Medal Art on their website. So I decided to look at the next indicator on the post card:

I looked up to see if Mr. Google could find a certain J. Herman from 1912. Again, nothing; this includes a search through the Metro website.
The next clue was at the bottom of the line that makes this a divided back era post card:

For this logo I went straight to the Metropolitan website and searched under "M" because that top item looked like a fancy M. This could be interpreted as "MPCo". Scrolling down the Ms I found it!! This is the logo of the Midland Publishing Company from New York City, New York. Here is the description from the website: "A publisher of holiday and greeting cards. Most of their cards were printed in the United States by the Gold Medal Art Company, whose distinctive owl logo appears on the back. Their designs were very simple and often uninspired."

I am luck to have these (I have a total of eight of them) post cards in my collection because the company was only in business from 1912 to 1914.

Celebrating Almonds in California

This post card is definitely celebrating the fact that almonds grow in California. Those are actually flowering almond trees behind the rail car in the post card. This post card was mailed on January 16, 1913 and I wanted to see if the almonds were still being grown in California 107 years later. Sure enough, there are three Almond Growers Associations near (within 300 km) San Francisco. One town, Kerman, has the same name as a town in Iran that grows pistachios. I wonder if this is a coincidence???

This picture to the left is the back of the post card. I cannot read the writing, but I can see that it was sent from San Jose, California to Chicago, Illinois. I also see that the post mark is advertising that there will be an international exhibition in San Francisco in 1915. The World's Panama Pacific Exposition

was from February 20th to December 4th of that year. It was seen as an opportunity to show to the world that they had recovered from the earthquake of 1906. They did very well.

The Only One in My Collection

Don't let the title fool you. We are still staying with the theme of exaggerated pictures on post cards with this post. We are straying away from exaggerated edibles to exaggerated lumber

(or rather titles for the lumber). The title on the front of the card is there to get your attention (as if the picture, itself, isn't enough). This particular post card is calling these very large timbers "toothpicks". The back of the post card, however, gives away the truth of the situation.

This shipment of wood is from Washington or Oregon and the people in that area of the United States are proud of their handiwork and production.
Now, to explain the title of this post. I keep track of all the printers and publishers of the post cards in my collection. I have 3,036 post cards from 529 identifiable printers and publishers. This is the only post card with Wesley Andrews in "the credits".

This line has been turned 90 degrees so you can read it. It is actually used as the line between the address and the message sections of the post card - very creative use of words. The texture of the paper used for the post card, the code on the front in the bottom right-hand corner and these words "C. T. ART COLORTONE" tell me that this is a Curt Otto Teich card from early 1932. I have lots of post cards from him. But, this is the only post card that I have with a credit going to Wesley Andrews. I looked him up on the internet and this is what I have found. He was born in Ontario, Canada (YAY! A fellow Canadian!!) and set up his first publishing shop in 1904 in Baker, Oregon. He was also a photographer famous for his views of the Oregon coast. He moved his shop to Portland around 1920 and eventually sold it to Herb Goldsmith before his death in 1950. Andrews donated hundreds of his negatives to the Oregon Historical Society, leaving a legacy of his pioneering photography.
This what the back of the post card looks like: