Wish you were here - Werner von Boltenstern postcard collection

Sunset, August, 1996 by Peter Fish

Dear Miss Whitbook: I appreciate so much the stamp and card you sent me. For the last few days here at Lakeshore the weather has been too cold for comfort with rain yesterday. I hope your summer will be as pleasant as I anticipate my own.

Summers are pleasant. Weather is cold. Or warm.

Dear Frances, Everything is very nice here. The flowers are very beautiful, it has been very warm today like July in the east.

"We may or may not have 1 million postcards," Errol Stevens says. "We've never really tried to count them."

Stevens is the curator of the Werner von Boltenstern Postcard Collection at L.A.'s Loyola Marymount University. The von Boltenstern is said to be one of the largest publicly accessible postcard collections in the United States. Anyone who signs the guest book and slips on a pair of white cotton gloves can peruse 41 cabinets of postcards - a world of wish-you-were-heres.

How RU these windy days? I am fine and dandy.

"Werner von Boltenstern was a German photographer and postcard collector who came over here after the [Second World] War," explains Stevens. It was von Boltenstern's dream to have a postcard collection that spanned centuries and continents. In this he succeeded. The collection, which he donated to Loyola Marymount in the 1960s, includes one of the world's earliest postcards, issued in Austria in 1871. It contains postcards from all corners of the globe, many arranged in a rigidly alphabetical filing system that places Anaheim, California, next to Anadol Hissar, Turkey. It contains a section titled "Ethnography," with cards captioned "Festive Costume of Chodsko, Western Bohemia." It contains a drawer of tame, swimsuit-clad pinups:

Wish You Were Here Cuz Look What You're Missin' There's Plenty of Gals Here Built Like This'n

The collection particularly shines in its Southern California views. That makes sense, because von Boltenstern spent the second half of his career in Los Angeles. Here they are, the orange groves and mission bells, the hungry gators answering the dinner bell at the Alligator Farm, Los Angeles Cal. Here are the swank nightspots: The World Famous Cocoanut Grove where every night is filled with glamour. And the palm-trees-in-January scenes sent to relatives shoveling snow in the East. A Rose Covered Home in Midwinter California, one card reads. A California Backyard in Midwinter, brags another.

And what of the people who sent the cards? "The messages are usually very bland," Stevens says. "I don't think you can learn a lot by reading them."

But I found that is not true. What you encounter as you read the cards is a kind of American poetry: compressed, cryptic, powerful. Opposite a garish view of Long Beach's Nu-Pike Amusement Park, a jazz age go-getter writes:

I just opened a store of my own out here and I think I'll make it go as this is some lively resort-like city right on the Pacific Ocean it keeps me hustling too.

Other messages are plaintive. On a bleak black-and-white postcard of the Harris Motor Company Used Car Department:

Mr. Beckman - Have You Any Prospects? Ted

On other cards, the gulf between the glossy promise on the front and the trouble hinted at on the back can tear your heart. On a tinted view of Hollywood's Brown Derby restaurant, spidery handwriting:

Dear son, This is not as good as a letter; but this means I am thinking of you, and praying for you. I have over-worked again and became too tired; have had a bad cough. I promise to rest more. I know you want me to rest more. Love, Mother

One cannot read these missives and not wonder what happened after the card was signed and slipped into the mailbox. Did our hustler make good in that lively resort-like city? And Ted? Perhaps the answers are scrawled on some other postcard in another cabinet of the Loyola Marymount collection. Or maybe the reply is floating from post office to post office - a stamped, canceled emissary from the past.

One series of cards was mailed in 1943 by an army private recuperating at Fort Huachuca Army Hospital in Arizona. Each week he sent requests to the Reveille With Beverley program on the Los Angeles radio station KNX:

Beverley we listen to your program every morning and we think it's swell. Will you play some requests for us boys here in the station hospital in Huachuca? Play I Had the Craziest Dreams by the Vagabonds and for all the boys play Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy by Tommy Dorsey.

Here's hoping Beverley played your songs, Private, and that you left Huachuca in good spirits and made it through the rest of the war. Here's hoping your life was swell and your craziest dreams came true. In the meantime, have you any prospects? I am fine and dandy. Weather continues warm.

The collection is housed in Loyola Marymount University's Charles Von der Ahe Library, 7900 Loyola Blvd., Los Angeles. Hours are 9 to 4 weekdays; (310) 338-3048.