Category Archives: Uncle Bob’s Pix
United Mainliner
This nice postcard is from the late 1940s. United used that logo from 1940 to 1954. “Mainliners” were DC-3s. With world-wide production, some 16,000 of these planes entered service somewhere…and some are probably still flying.
RMS Scythia
A 1934 Cunard White Star postcard showing the Royal Mail Ship Scythia.
Artwork by Kenneth Shoesmith.
Oops!
In 2013, Broad Street UMC was replacing their steeple. This is the old steeple that they’d left out in the yard. I added a scoop of ice cream, which tends to rather resemble a baseball, for some reason.
Mass o’ Vandas
These are on the side porch at a friend’s house. Fine color for this orchid, an epiphyte whose name comes from the Sanskrit word for this flower, vanda. Literal translation, I’m told, means “mistletoe” or, more generally, any parasitic plant.
Two Kids
This is a cropped version of a real photo postcard, printed on Artura stock that was made between 1910 and 1924. The image was very faded with moderate spotting and scratches.
A couple of things: I have heavily kicked up the contrast and the sharpness. I brightened the light reflections in the kids’ eyes, but I can’t correct the problem with the left kid’s left leg, as you view him. Notice that it looks like his leg ends before it even gets to the shoe. I enlarged it and it appears to be a lens aberration or a case of poor processing. Maybe he didn’t have a leg there…who knows?
Lonely in Limestone
This card was mailed almost exactly 104 years ago, when Limestone TN had cowboys and stage coaches. Ah, those were the days…
This is a standard-size postcard, a generic issue overprinted with “Limestone”. These cards were generally sold by an agent of the printing company, so this particular motif was chosen by someone local…the one who placed the order. I do not see any printer’s credit on the card. By 1914 there were dozens of print shops churning out varieties of cheap postcards.
One other <yawn> interesting aspect of this card: to read the message, you rotate the card toward you. Most cards require a horizontal rotation.
Bahama Star
The old Bahama Star is what I am after. Here’s a link to its page in the Wiki.
As noted, it came to the rescue of the burning Yarmouth Castle in 1965. The captain was then Carl Brown, better known to Rogersvillians as Carl Netherland-Brown. He was just two weeks into his captaincy when the Yarmouth Castle event took place.
This New Bahama Star? What’s left of it is part of a breakwater at Taiwan.
Blimp?
Blimp? What blimp? Notice that not one person on that beach is looking upward at this gigantic blimp floating along. Well, why not, for gosh sakes? Because the blimp’s not really there. This is a composite image, as far as I can tell. Well done, too.
An L-Class Goodyear blimp. The resolution of the image, plus a pesky palm frond, keep me from reading the NC number on the bottom tail fin. And I don’t know what that blue and yellow signal flag means.
Here’s the reverse:
Uncle Bob's Pix 