postcards home

March 24, 1958
Hello Mom & Dad:
We got your letter and the check too. Thank you. Janet is going to buy clothes for the babies. They need summer clothes. Marylou is all fixed up already, except she wants a pair of loafers, which she will get. Mike needs a couple shirts and ties, so they aren’t bad off. So we will spend the twenty on the babies. I brought home a little metal car which has a friction motor. I wanted to see how they would like it. We had to take it and hide it ’cause you never seen such a fight, pulling, pushing, hitting, rolling all over and both of them crying and madder than wet hens, and they broke the front wheels off while they were dong it. It doesn’t pay to buy two because one gets broke and they fight over what’s left. Gotta go. Your son, O. Jr.
P.S. Mom xxxx!

My Thoughts

This postcard speaks volumes—gratitude, family budgeting, a house full of children, and the good-natured frustration of a father trying to bring home a little fun, only to see it dissolve into a squabble. It’s written with warmth and immediacy, as though he dashed it off in the middle of a loud afternoon.

All in all, a gem of domestic storytelling, full of love and gentle irony.

March 17, 1958
Hello Mom & Dad
I forgot to tell you we have three rolls of film to be developed 1 roll of still and 2 rolls of movie take about two week[s] before we can get them up to you. Getting quite a collection now. I feel fine today. I haven’t anything to say today tell you something tomorrow. Love your son. O. Jr. xxx! (U.C.G.O.T.P.)

U.C.G.O.T.P. [You Can Give One To Pop]

The First of a Series

In 1954, my father Orlando moved his young family from Rochester, New York to Newport News, Virginia, to take a job as a draftsman at Newport News Shipbuilding. He and my mother Janet brought along my older siblings, Michael and Mary Lou, and two years after arriving in Virginia, my twin brother Tim and I were born.

During his lunch breaks at the shipyard, Dad would dash off postcards to his parents back in Rochester — quick updates written in a few minutes before returning to his drafting table where he designed boilers, exhaust systems, and gate valves for aircraft carriers and atomic submarines. These cards weren’t meant to be great literature. They were just a young father’s way of staying connected across the miles, letting his parents know the family was doing fine, the babies were healthy (mostly), and life in Virginia was good.

What I love about these postcards is their honesty. Dad didn’t save up only the highlights — he wrote about the mundane stuff too: sick kids, bad weather, grass seed washed away by rain, twins fighting over a toy car, a little boy who wouldn’t go near Santa Claus. He wrote about Mike’s school troubles and his football triumphs, about haircuts that left everyone crying, about loads of laundry ending up in the trash can.

Reading them now, more than sixty years later, they’re a time capsule of ordinary American family life in the late 1950s. Two-cent postcards, written at lunch, mailed from Newport News to Rochester. Brief notes that added up to something bigger: a father’s love, a family’s story, a connection across distance that neither time nor miles could break.