Dr. Patrick’s Postcard Roadside

Non-California’s introduction to the Los Angeles Basin’s San Fernando Valley came with the 1968 inauguration of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In broadcast from “beautiful downtown Burbank” at the Color City television studio opened there in 1952.
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Robert Wagner and Joanne Woodward run around in the 1956 thriller, “A Kiss Before Dying,” but the real star is midcentury Modern Tucson, Arizona, presented in supersaturated technicolor and Cinemascope.
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The soda fountain counter at Indiana, Pennsylvania's Rexall Drug Store in the Odd Fellows Building on Philadelphia Street.
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The limestones of the Missouri Ozarks are pock marked with show caves that prospered on the traffic of Route 66.
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The linen postcard with its soft hues, picturesque edits and eye-catching graphics was the perfect medium for image-making.
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On this 1930 postcard, Bell’s Tourist Camp shouts out to U.S. 71 motorists coming into Texarkana from the north.
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When Viennese architect Victor Gruen designed Minneapolis’s Southdale Center, he never suspected these retail mega-generators of auto-sprawl would replace the town centers he was trying to celebrate.
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Nevada ended its frontier ways in 1909 when it made gambling illegal to project a sense of civilized modernity to the rest of the nation. Just 22 years later, it voted gambling back as an economic panacea to fight the Great Depression.
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George Chinn opened up – literally, with dynamite – Chinn’s Cave House at Brooklyn Bridge, Kentucky, in the 1920s.
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What could be more appropriate for New Jersey than a postcard celebration of a highway interchange? Not just any interchange, this is the Woodbridge Cloverleaf, the first cloverleaf interchange in America.
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A quick message scribbled on this 1940 postcard and mailed off to family in Ohio depicts what to the transient sender was just the Greyhound bus station in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
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After a deal made with the Northern Pacific Railroad that traded worthless mountain top rock and ice for valuable timber lands, Mount Rainier became the nation’s fifth national park in 1899.
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