Dr. Patrick’s Postcard Roadside

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.

George Chinn opened up – literally, with dynamite – Chinn’s Cave House at Brooklyn Bridge, Kentucky, in the 1920s.

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.

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.

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.

Could this be Mary Meyers and her dog? Random postcard people are rarely random and more typically known to the businesses they frame.

When the Old Reading Beer billboard went up over Penn Square overlooking Reading, Pennsylvania’s downtown retail district it was advertised as the largest animated sign in the state.

The Big Band sound faded with the postwar rise of Rock and Roll, and with it, venues like The Tropics in the Chicagoan Hotel. By then Sam Bari and Red Duncan, Chicago’s “famous” and “nationally known” Blind Pianist, were history.

The magic of Magic Forest was its willingness to mix roadside wonders from wherever.

Denver, Colorado’s Overland Park was the king of the municipal campgrounds established during the early 20th century’s “automobiling” craze, a nationwide fascination with the new-found freedom of the automobile that put millions on the road looking for places to camp-out.

The Bok Tower was designed to be a sculptural set piece in a garden, an architectural folly housing a carillon. You cannot get up it for a view of the countryside; it is the view.

The snazzy ‘60s graphics surrounding a lower-cased hotel harris floating in isolated, midcentury Modern splendor was the final chapter for a stalwart hotel that had been in downtown Kalamazoo, Michigan, since 1844.