Dundee Postcards

I made some postcards for McMinnville and Dundee.
I wanted to celebrate the quirky and weird; the stuff that will not survive the impending pimpification that's looming over this valley. I want people to come into the shop and laugh and say "what IS the story with that purple house?" And buy the card to show their friends how cool and different Yamhill County is.

I had the idea, when I lived in Santa Rosa, to document the 'eyesores' I saw everyday, or that I remembered from my childhood. Weird things, not necessarily attractive, that I loved.

I got the idea from a letter in the Pacific Sun (small Mill Valley newspaper) calling for the 'renewal' of the Tam Junction area. If you go to Stinson Beach from 101, Tam Junction is where you make the left to go over the hill. It's fairly divey, but it's real. I didn't like it when the strip-mall went in there and Dan's Liquors moved out of the surf shop building. I used to buy Charleston Chews there when I was a kid and they were three feet long. I like the dusty divey reality of the place, and here was someone suggesting that box stores and parking lots would be better, "like the renewal at the Flea Market."
The Sausalito Flea Market was a big dusty lot across the freeway from the houseboats where vendors came from all over to sell weird weird things and you could buy spring rolls from Vietnamese vendors in trailers and go back on Sunday night or Monday morning for the Free Market and dumpster dive all the stuff people didn't think it worthwhile to truck home again.
I bought my $12 Ciro-Flex camera there, which I still use to take my sprocket-hole pictures. I found $5 blown up against the fence once, and I have a set of antique drafting bows and dividers someone threw into one of the 50-gallon drum garbage cans.
They bulldozed that place, put up a huge empty parking lots and dotted some Best Buys, Hornswoggler BBQ places, crapfood drivethroughs and similar jewels of western thought. There's a Ross there now, the emptiest Ross I've ever been in.

It made me sick to think that something similar might happen happen to Tam Junction, and I thought "boy, I should document these places before they disappear!"

I failed.

I thought I had time. In the couple of months I thought about the project, some of my favorite eyesores quietly disappeared. The controversial railroad trestle at Larkspur Landing was hit by a truck and had to be removed. The boarded-up white Victorian, up on blocks by the South Petaluma Boulevard offramp for years and years, suddenly wasn't there.

Already the 'Bottleneck' sign is stripped back to "closed honey", so yay, I got the picture. The trailer underneath the big Honey sign was gone the other day, too, but now it's back. For some reason I really like seeing it on my way up to Newberg or Dundee. It's one of my familiar friends.

I'm working on some more postcards, and I want to print them up with some info on the back, and a square for the stamp. That's what makes a postcard real, and not just a picture. A white border might look good and old-fashioned, too.

I'd like to sell them stamped, or stamp them as they're sold. The post office is only a block away, but it would be ideal to wander around, buy a quirky postcard, write to a friend while eating a panini at Luigi's Daughter, then mail it from the Hotel Oregon. Easy.