FORD FUTURA: Car that didn't make the future

Ideas About The Future Are Always Out There
This photo postcard makes me think how goofy all ideas about the future really are.
Of course we don't know what the future will look or feel like because our ideas are, as always, locked in the assumptions of the present. The future tends to pass us by, especially our technology. Perhaps if we could time travel we might be able to go forward into time and see the future but then our own travel to the future would alter the past and the future simultaneously, so that might preclude us from knowing the future especially if everyone wanted to travel to see it and of course they would. So time travel might not work as a way of smoothing out the journey.
Then too, there is the issue of acceleration. The speed of change is increasing exponentially. How can anyone keep up with that? No one has a clue of what might happen?  In a way, we're all dumb animals running into the street without the slightest idea that a car could come along, strike and kill us. We learn very slowly. I suppose you could say this fatal ignorance gives life its poignancy.
End of pondering our species limited knowledge. Now the short history of the postcard car.
This was Ford Motor Company's car of the future. Somehow the future arrived and passed this winged monstrosity behind. The car here looked a little like an Edsel on steroids, another Ford dinosaur. They called the car the Futura, not to be mistaken for the Ford Futura produced for the Australian market between 1962 and 2008. That car was a BF Series Ford Falcon, a much smaller car that morphed into the current Ford Fusion. The model shown here looks like what an engineer in the 1960's would think the future would look like -- sharp lines, wings, wrap-around chrome and big -- gas guzzling behemoth. It never made production, fortunately.

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Thanks Rick B. for the great postcard. Yes, I think it will be a "smash hit."

A post card sampler

I feel like a new kid on the block. Somewhat timid at setting out in my new neighborhood, yet thrilled to see what new sights (sites) I might find and the new acquaintances I might make. This blog will display some of the cards in my collection and some comments on the cards, on collecting and on popular culture.

The post cards in the image above represent several eras of cards during the first half of the twentieth-century. They also show varied themes and subject matter typical in the U.S. and Europe.

At the bottom left is a card commemorating the surrender of Confederate Gen. Roberts E. Lee to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, April 9, 1865. Of all the cards in the sampler it is the most modern, most likely produced in the 50's or 60's. It is a photo of an unidentified painting. The card at the top of the sampler of the two lovers is the oldest. It is a black and white photo with hand painted highlights. These were typical of cards of the first decades of the 20th-century.

The black and white photo card to the right of the lovers was copyrighted 1940. It was an advertisement for the Renfro Valley Barn Dance, a radio show broadcast Saturday nights "from a real barn" in Renfro Valley, Kentucky, back in the day. I found that the barn dance is still going strong down in Renfro Valley.

The characters pictured are A'nt Idy and Little Clifford. The message on the reverse side says, "After this picture was taken A'nt Idy asked the photographer for the head-rest used in posing Little Clifford. She claimed it was the only thing that had ever kept him still for any length of time."

I'll reveal more about these and other cards in the coming days. I hope to be able to feature one card a week.