My high school friend, Rick, has a great sense of humor and wrote on the back of this old Curt Teich linen postcard, "Here's a photo of me catching a big salmon last week. He put up a mighty fight too!" His fish story did catch the vernacular of the 20Th-century postcard greeting. How many folks back home were bamboozled or humored by stories of whoppers caught and eaten in obscurity on vacation in the back woods.? I would guess more than a few.
Though the old Curt Teich postcards were not of the great quality of color cards printed in Germany and France in the first half of the 20th-century, they do have a rich watercolor tone all their own. Looking at the image, I can feel the vast quietude of the water, timeless atmosphere and the euphoric mood that is a part of the fishing experience on large lakes. Someday I'll tell Rick about the summer when I was ten and landed the giant Sturgeon that bit our boat's oar in half.
