Classic North Carolina Postcards

The folks at UNC's North Carolina Collection have put thousands of interesting old NC-related postcards online. What I find fascinating about looking at these postcards is the juxtaposition of the familiar (men working in tobacco fields, the American Tobacco Company plant in Durham - which was recently converted to luxury lofts, Blowing Rock, and the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse), and the unusual (If You Will Only Come to Brickton, N.C. We Will Have a Jolly Good Time) And, of course, there are plenty of scenes which might be familiar to North Carolinians, but unusual to anyone else (a bagpipe concert at the Highland Games, Gimghoul Castle in Chapel Hill, a festival celebrating the pre-American Revolution Regulators movement, and a jokingly morbid visual interpretation of the "and when I die I'm a Tar Heel dead" part of the UNC fight song, pictured above).

There are a number of postcards representing fires or natural disasters, like Asheville Flood, 1916, and Avalon Mill Fire - and you can imagine why people living in the pre-television era would want to send one of these, to capture a shocking image for friends or family. Other highlights in the collection include Teach's Oak, "It's a Bear", Captured Whiskey Stills Destroyed at the Court House, and the hilariously inaccurate "U. of N.C. Campus, Durham". Finally, a number of the cards bear interesting hand-written messages, like Colored Troops Man the 155 mm. Coast Defense Guns - Camp Davis, N.C. and The Baptist University for Women (now Meredith College).

North Carolina Postcards [UNC University Library]

Surgeon General told not to attend Special Olympics!

Just when we thought the Bush administration couldn't go any lower, Former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona says that he was discouraged from attending the Special Olympics for political reasons. "I was specifically told by a senior person, ‘Why would you want to help those people?' " Dr. Carmona said. "Those people" were the Kennedy family, which is heavily involved with the Special Olympics.

What I don't understand is why Bush (or Cheney, or Rove, or whoever) thought that supporting the Special Olympics would be seen by anyone as supporting the Kennedys, in any way. Under that logic, were those of us who gave money to the Tsunami relief fund "helping" Bush Sr. and/or Bill Clinton, who acted as spokesmen for the cause? And until now, I wasn't even aware of the Kennedy family having any involvement with the Special Olympics - and based on unscientific sample of folks I've talked to about it, I doubt most Americans think of the Kennedy family when they think of the Special Olympics.

The Special Olympics wasn't the only issue where the Surgeon General felt hampered by an obsession with partisan politics - the article also discusses how the administration ignored the science on issues like global warming, secondhand smoking, and prison health care.

"Surgeon General Sees 4-Year Term as Compromised" [New York Times]
PDF: Dr. Carmona's Prepared Testimony [New York Times]