From Medford to Sicily, my postcards have shown the way
Remember postcards? Medford native Steve Coronella does. Check out his look back at the pre-digital travel souvenirs he has kept all these years.
During my backpacking heyday in the early 1980s, staying in touch with friends and family in Medford as I roamed across Europe was hard work. I couldn’t pop into an Internet café for a reassuring exchange of emails, and I certainly couldn’t pull out a cell phone and text or FaceTime my anxious parents back home. Those outlets just weren’t an option because they’d yet to appear on the international travel scene.
Instead, my preferred mode of transatlantic communication all those years ago was the humble postcard.
Ignoring Garrison Keillor’s advice that the ideal postcard message shouldn’t exceed 50 words, I attempted to turn mine into mini-travelogues, regularly crossing over to the address side to accommodate my glittering insights. I kept an intermittent journal while I traveled and in its back pages I sketched out first drafts for my postcards home. Reading them now, it’s clear that I should have followed Keillor’s cardinal rule.
Of course, what I wrote in my rambling reports was beside the point. There was a more important subtext.
By sending home a postcard of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London or the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, I was in effect proclaiming myself a citizen of the world, while at the same time reassuring my friends and family that I hadn’t forgotten where I came from.
I had another reason for gathering up postcards along the way. To record my travels in photographic form, I arranged an extended loan of my sister's Vivitar C-135 camera, a fine piece of equipment in its day but rightly regarded now as a technological relic. As those of us who came of age in the pre-digital era can testify, the odds of capturing a satisfactory image with such a device were 50-50 at best. (A surviving photo album, assembled after my first backpacking lark in 1982, provides convincing evidence to this effect.)
Being neither a capable photographer nor a gambling man, I decided to hedge my bets and made sure to buy a few postcards wherever I happened to turn up. As a result, in a back bedroom closet in Dublin I still have some lovely images, captured on postcards, of Barcelona Cathedral, Stormont Buildings in Belfast, and the Church of the Salute in Venice.
I also have some wonderful postcard depictions of Cork City at night as well as the ancient monastic ruins at Glendalough in Wicklow – each purchased when I was a mere tourist in these parts.
In the same stash I have a postcard with an intriguing aerial view of Medford, which provided an interesting perspective before drone technology made such images commonplace. My family home isn’t visible in the photo, but if you look closely you can spot our favored basketball court at Barry Park as well as the house of my second family (the Creedons) just across the street. I remember buying this particular memento for 10 cents off a souvenir rack at Murray's Stationery, a long-defunct store on Riverside Avenue in Medford Square.
Even with today’s sophisticated phone cameras, I couldn't hope to take such compelling snapshots as those found on my collected postcards.
Without doubt, I picked up my most meaningful postcard in 1986 in the harbor town of Augusta on the east coast of Sicily. This is where my paternal grandparents were born. I was in Augusta on a surprise visit, having dropped in on my father’s uncle Francesco and his family out of the blue after an Irish sojourn, and I chanced upon an oversized black-and-white postcard of the local church where my grandparents were married before they sailed for Boston.
As soon as I saw it, I knew that I’d discovered something special. When I returned home three months later, I had the postcard mounted and framed, as a gift to my father.
As I’ve noticed in my more recent walks through Dublin and strolls around Boston, postcards are still available in select outlets for Boomers like me. Of course, with social media sites now offering instant communication and phone cameras providing immediate images, postcards are no longer an essential travel item.
In my world, though, postcards will always have a prized place, helping me to remember where I’ve been – and where I’ve come from.
Medford native Steve Coronella has lived in Ireland since 1992. He is the author of “Designing Dev,” a comic novel about an Irish-American lad from Boston who's recruited to run for the Irish presidency. His latest paperback publications are “Entering Medford – And Other Destinations” and “Looking Homeward - Essays & Humor from a Misplaced American.”
