Thoughts, Memories & Ravings of Big Daddy Graham
Wish You Were Here
Greetings from Sea Isle!
OK, so “Greetings from Sea Isle!” isn’t quite as famous as the postcard album cover on Bruce Springsteen’s “Greetings from Asbury Park,” but both postcards serve the same purpose: to send a message from point A (Sea Isle City) to point B (Anywhere, USA) for a mere 35 cents. I love postcards, and I have since I was a little kid. Speaking of Bruce, I have a cool story about that album cover that I will tell you later.
Mom and I used to lug our bags on the 36 trolley to board a bus from 13th and Arch Street in Philadelphia and head on down to Wildwood. But first, we would make a pit stop at the Collings Lake Diner in Hammonton, which was the midway point along the way. This diner had a jukebox and when the bus would arrive, the owner of this diner used to insert a nickel and play “Hello, Dolly” by Louis Armstrong. Now, for those of you who don’t remember “Satchmo,” Louis was a famous trumpet player who was just as well known for having this extremely gravelly voice. (Think Tom Waits.)
The owner would croon along with the song and when Armstrong’s trumpet solo would begin, the owner would pull out a trumpet of his own and play along with the record to thunderous applause. It was so cool, and I always looked forward to our bus stopping there.
My mother looked forward to the diner as well because it sold Jersey Shore postcards. Mom would buy about 10 of them and then proceed to fill out the cards right on the bus for the rest of the trip before she got anywhere near the shore. I would even help her pick them out. Mom preferred cards with beautiful shots of the beach or awesome sunsets on the bay, whereas I went with any postcard that featured the boardwalk or a roller coaster.
Mom would then write on the back of these cards generic messages like “Beautiful weather,” having no idea whether or not it was going to rain nonstop. “Terrific room,” not knowing if it was cheap flophouse, because we never spent even one night there.
But for relatives she didn’t care for as much (which was about half of them), she would send them the standard and obligatory “Wish you were here.”
“Wish you were here.” Ever wonder how many millions of postcards have had that message? Imagine the surge of such a postcard when Pink Floyd used it as a title of one of its albums. I have a cousin named Fred who is a mailman. One night at a party, I asked Fred that exact question. “We are not allowed to read those cards,” was his reply. Later on, at the same party, Fred, who had a couple in him by then, came up to me and whispered in my ear, “About half of them.” Even though a mailman couldn’t care less what’s written on them, he can’t help but see “Wish you were here” because it usually takes up all the space that’s allotted for a message. No one ever writes “Wish you were here” in small letters.
Did you know that you could have sent a postcard from the Titanic? It stopped in France and Ireland before it headed across the ocean, and people actually sent letters and postcards from those countries to New York. So, imagine you’re in Brooklyn, the news has already broken about the sinking of the Titanic, and then you get a postcard from somebody you know was on it. And that postcard said “Wish you were here.” Now, that’s creepy.
Where do I get my postcards? Right here in Sea Isle at Dalrymple’s. You can get the stamps there as well. I dig Dalrymple’s. (Sounds like it should be on a T-shirt.) It’s a small general store that sells a little bit of everything. There were plenty of such stores in Southwest Philly where I grew up. I stop in every Memorial Day weekend to make sure its selection of paperbacks has a copy of “The Catcher in the Rye.” Dalrymple’s reminds me of the general store in the movie “Jaws” where the cop goes to buy material for the “Beach is closed” sign.
Back in the day when I was on the road as a stand-up comic, the hotels I used to stay in had their own brand of postcards: drawings or photos of the hotels themselves with the words like “Welcome to the Atlanta Omni” written across them. They would keep them right on the front desk and I would swipe about a dozen of them. One year I used them as Christmas cards. “Buffalo Marriott,” it would say on the front, and “Happy Holidays,” I would write on the back. But, alas, texting and email, among other iPhone features, have all but killed off the postcard.
But not for me. I love getting them and sending them. My sister and I have been sending them to each other for decades. You can buy box sets of really cool postcards, and I do once a year.
To get back to that Bruce story … When Springsteen’s management submitted that postcard, it virtually had no chance of being the cover. Columbia Records had an in-house rule that all debut albums had to feature a photo of the artist as a way of introducing the artist to a new audience. But the man in charge of choosing covers was a collector of vintage postcards, and the rest is history.
So, send out a postcard today to someone you love. I’ll even tell you what to write on the back of it. Care to take a wild guess?
“Wish you were here.”
Go to bigdaddygraham.com to find out how to book me and how to get autographed copies of “The Revised Edition of the Great Book of Philadelphia Sports” or “Last Call,” the book I wrote about my dad, available for $15 a piece or $25 for both (and that includes shipping and handling).
And I am getting real close to performing again.
