Anyone who knows me knows that one of my absolute thrills is a flea market. I’ll always prefer that to a perfectly curated vintage store. Flea markets present us with little dioramas of people. One cubicle may be the personal belongings of a fashionable old woman who has passed way and her next of kin are trying to liquidate her stuff. Another cubical may be filled with someone’s childhood collection of 1950s toys. It’s all so varied and I could (and do) spend hours taking it all in.

Sometimes there are postcards or photos you can go through. I feel like these items are another layer of personal. I’m sure none of these people thought of these items being for sale or looked at by strangers decades later. But there they are. On a recent trip to one of my favorite flea markets in Point Pleasant, NJ I found this post card.

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It was sent from Whitehouse, New Jersey in April of 1945. What an interesting time to be living: the very tail end of World War II. But most of all I adore this 1940s snark, let’s break it down shall we:

• I’m obsessed with this cover: the train is floating, the dog looks pissed, why are their feet so small? Also I’m not convinced that that isn’t a butch woman in a suit
• I can’t imagine not having to put a street address on a piece of mail. That mailman knew just where to go. I remember when we had to start using the area code with even local calls when I was a kid and boy were people mad. Any more you can update your location every 5 minutes to the USPS and they’ll still find a way to loose or never deliver your mail.
• “Hello Helen, how are you. Are you enjoying yourself as usual?” So…either Helen is a coke fiend with a proclivity for small acts of arson (she sure as hell has a kick coming in) or Helen is a total bummer and Helene is really being savage af in her delivery.
• Next line “I am.” Yup, Helene is COLD AS ICE.
• “Did you enjoy yourself at the party? I hope SOME ONE was there.” I want to know what kind of party we’re talking about. In my mind it was a child’s 5th birthday party and in comes coke fiend Helen stealing a bat from the birthday boy because her high as hell ass needs to be the one to break the pinata. God I hope she got some Laffy Taffy…or like a 1940s version. I’m not sure what that would be but given rationing little Timmy might have just had to lick sugar off a twig at his birthday party.

I decided to look up all the Helen M Opies, the Helene Apgars and the JN Apgars I could find. I found out what I believe to be Helen Opie (then at her death Helen Rickey)’s obituary in the paper. She had married a sheet metal worker named Fred and was a librarian. She lived in the Bernardsville area for 49 years. As it turns out the Apgars are very well known in the Whitehouse area of New Jersey and have an annual family reunion that dates back to the 1930s. As you can imagine, only having initials made my search through the buckets of geographically matched Apgars difficult but I was able to find 1940 census information of an Apgar family who had a 41 year old father (John) his wife (Jennie-39 years old) and their son and daughter-Helene Apgar who was 15 at the time, making her 20 years old when this post card was written. Helen Opie’s age at the time would have been 56-which is a surprise to me. I wish I knew how the two knew each other. In my mind I created a scene in which Helen was Helene’s librarian and they kept in touch. Or maybe Helen was a drug dealing librarian. Most likely not that but a girl can dream. They certainly have some great banter we can read into 74 years later.

Also shout out to Josh Rozett for figuring out Helen’s last name was Opies, that lower case p threw me for a loop; cursive, am I right?