A few years ago, I found a yellowing envelope at my mother’s house tucked away in some files that obviously hadn’t been touched for many years. It wasn’t sealed, so I looked inside, intrigued. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a stash of high-denomination bearer bonds or some such.

Instead, there were six large note cards of an odd size, 7⅝ ” x 5¼ “, printed on white paper only slightly yellowed. There’s a theme to them all, with this sentence running over each of six different cartoons: I would have written sooner… but…

Procrastinator cards. Just Google that term and you can see it’s a small genre.

The cards include an illustrative cartoon and caption. This is one of the six.

If I had to guess, I’d say 1950s vintage. They don’t strike me as anything my mother would have bought. Maybe someone gave them to her — maybe one of my aunt’s many gag gifts to her. That would have been in character, anyway. It also would have been in character for my mother to tuck them away, even though she had no intention of ever sending them. She might have considered them too silly to use.

They are silly.

Actually, the term dopey comes to mind, but that’s just me. Of course, humor doesn’t age well, but it could be that even in the 1950s, these weren’t very funny. At least, my mother probably didn’t think so.

The back of each card attributes them to an outfit called Country Cousin of Lake Placid, New York, but there’s no address or date or copyright mark. A simple search turns up nothing about it. The illustrations are signed “Inertia Smith.” That name doesn’t turn up much except two people using it for a name on Facebook.

Those are the only three I’m going to scan, because the other three include hopelessly racist caricatures, featuring Africans, American Indians and Chinese characters. The one depicting Africans manages to work “mau-mau” into the text, a more direct clue pointing to the ’50s. Best to leave them in the envelope. You could argue that standards were lower then, as indeed they were, but I wouldn’t be posting them in the 1950s, I would be in the 2020s.