Recently I realized I have a minor collection of presidential post cards. Some I’ve acquired myself, some my brother Jay has sent me. I didn’t plan on it.
That comes to mind because last week Jay sent me one depicting Herbert Hoover. Here it is.
Jay says it looks like the president is emerging from the Time Tunnel, a cultural reference for those of us of a certain age. Unless, he noted, Hoover’s an extraterrestrial impersonator in this image. I’ll go along with that one. He looks like one of our Lizard Overlords back in the early 20th century, before they perfected their rubber masks.
The card, incidentally, was produced by the Hall of Presidents Wax Museum, located once upon a time in Colorado Springs. It seems to have closed around 2000 or earlier (sources differ). Closed for lack of visitors, or because the aliens packed all the wax figures into their saucers and took them home.
I already had a Hoover card, one produced by the Hoover Museum in Iowa, with him looking grandfatherly sometime after he left office — not nearly as much fun as the wax-lizard Hoover.
I did a quick and not completely thorough count of my presidential card collection, including only those with faces of presidents on them. (I have others that depict their homes, and two vice presidents: George M. Dallas and Al Gore.) So far I have Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Lincoln, A. Johnson, Grant, Benjamin Harrison, TR, Hoover, Eisenhower, LBJ, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Clinton. Got a ways to go.