Gothic-Revival Church, 1930s.

Wooden gothic-revival rural church 1930s.

Small-Town Country Road, 1930s.

Driving through the plains or Minnesota, North Dakota, or South Dakota, many small towns still look like this today: Grain elevator, church, a handful of houses, and then just more open farmland. It's likely that buildings from the 1930s are still standing, although they're far more run-down than they looked eighty years ago. This photo was taken sometime in the mid-1930s, location unknown. (click for full image)

The Best Of Friends

This is the last of the atheistic Freethought postcards I got at an antique show a few months ago. It's the least witty or thoughtful of the three, but it was the hardest to translate. We've got a priest and a devil, arm in arm, looking a little displeased, but neither is fighting it. The first line reads, "Example of an extreme friendship"; the second says, "A pair who exist due to afflictions." This sentiment is similar to the first card, an attitude that the church preys on people who aren't giving their condition enough thought and trusting in religion. It's an odd thing to be anti-church, while using the church's boogey-man as the reson for the comparison, but, hey, it works. Me, I personally really like the stylized devil he drew -- in today's modern culture, we almost universally show a "Mephistopheles Dracula", a red-skinned suave gentleman with a van-dyke beard, stylish cape, and tiny horns on the forehead. Or, we depict Satan like the Incredible Hulk, with huge teeth and bulging muscles. This Czech devil (probably intentionally) looks ill and weak. A fat, well-fed cleric and an impotent devil? That probably meant more than a weak analogy.