Travelodge - Sleepy, not Drinky.

Another item from the shipment from Alert Reader Mandy today. It's a postcard bought at TraveLodge, probably around the 1960 or so.

One might get the idea that, should you choose to spend a night at a TraveLodge, you could expect to have a seventy-foot bear shuffling around the parking lot, peering in your window, looking for a place to crash. But no, Sleepy bear was just the mascot of TraveLodge (which apparently still exists today). Judging by their graphic on the website, which also serves as a loose chronology of the character's design, this version of Drinky Stoney Sleepy The Bear dates from the early Sixties, or thereabouts. The design of the motel itself seems to agree with that estimate.

As it always seems to go with mascot "refreshes", every iteration of the character got weirder and uglier. Well done, Lowest Bidding Graphics Consulting Design Firm.

The Sleepy The Bear on the back of the postcard looks, as noted by Mandy, more zombie than sleepy. A free continental breakfast is available in the cafe from 6-10 am. A fine selection of breakfast items will be served, but the brains go fast, so come early!

Hmm. That bear looks familiar. Hang on a sec. Let me browbeat an intern into checking on it..... a HA!

http://phil-are-go.blogspot.com/2010/11/antiques-creepshow-figuratively-freaky.html

I knew it! We posted a photo of Semi-Concussed The Bear way back in 2010! Let's roll back the hands of time to artificially lengthen this post with minimal effort, shall we?

LOT #2 DRINKY BEAR
Our second feature is this delightful drunk teddy bear, ready to stagger into your heart and vomit down your aorta, mistaking it for a toilet. "Drinky Bear" was the mascot of a small chain of midwestern addiction centers in the sixties, and this example of Drinky is in fine condition, from his mismatched footpads to his baffling camel toe. Drinky's not dead yet! The "halo" is merely part of the art on the game box holding him up. If you bring home Drinky, you can pretend the price tag on his wrist is a medic alert bracelet, alerting would-be resuscitators of his allergy to Vivitrol. The only medicine he needs is your love! And bourbon!

According to Wikpedia, if your family chose to spring for the Sleepy bear Den, each child would get a free stuffed version of Novocaine Bear. That's one financially unsustainable premium! While the Sleepy bear Den feature of Travel Lodge (the budgetary savings from discontinuing the "free bear" campaign now being spent on a space in the logo between "Travel" and "Lodge") seems to be a thing of the past, the Sleepy Bear Dens seem to still be available at some franchises.

Know how you can still get yourself a Barbituate Bear? Right here, baby. He's a PNG with alpha channel, so you can put him on your own lampshades and bedspreads. Don't nod off yet, Hesher The Bear, you've got lots of work to do. Don't worry about using him, readers. He works for peanuts... or Methadone. You're welcome!

King's Tropical Inn

Alert reader Mandy sent us a padded envelope trove of stuff last week. She must have broke the bank, because I happen to know that post cards with blank backs are more expensive than ones that are filled in. Apparently, someone back in History was only a post card buyer, but not a sender. And he or she probably ate at King's Tropical Inn. Based on this, we can guess that they also ordered the "Jumbo Squab Dinner", took it home and stuck it in an attic for seventy years or so.

Some things never change. On the front of the card, we meet John G. King, our host, and presumed owner of the restaurant, but the name of the place is spelled "Kings", as if it's just named after a few monarchs. Okay, fine. Moving on....

On the back, it's spelled with a possessive apostrophe, like Johnny King owns the place. So, what have we learned? Ignorance of your mother tongue is not a new invention. But hey! Walter Winchell! Who was he, anyway?

Walter Winchell (April 7, 1897 – February 20, 1972) was an American newspaper and radio gossip commentator, famous for attempting to destroy the careers of people both private and public whom he disliked.

Wow, he sounds like a great guy. Winchell looked like Steve Martin before everyone was doing it. So, was he a prescient Steve Martin impersonator, or was Steve Martin a Walter Winchell impersonator? Never made it without biting. Ask Mister Owl.

This post card is the fold-in-half kind with four pictures on it, so the story doesn't end once you flip it over.

The exterior of King's looked like some kind of casbah, but camel parking was surprisingly prohibited. So was painting lane stripes on the street. Crazy times.

Fake starry sky ceiling. Every table a booth. (Presumably) fake palm trees all over the place. I would totally eat here all the time. If there was a nightly floor show, I would frikkin live there.

So what's at the corner of Washington and Adams in L.A. now? Get ready to be typically disappointed, people!



Strip malls and a few vacant store fronts. I looove L.A. Someplace calls itself "We Are Famous". Maybe they're being edgefully ironic, but if you're actually famous, you don't need to tell everyone you're famous. It seems that this building has, over the intervening decades, found owners with ever more profound levels of confusion regarding the meaning of words.

Sho-Bar, Nineteen Sixty-Something - Bring granny!

When you're in New Orleans this holiday season, some time in the early 1960s, who would you like to be at your side when you stride purposefully into a strip club? Correct! Your wife, who is probably someone's grandma!

Over the years, Sho-Bar has moved a few times, but we'll (well, someone will) always have a soft spot in our hearts (probably) for the original location at 228 Bourbon Street, which opened in 1948. This post card has no date on it anywhere, but it looks like the photo could have been taken some time in the late fifties or early sixties.

But it hardly matters, because there's one thing that never goes out of style, and that's forcing your wife - who's probably a grandma - to sit next to you as you ogle Brigette Boudreaux. Just look at all those happy faces!

One thing's for sure: The night this picture was taken, absolutely none of these men were in any trouble at all when they got back to the hotel.

Sweden House Smorgasbord - Gone, but not digested.

Who's up for a Swedish buffet? Yes, please. Is it cage-free, free-range, non GMO, and vegan/veggie/lacto-ovo? Shut up. It's a Swedish Smorgasbord. Enjoy a plate of dust and twigs at home.

In countries where it gets Properly Cold, the food indicates to what degree the people who lived there were worried about making it through winter. You didn't spend a day re-thatching the roof of your a-frame, hoping the snow didn't fall through and cover your family, and then enjoy a light salad before curling into a ball under several animal skins in the hope that you'd wake up in the morning. Smorgasbord, baby! For, on the morrow, we ice fish.

Sweden House sounds terrific. Not so much because of the photos on the post card. They're yellowed and showcase the furniture and steam tables more than the food itself. About all you can make out clearly, in terms of food, is the huge Brontosaurus roast in the lower left. But that's enough. Where there's stainless chafing dishes, there's Viking food. Where there's doilies on funny stands, there's desserts of many kinds, also with many vees in the names.

So what's there now? Bleh.

At the former Elgin location of Sweden House, you can find a Great Clips and a Post Mart, and someone called Sally.



Okay, but what about the Fort Lauderdale Sweden House? It's now some kind of thing called "Olive Garden".


The post card doesn't give an address for the Naperville location, but the P.A.G. Research and Googling Brigade can find it, if it exists.

Aww, nertz. But wait! What's this? "Swedish Massage"? Hmm. Perhaps I need to personally lead an away team to investigate the disappearance of Sweden House at Heavenly Swedish Massage. First question: I'll ask something suggestive about their dumplings, huh huh huh.

Carefree International Restaurant - Carefree, Arizona.

So where's lunch? How bout the Carefree?

Dining in Carefree, Arizona in The Sixties was pretty damn cool. Apparently there was this restaurant with six (or seven?) themed dining rooms arranged radially around a central kitchen, all in a mid-century modern purpose-built building that wasn't just a repurposed out-of-business hallmark store in a strip mall, which is mostly what we get, here in The Future.

This postcard scratches the surface, but the Ultranet is pretty much made of rabbit holes, and a simple search led the Phil Are GO! Research and Googling Team to the Carefree, Arizona Cave Creek Museum's site (...of course, and why wouldn't it?) which had an exterior shot of the restaurant and a floor plan. It looked like a groovy space station on the desolate moonscape of the moon, instead of the desolate Arizonascape of Arizona.

Oh yeah. That North America.

The post card boasts about seven distinctive yet interconnected dining areas, but we can only see six on the map. Nordic, Asian, African, South American, North American (you know: mac & cheese), and Mediterranian. Where' sthis phantom seventh dining room? The wine cellar? Hmm. They may have been on to something...

Naturally, any really cool looking restaurant doesn't want you to ask about the food. It was probably okay, or at least non-lethal. Or, it was probably better than trying all day to catch a road runner with your rocket skates.

If you're stranded in the desolate Chicagoscape of Chicago and you feel like having a similarly absurd dining experience, there are still places you can go for a heavily themed inoffensive meal served by a disinterested staff.

Shef Shangri-la! It's right near the Brookfield Zoo, so you can stagger out of the jungle just like a lost explorer and stagger up to a table and order a drink in a ridiculously-shaped glass, just like a lost suburbanite.

P.S. You will not live forever before or after eating at Chef Shangri-la, and that's probably best.

The Texas Jack Rabbit postcard

The Phil Are GO! Investigative Journalism Brigade had just learned that in 1962, Vernon, Dorothy and Carol took a road trip, at one point passing through Texas. They purchased this novelty postcard of a cowboy riding a huge jack rabbit, and sent it to their friends Eddie and Rita Horton, in Dwight, Illinois.

In the body text of the postcard, none of the involved parties saw fit to wonder what rules of capitalization the Dexter Press were following. At this late date, it's possible we may never have an explanation.

The Baby Harvest Postcard.

A couple of weeks ago, the Phil Are GO! Garage Sale and Antique Store Assault Force's Bravo Detachment (GSASAF-BD) staggered through the doors of GO! Tower. They had lost only two members this time out, but their sacrifice was totally worth it. In the team's bag of loot was this postcard from 1905, revealing to us a few scraps of priceless information about how the primitive humans of 1905 "lived".

For us living here in the Bright and Shiny Perfect Future, the savage world of 1905 is veiled in mystery. Absolutely no documentation survives from this brutal era, apart from Downton Abbey, and most of PBS's programming schedule after 9pm.

Naturally, the instant that Bravo Detachment handed this postcard to the Phil Are GO! Historical Analysis and Staring at Things Supervisor, it was sealed in five ziploc poly bags (to keep it nice) and whisked off to the Research floor of GO! Tower for some historical analysis and a good hard stare. Bravo Detachment, meanwhile, wobbled back to their paddock to perform limb reattachment surgery on themselves and catch up on the Korean romance dramas they had missed while they were out on mission.

Handling the postcard with specially reinforced Hisorical Research Tongs, it was removed from all of the poly bags and clinically stared at. The entire analysis team were then issued Dramatic Gesture Spectacles, so they could then simultaneously look up form the table, whip off their glasses and mutter "My god, we're through the looking glass here, people."

Humans in 1905 reproduced via some form of bizarre aquatic baby-harvesting ceremony. There, I said it.

Assuming that postcards were an academic record of ordinary life in 1905 (and what else can we assume, if not that?) , the people living at the time had not yet invented the act of "doing it". Yes, they had to get their children from wherever they could, and apparently that involved growing babies like cranberries, floating in a pond, sometimes on lily pads, and often - my god, people - naked.

The woman on the postcard seems to be having a grand day out. The baby-harvesting act apparently was viewed as a charming and pleasant activity, the bastards. She has already chosen three new babies from the season's harvest, carrying them in her Baby Basket.









But what did the babies think?

The babies, for their part, are clearly as astonished and horrified as we are that this was how the denizens of 1905 preferred to create humans. "Why not," the babies seem to wonder, "just use the good old weenus-meets-virginia method of personmaking?" Obviously, there was no "good old" personmakery method at the time, as it hadn't been invented yet. Babies sure are stupid.

Also, if you look at the horizon in the postcard image, the Earth was rotated 1.66 degrees off its axis, as measured below.

Surely this planetary disturbance was playing hell with the tides and water levels on a global scale, making it even more baffling that humans had chosen to adopt a means of reproduction that relied so heavily on localized bodies of water. It's amazing our species made it through such a tenuous period.

Lastly, the reverse side of this postcard seems to feature the text "post card" in eleven different things - possibly languages or something.

Therefore, this postcard will be secured in the PAG! Vault of Words and Languages, as it may serve as a kind of Rosetta stone for the phrase "post card" in coming decades.

There is no way to decipher the hand-written inscription, as of this writing. Our Language Theorist surmises it may be the semi-insane ramblings of a person from Gibberalia, making observations on the annual baby harvest festival, sent to a recipient by the name of "Herrn F. Halle", living at "yer: Alln H. Dickmann, Gn Louftkiker, Lfisffini Noluz". However, even if we could effectively translate the Gibberese, the ravings of someone probably driven mad from witnessing the horrors of a baby harvest must be regarded with a jaundiced eye, at best.

Milan Plaza Court Motel - The center of Tennessee's fashion district.

If you're planning on attending this year's 1958 Ultimate Global Fashion Conference, here at ground zero of the world's fashion market, Milan, Tennessee, please consider staying with us at the Milan Plaza Court Motel... "where every court is also a plaza"!

Your visit begins at the historic "front office", where you can also renew your license plates and buy some bait, for your unskippable trip to the Milan Plaza Court Fishin' Hole, where we say "Mmmmm-MMM! That's good hole!"

You'll want to stop by your room next, so you can put your luggage away and change into your swimmin' costume. Don't forget to be fashionable!

Awnings cover each window, and are included in the price of the room. We think you'll find them downright homey!

Wooooo, nelly! Grab a eyeload of the bathing beauties over at the cement pond! That's what old Verne's doing! Verne ain't no fool!

The lawn chairs are provided as a convenience feature for our guests, and should be distributed to each, as befits his or her sitting needs... except that one chair where the strappy things are coming unwoven. We'll get right on that directly, probably this weekend. Just fold it up and set it aside.

You'll probably forget all about the outside world during your stay, but should you need to reach out to those poor folks not staying at the Milan Plaza Court, you'll find a telephone in every singe room! An additional phone can be found at the check-in desk. Calls are free, so long as you don't yammer on too long. Fran's expecting a call from her foot doctor about her corns.


One super sure-fire don't-miss feature you won't want to miss is our fabled and anciently mythical Hanging Gardens of Milan! How'd they get there? Noooo-body knoooows! Please buy a keychain at the gift counter, to commemorate your visit to the Hanging Gardens at the Milan Plaza Court Motel!

The Milan Plaza Court Motel - where there's always vacancy in our hearts... for YOU!

Click for 1600 px.

UPDATE: Diligent Reader John S. has just come back from the lab with this newly isolated Plaza Court Motel sign. Enhance the curb appeal of all your jpegs and stuff with this mid-century modern googie-style Milan Plaza Court neon sign. Make the Plaza Court Motel everywhere you wanna be! John says we're welcome!

Click for big.

Serving suggestion only. You may or may not live in war-torn Warsaw.

UPDATE to the UPDATE: Alert Reader Cyclotronboy has probably located the location of the Milan Plaza Court's location in The Google. He also lends some insight about pool removal. Thanks, CTB! His observations below the embedded GM window.

"Google Maps suggests that at the corner of 45E, 70A, and 79 is at the present-day corner of S 1st and W Van Hook St, c.f. http://tinyurl.com/hn6ogzb I suspect that the now-closed Executive Inn & Suites is the ancestral home of the Milan Court Plaza. Usually when a place undergoes massive restructuring and remodeling, a pool is left in place due to the costs of moving it. So I think it's probable that the pool in the postcard is the same pool on Google Earth."