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A few weeks ago, I got a real letter in the real mail from a real person. She said my phone wasn’t working (this is common), nor was my email (also common), so she resorted to old fashioned means of communicating, which I believe to be superior in many ways, but that isn’t a topic for this post. (You can read about such things here.)

She was part of something called The Green Hotel Restoration Foundation, and they ran out of the 1000 notecards of my pencil drawing of their building. (That’s a burn rate of 38 cards per year, in case you are curious). The foundation wanted more cards.

Back in 1997, I didn’t have much of a computer, nor did I have a digital camera or a scanner. The only record I kept of my work was an occasional photocopy, a slide (remember Kodachrome?), or if the customer had cards or prints made, I’d keep an extra.

The printing company I used back then is out of business, and even if they weren’t, they certainly wouldn’t still have the plates and negatives used 26 years ago (that’s how offset printing use to be accomplished).

I called her, since obviously my email isn’t speaking to her email, and asked her for the original. 

Oh-oh. No one knows where it is. We had a great visit, then she told me that her cousin would take over the project.

Her cousin and I had many phone conversations, with lots of ideas batted around to figure out how to get more cards without having the original, and more ideas about where to look for it (the foundation balked at paying me to draw the hotel again), and we reached an impasse. 

Then I had an idea. I went rooting around in my many stacks, boxes, drawers, and binders of old cards and prints, and sure enough, I found the Green Hotel.

I scanned and photoshopped it into printing shape, since printing something with an ivory background will not yield good results.

A few more phone conversations, many undeliverable emails and lots of various attempts, and finally, finally, this drawing was in the determined and capable hands of The Green Hotel Restoration Foundation.

Then I wrote a copyright release letter and an invoice for the photoshop work. This wasn’t what one could refer to as highly profitable in terms of monetary gain, but I sure did enjoy talking to these two dynamic women, devoted to history, determined to get a thing accomplished, and very quick-minded.

To top it all off, Cousin Lady lives across the street from my brother-in-law’s parents former home, so despite being in a county to the south of Tulare County, the small-world-ness of my little life is alive and well.