Post cards from Karel

An ‘Auto’biography of History

Two Greeting Cards from Reinout
Yes, this time we’ll have two of my cards because I think that Karel is on vacation and I didn’t get one from his collection. The good thing is that I have a box full of all kinds of greeting cards. Actually that box just got twice as big. Let me explain. For years I was convinced that I had two boxes with cards, but there was just one in our house. What happened to the second box, or was I mistaken and had only seen the second box in my dreams? I hoped that packing everything up in 2017 to move to Decatur, GA, we would run across the missing box… no luck. Then, it would certainly unearth itself while unpacking the container… still no luck. A few weeks ago however it did show up when we were talking about that one beautiful box with the flower design that we used to have. “You mean this one?”, Henneke asked. Suddenly it all came back and I answered "Yes, that one honey, and the missing MG greeting cards are right in there, I bet you”… Bingo. So here we are, I organized all the cards by model and put tabs in the box, so they can easily be retrieved.

Big old headlights are beautiful objects and the first greeting card is one of my favorites. It came from the rediscovered box with the beautiful flowers. The card is blank inside and has not been used yet. The back reads: “Elaine’s TC, William A. Motta. Acrylic on canvas, and: The headlamp of an MG-TC transforms a rainbow of colors as they are refracted in the lens. The car depicted in this work once belonged to Elaine Bond, former publisher of Road & Track magazine.

The second card is a TD headlight. The note on the windshield reads: Hartelijk Gefeliciteerd, Dutch for Happy Birthday. It must have been readily available in 1989 in The Netherlands because I got two of them for my birthday that year: from my friend and colleague-model car collector (the late) Rob Verstraaten and from my brother-in-law Ton Burger.

~~ Reinout Vogt