Postcards are easy in some cities. Want something that says San Francisco?
The Golden Gate Bridge. London? Big Ben. Paris? The Eiffel Tower.
But what do you pick for San Diego?
The Hotel del Coronado is probably the most instantly recognizable building in
the county, as close as San Diego comes to having an icon. But it isn't the best
seller here in terms of postcards.
That would be a shot from Point Loma looking east. It has sailboats, blue water,
the downtown skyline, mountains in the distance and a palm tree in the
foreground.
"There used to be two palm trees," Richard Brown said, a little forlornly. "They
cut one of them down."
Brown would know. He is the owner of Road Runner Card Co., the oldest postcard
maker in the county. The Point Loma shot, he said, has been king for decades.
Leo Sismani, who runs another local card company, California Scene, said the
same is true for his firm. "This view epitomizes the essence of San Diego's
beauty," he said.
Tuesday brings the official start of summer, which means tourists, and tourists
want postcards. Even in these high-tech times, people look for a souvenir that
hasn't changed fundamentally since its invention in the late 1800s. An estimated
6 million postcards are sold here annually.
Some people actually write a greeting on the back and send it in the mail to
make their friends and family jealous. But most postcards get bought as
keepsakes, brought home to be put in a scrapbook or tucked in the corner of a
mirror – a reminder of pleasant times in this sun-splashed corner of the world.
As such, the key to a good postcard is knowing where the tourists go. "It's got
to be an image that is going to represent their trip," Brown said.
So there are postcards of the beach and Balboa Park and the Star of India. There
are postcards of the flower fields in Carlsbad and the pier in Oceanside. The
companies have dozens of cards in racks at hundreds of shops around the county.
Summer is their busiest time.
Making sure a card represents a visitor's trip, of course, also means making
sure the photo is current. That's how Brown knows there's only one palm tree in
the Point Loma panorama when there used to be two.
Standing in the Road Runner warehouse east of downtown, Brown pulled a card of
the San Diego skyline from a box and said you could tell it was new because in
the photo the Omni Hotel, which opened last year, has been finished.
Similarly, the card for the aircraft carrier Midway had to be updated three
times in the past year, he said. The flight deck kept changing – new paint, car
parking, different arrangement of aircraft.
And the need to stay fresh is also why the postcard lines for both Road Runner
and California Scene include shots of Petco Park, the Padres' ballpark, now in
its second season.
Some cards of the coastline have a long shelf life, more than a decade, although
Brown said he sometimes hears from hotel clerks who get tired of staring at the
same pictures. His rejoinder: "You rent the same rooms every day, don't you?"
The proliferation of digital cameras and camera phones presents another
challenge. Why send a postcard when you can just e-mail a photo of yourself
standing in front of the pandas at the zoo?
"That's one of the reasons we use a lot more aerial photos now," Brown said. "We
want shots that the average person can't get on their own."
Sismani said the quality of postcards has improved so much over the years that
even when people take their own photos of, say, La Jolla Shores, they still
might buy a card because it better captures the scene.
"It is hard to have the ideal shot of each location with the ideal weather
condition," he said.
Ah, the weather.
It's a key reason people live here, and it's why others visit, so of course it
has something to do with postcards. But maybe not in the way you would expect.
A card of the sparkling ocean, blue sky overhead, miles of sandy beach – one
that seems to shout "summer in San Diego" – was probably shot in the winter.
The sky often is cleaner then. Less haze, less fog, fewer shimmering heat waves.
Pretty as a postcard.
Summer Flings is an
occasional series exploring what makes summer special in San Diego.