nola.com16%
A 1953 postcard from a smooth-talking Bob leads to a Louisiana mystery 38%
By Jan Risher55%
7/19/2026, 12:00:00 PM
Topics: Postcards, Human Interest
BS Summary: This article contains 31 faulty reasoning types, including Biased Writer Voice, Availability Heuristic, and Ambiguity (Equivocation), with Anecdotal as the most egregious example at 13.7% saturation with 113 hits. Analysis detected 1,087 faulty-reasoning hits from 825 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 44.2% and a BS Rank of 38% (11,484 of 18,284 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 62.80% of the article peer group.
Bob wrote only 26 words.
Somehow, 73 years later, when I showed the postcard around the newsroom, five young women actually swooned.
In full disclosure, I did too.
On the back of a Times Square postcard, Bob wrote:
“Dear Janie,
Just came down from the Empire State Bldg, naturally my head is still up in the clouds — no wonder I thought of you.
Bob”
Despite punctuation issues, Bob’s message packs a punch.
Bob had serious game.
The postcard was postmarked 8:30 a.m. on April 24, 1953.
I suspect Bob had visited the Empire State Building the day before.
The weather was perfect — sunny, 75 degrees, with a low of 56.
Bob may have been so smooth that the sun was always shining.
I’m not exactly sure how or when I received the postcard.
It’s small.
It’s yellowed.
It’s printed on linen-finished cotton paper.
A similar one is for sale on eBay for $17.50.
It was made by a Boston company called ColourPicture Publication, which made postcards from 1938 to 1969.
Five summers of coordinating the Postcard Project have left me with boxes of postcards — new, handmade and decades old.
I never know quite what to do with them, but every now and then, one turns out to be a treasure.
The goal of the Postcard Project is to get postcards from all 50 states and as many countries as possible.
Bob's postcard was addressed to Miss Mary Jane Gagnier at Marygrove College in Detroit.
Its message was enough to send me down a rabbit hole.
Who was the woman who could inspire a young man to be so poetic and thoughtful?
I wanted to know her!
Finding her didn’t take long.
Mary Jane Gagnier Gelpi lived the last two decades of her life in Baton Rouge.
She died on the first day of April this year.
Her obituary confirmed that she attended Marygrove College in Detroit.
Then, my search led me to Facebook, where I realized that three years ago, she had sent me a friend request.
Maybe that was when she gathered her old postcards and sent them my way.
She and I had other mutual friends.
I started talking to people who knew her and learned that she was as delightful as I imagined.
One distant relative described her as “pure sunshine.”
Seemed appropriate.
I was able to track down her son, Dr.
Greg Gelpi in Baton Rouge.
I knew, based on the details of her life I had learned, that she didn’t meet and marry his father for several years after Bob sent this postcard in 1953.
Still, asking about a parent's old romance takes a certain sensitivity.
Explaining the postcard to him turned out to be trickier than I expected.
Bob had written it to Janie.
When I read that version of the card to Dr.
Gelpi, he didn’t register the connection.
“Well, I don’t know either of those people,” he said at first.
I then explained that it was addressed to his mom and, apparently, whoever Bob was had called her “Janie.”
Oh.
“Nobody really called her ‘Janie,’ but she might have been called that when she was at Marygrove or something,” he said.
He explained that in his mother’s last days, she told him she had been engaged to someone else before she met his dad.
Was it Bob?
We’re not certain.
I told Dr.
Gelpi that everyone I spoke with who knew his mom said that she was an incredible human.
In 1967, she was working on the cutting edge of computerization.
At the age of 91, she earned her Life Master status in bridge.
I regretted not knowing her.
I said, “She must have read that I was looking for postcards.”
That made sense, he said.
“ All the way up to her death, she was very hyper.
She had 10 million things going on with the dietetic stuff and her food service career,” he said.
“That would make sense that if she saw you were collecting cards.”
I solved only half the mystery.
Without more than "Bob," I didn't have enough to go on — no last name, no college.
One postcard carried me into the life of a woman I never met and a man whose name I may never know.
That's the magic of postcards — they can outlive moments they were meant to preserve.
Sometimes they outlive the people who wrote or received them.
*The 2026 Postcard Project has now received postcards from 43 states — down to missing seven states, four of which start with the letter N (Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire and North Dakota).
The other missing states are Oklahoma, South Carolina and Vermont.
*The 2026 Postcard Project ends on Labor Day.
If you’d like to participate, send postcards to Jan Risher, The Advocate, 10705 Rieger Road, Baton Rouge, LA 70809.
Email Jan Risher at jan.risher@theadvocate.com.
Analysis
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