Postcards

From the mouths of kids: A thoughtful and sensitive reader wrote a letter to the editor this week suggesting a way America could get around this anthrax mail problem. Mike LaRosa is just 11, but despite his young age - or perhaps because of it - he proposed a remedy that is impressively straightforward. Send more postcards, Mike said. The young man was talking about Christmas cards, and his special concern is postal workers and their potential exposure to spores lurking within sealed envelopes.

The collapse of the World Trade Center towers has sent New Yorkers scurrying to find pictures of the city they knew. "I have to realize New York's skyline doesn't look like this any longer," said Dayna Camp, 21, as she pondered watercolor paintings of Lower Manhattan's skyline at Phantom of Broadway, a Broadway gift shop between 50th and 51st Streets. "So much has changed. " Ellen Synn, 32, a shopper at Crown Art Gallery Inc., on Broadway between 48th and 49th Streets, said: "It's like having something historical.

Alice Steer Wilson, 74, whose watercolor scenes of Cape May have graced thousands of postcards, died Sunday from breast cancer at her Merchantville home. Mrs. Wilson found a niche with watercolors that have appeared and been praised at numerous art exhibitions, from the Chalfonte Hotel in Cape May, to the Perkins Center for the Arts in Moorestown, to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Fellowship. But the reproductions of her Cape May scenes on postcards and note cards are known far beyond the area.

Kelley Miller has found the key that unlocks a first grader's desire to write: big trucks. Miller, a first-grade teacher at Lower Pottsgrove Elementary School, has sparked her pupils to practice the fading art of letter-writing by finding them a prolific pen pal in Dale Banks, a truck driver. Banks, 56, and Miller, 27, were connected through Trucker Buddy International, a national nonprofit organization that makes correspondents of truckers and schoolchildren. Miller first heard of the organization when she was a long-term substitute at an Upper Merion elementary school six years ago. Since then, she has been eager to use it in her own class.

Andrew Herman stood outside the Growden Mansion in Bensalem and recalled his youth. He remembered being 13 and getting into mischief by setting a fire in the bakehouse on the grounds, being 11 and hanging out in the backyard with his friends, being 20 and discovering the import of the hundreds of years of history overflowing from the estate just a short walk from where Herman grew up in Bensalem. That love of history has led to Herman's latest book, the Lower Bucks County volume of Arcadia Publishing's Historic Postcards.

The park in "Postcards from Paradise Park" is a place for trailer homes, and it's where a pompous ad exec winds up after losing his wife and his job. If this sounds familiar, it may be because "Postcards" follows the same general arc as "Lost in America," Albert Brooks' comedy about a big-shot ad man who also hits rock bottom in a mobile home. "Lost in America" was a mini-classic, anticipating and defining the kind of midlife issues that "Postcards" also explores, though not as memorably.

An apparent grassroots storm overwhelmed the Capitol mailroom early last year: at least 15,000 postcards demanding that lawmakers allow Bell Atlantic to offer long-distance telephone service in Pennsylvania. Such passion on this obscure issue puzzled politicians, who, it turns out, were right to be skeptical. Bell Atlantic of Pennsylvania has agreed to pay $250,000 to settle charges that it fraudulently used consumers' names in the lobbying campaign, Attorney General Mike Fisher announced yesterday.

Flipping through her albums of turn-of-the-century postcards, Betty Davis sees Bucks County as it was 100 years ago. Last week, as she tutored visitors on the finer points of postcard collecting, Davis stopped and pointed out a picture of the Wycombe train station. "Newton worked for the railroad, you know," she said, speaking as if she were talking about a long-lost friend or relative. "Newton" was Newton Arnold, one of the two Arnold brothers who produced a line of postcards favored by collectors of Bucks County memorabilia, Davis said.

Lavender crocuses peeking through fresh snow. A majestic, centuries-old tree. A historic barn shrouded in early-morning fog. These are the scenes of Bucks County captured by photographer John D. Sikora of Yardley in his 2000 calendar. "The advantage to [photographing] Bucks County is the river and canal and the whole dynamics between the western and eastern regions - from the cliffs and rocks to the flat land," Sikora said. "In Montgomery County, you don't have that dramaticness.

Harleysville resident Danielle Melanie Brown is heading to Broadway to perform in Les Miserables. Brown, 8, will share the role of the young Cosette with two other girls. She will fill a vacancy created when a girl left the show, which plays at the Imperial Theatre, to perform in another production. "It takes a lot of work," Danielle said this week as she prepared to begin rehearsals in New York. The prospect of being on stage made her "very excited," she said, adding that she did not mind a large audience.