Postcards from the Edge: First Steps Toward Becoming a Global Citizen

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 My First Postcard Home — from Moscow, USSR March 1977

An Overview

Today Russia is always in the news. Thanks to Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine, many Americans and people the world over can make comments about Russian military aggression or the sad plight of Ukrainians.

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, the focus on the Russian threat — then characterized as the Soviet nuclear and ideological / communist threat — was just as powerful if not moreso. As an elementary school student I experienced bombing drills where we kids had to either kneel under our desks or be dispatched to the school basement in an ‘evacuation exercise.’

That experience was my first awareness of the Soviet Union. By the time I was in 6th grade, I could have been conditioned to have fear and hate toward the Russian empire. In fact, the opposite was true. I wanted to know what the full story was. For that reason, when our teacher Mrs. Redd announced that to better understand the unit in our social studies book about life in the USSR we would have a visitor to our class who would show us a slide show about Russia, I was fully onboard. When she called for a volunteer to assist the gentleman in bringing his equipment into the auditorium and in the set up, I raised my hand. As it happened, the visitor would turn out to be our local high school’s Russian teacher, Mr. Ed Taylor.

And that was the start of my journey. Mr. Taylor’s slides showcased his own journey to Russia, and inspired by the vibrant human images and the man who shared them, from that point forward, I would take every opportunity to learn more about Russia, its culture and people.

I studied basic Russian language both in 9th and 10th grades in high school and also learned something about its culture and history. My most vivid memory of the classes was memorizing dialogues and practicing those with my classmates.

By the time I entered university in September 1974, the die had been cast: I would be studying Russian language and Soviet Area studies as my major and, if the stars aligned right and I did well, maybe I could teach Russian in the future and inspire students just like Mr. Taylor did, or perhaps I could even score an analyst job with one of America’s intelligence services.

Lucky for me, once I was enrolled in Ohio State University, I learned that the uni had one of the only study abroad programs in the USSR that existed for students in the USA. I was in solid.

That brings us to this postcard. In March 1977, nearly through my 3rd year at OSU, I had left Columbus as a naive but wide-eyed 21-year-old, bound for Moscow and a term at the renowned Pushkin Institute of Moscow State University.

Though I had already studied Russian for two years in high school and had learned a lot about the country's history and people through eight trimesters at Ohio State, such an immersion was something else entirely. I would be living in the capital city of the USSR and we would not be allowed to speak English, which was both daunting and exhilarating. Alongside language practice, we had to attend lectures on Soviet culture and history, gaining clearer glimpses into daily life and government policy decisions under Brezhnev’s USSR. At the same time, I'd have a chance to get to know real Russians, which I had not done in Columbus save for the professors I'd met.

My journey to Moscow was itself a rite of passage: Columbus to JFK, Icelandic Air to Luxembourg via Reykjavík, bus to Frankfurt, flight to Berlin, crossing through Checkpoint Charlie into East Germany, then eastward by train through Poland and Belarus. Finally, we reached Moscow — a city that seemed impossibly romantic and mysterious.

On my very first night, a few American companions and I descended into the Moscow metro and emerged into Red Square. That moment — stepping onto the cobblestone of the city I'd learned so much about and which had played a central role in global geopolitics for 60 years — sealed my fascination with travel and cross-cultural discovery. There I was, standing in the heart of Russia, hooked.

Looking back now, half a century later, I feel that this postcard was more than a note home to my family. It’s a snapshot of my transformation: the moment I stepped beyond borders and began to see the world not as one simply divided by ideology, but as a place connected by our common values, dreams and interests in bonding. It was when I first truly sensed our shared humanity.

The Postcard’s Visual Imagery

This postcard pairs two powerful symbols of Soviet identity. In the background stands Moscow State University, one of Stalin’s monumental “Seven Sisters" skyscrapers, its soaring spire and wings embodying the intellectual ambition and disciplined grandeur of the Soviet state.

In the foreground rises a World War II memorial: two stark, tapering obelisks with a commemorative plaque and wreath at the base. Red flowers soften the austerity, but the monument’s purpose is clear — honoring the students and staff of Moscow State U. who died in the Great Patriotic War (our World War II).

Together, the university and the memorial present a carefully composed narrative of Soviet endurance, achievement, and national pride.

Stamp Imagery

The stamps themselves carry ideological weight. One depicts Sergei Korolev, chief architect of the Soviet space program, surrounded by rockets and medals — a celebration of cosmic ambition and technological prowess. Another commemorates the 60th anniversary of 1917's October Revolution.

Even ordinary mail at that time was infused with meaning: these stamps projected the USSR’s identity as a scientific, historical, and ideological superpower. Against this backdrop of monumentality and state symbolism sits my handwritten message — personal and tentative.

Postcard Text (1977)

Hi, well, I finally made it. It’s really unbelievable. So different.

The food has been different but good. We aren’t allowed to speak English and that’s pretty hard but I like it. I’ve already made many new friends, many from our group and a few from other groups who are staying here but not many Russians yet.

Well, I plan to write a letter soon so I’ll say more then.

Hope everything is OK.

Brad

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Closing Thought

That spring in Moscow sparked a lifelong pursuit of cultural understanding. It led to further study in Russian language and literature, travel across Europe and Asia, and eventually to a career shaped by and for global engagement. This postcard — tentative, wide-eyed, and sincere — was the first step on a path that continues to unfold. It reminds me that even small messages sent from the edge can carry the weight of a mind beginning to open.

🚂🏷️ Two Symbols of Transport, Two Symbols of Legacy

Among the heirlooms passed down from my grandfather, Jerry Blackstone, two small objects have carried extraordinary weight in my life. They may seem modest at first glance, but together they embody the story of my family’s enterprises, my own childhood memories, and the broader arc of the social mobility that shaped us.

The National Molasses Train Car Paperweight

This miniature bronze tank car, engraved with National Molasses Co. (and added info: N.Y.Y.D. and Bird’s Eye View Sugar Water), once sat on the wooden counter of the Thornville Elevator in Thornport, Ohio. To a young boy, it was more than a desk ornament; it was a symbol of the bustling grain business my grandfather owned and my father managed. I remember its weight in my hand, the feel of the metal, and the way it seemed to echo the larger rail cars lined up outside the nearby rail depot.

By my teenage years in the late 60s summers at the mill were filled with the dust of wheat harvest, the clatter of boxcars, and the camaraderie of my brothers and me as we helped probe the incoming wagonloads of wheat and how we would then prepare train cars for shipments. That tiny train car became a stand-in for the industry itself: the movement of grain, the rhythm of commerce, and the family labor that connected the Blackstone family into the fabric of our small-town's economy.

The 1915 Ohio License Plate

The second artifact is a weathered black-and-yellow Ohio license plate stamped 1915 — two years after my grandfather was born. I found it nailed to a wall in the back room of Thornville Hardware, my grandfather’s other enterprise. Even as a boy, I felt the metal plate’s resonance. I could imagine it affixed to a Model T, rattling down dirt roads where horses still trotted. For Grandpa’s generation, such plates marked modernity and progress, a tangible sign that the world was moving forward.

For me, the plate symbolized Grandpa's own remarkable journey: Leaving home in Carroll, Ohio, at 17, because of disagreements with his own father, Grandpa worked on local farms then became more settled under a local doctor and businessman, proving himself through smarts and diligence. His acumen and hard work eventually earned him ownership of both the grain mill and the hardware store, which were staples in my boyhood experience. It was this story of mobility — from humble beginnings to respected entrepreneur — that inspired me to make my own way in the world when I became a young man.

Legacy in Small Things

Together, these two artifacts — one tied to rail, the other to road — remind me that history lives not only in grand narratives but in the quiet endurance of people’s everyday objects. They carry the weight of family, community, and the inviting possibility of movement forward. Though Thornville Elevator and Hardware has been gone for over 30 years now, these simple items endure, whispering lessons about resilience, progress, and family legacy across the generations.

Amber Echoes from the Past: Medicinal Whiskey Bottles

 

The Ravine Find

On a quiet Sunday morning back home in rural Thornville, Ohio, 55 years ago, I joined Wirt and Judy Barrera—friends of my parents and our neighbours —for what we called a “dig.” Somehow the Barreras learned I had an early interest in antiques, a passion likely nurtured by my great-grandfather Ira Cooperrider and his daughter, my grandmother Carrie Blackstone, both collectors in their own right.

That morning, after we had walked a short ways through a fallow field just on the south edge of Thornville, we entered a wooded ravine and found the traces of a half century old dump. Among the twists of rusted farm machinery and kitchen appliances, I caught the glint of something reflecting the morning sun. Gloves on, I scraped away an inch or so of the hardened top soil around what appeared to be a small circle of darkened glass, and then below that, I carefully peeled away half a foot of earth from around the length of a fully intact glass bottle.

What I unearthed that day those many years ago was a pristine amber glass container embossed with the words “Belfast Malt Whiskey – For Medicinal Use.” It was crowned by a bold BM monogram. What a find! everyone exclaimed.

The bottle’s thick amber glass and pre-screw-top form placed it squarely in the 1890s–early 1900s, a time when whiskey was prescribed for everything from indigestion to nervous exhaustion.

The whiskey once held in this bottle was — as I learned later — marketed less as a spirit and more as a tonic. Produced in the late 19th century, it was a malt-based whiskey fortified with hops, intended to be smoother than grain spirits. Advertised for “nervous conditions,” indigestion, and general weakness, it was sold through pharmacies as a medicine rather than being poured in saloons. In practice, the 'medicine' straddled the line between remedy and indulgence (like ganja today), reflecting an era when alcohol was still widely prescribed by doctors as an actual treatment.

I've read how period advertisements for similar brands to the Belfast Malt, like Duffy’s Malt Whiskey, claimed it was “beneficial in old age, for illness and weakened vitality.” By 1907, federal regulators were already calling these medicinal whiskey promotions “gigantic frauds.” Belfast Malt Whiskey lived in that same cultural moment, sold as a cure-all in pharmacies across the Midwest.

Lucky for me, I developed a taste for straight whiskey back in the day, so this bottle carries meaning beyond the history. It has traveled with me ever since the early 70s, across decades and continents, a tangible link to my childhood and to the era before America's Prohibition in the 1920s and the introduction of municipal trash collection in the 1950s, back when rural ravines served as silent archives of everyday life.

The Collector’s Legacy

The second, shorter bottle in the first photo below, also amber glass and embossed, but with the added paper label, comes from my great-grandfather Ira Cooperrider’s collection, which was an assemblage of antiques and artifacts housed above his garage in rural Thorn township. Grandpa’s collection included dozens of period bottles and, literally, thousands of Native American stone tools and other materials he had gathered over many years.

This particular bottle bears the name of The Wendt-Bristol Drug Co., a Columbus pharmacy that operated, as stated on the label, opposite the McKinley Monument. With its cork top, prescription serial number, and illustrated label, it likely dates to the early 1900s, reflecting the transition from hand-blown to semi-automatic glass and the rise of branded pharmaceutical packaging.

Amber Echoes

Together, these bottles tell a story of medicinal whiskey practice, regional commerce, and my own family legacy. The taller artefact was unearthed when I was a curious teen, guided by neighbours who encouraged my budding passion for collecting. The other was preserved by my great-grandpa, a man who saw value in the everyday artifacts of Ohio’s past, and it was passed down as an heirloom. Both bottles now stand as amber echoes—reminders of where I came from, how far I’ve come, and what treasures and habits I’ve managed to hold on to along the way.