Mrs. Benjamin S. Rohrer lived in Leacock, a rural township in east-central Lancaster County, PA.
The large number of Amish and Mennonite farmers in the area account for the prevalence of German dialects as a first language of the population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leacock_Township,_Pennsylvania
In January of 1940, Mrs. Rohrer received a postcard from her granddaughter, Mary.
Mary mailed the postcard from Smoketown, a small village about five miles east of the city of Lancaster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoketown,_Pennsylvania
Leacock is less than six miles east of Smoketown.
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The face of the postcard is a charming image of Jesus; He is seated beneath a tree and surrounded by children of different races and nationalities.
The children seem to be attending to Him with interest and devotion.
Beneath the peaceful scene are two verses from Scripture:
“Suffer the little children to come unto me”, from the Gospel of St. Mark and “I will gather all nations and tongues…” from the book of the prophet Isaiah.
Despite the idyllic view of harmony and equality, one remembers that most churches in the United States were racially segregated at this time.
The postcard was published by the “S. P. Co.”, which I believe to be the Standard Publishing Company of Chicago – a non-denominational publisher of religious literature for Protestant churches.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Publishing
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On the reverse, Mary reports that “Lester is in the St. Joseph’s Hospital”.
St. Joseph Hospital was founded as a charity hospital in 1878; it was the first hospital within the city of Lancaster, PA.
Operated for many years by the Sisters of St. Francis, the hospital opened the first operating room in 1884 and a School for Nurses in 1902.
The sad saga of the sale of St. Joseph to large hospital corporations, and its eventual closing is capture in this article opposing the closure of the hospital:
Lester occupies a semi-private room, and Mary notes the visiting hours of the afternoon and the evening.
Mary and others “were in this afternoon” and found Lester to be “still rather weak”.
We don’t know what illness or condition necessitated Lester’s hospitalization – “the other boy in his room was operated on today for appendicitis”.
One hopes that Grandma was pleased by the news, that Lester made a full recovery, and that Mary and her grandmother continued postcard correspondence for many years.
