Four Postcards Heading Back to Riverside, CA

Sometimes the advice you give other people is advice you end up following yourself.

While going through my late mother’s possessions, I found four postcards addressed to a Dr. W. W. Jones, a horticulturalist, at the University of California, Riverside. Two are postmarked 1958, and two more from 1961 and 1962, and two of the four show that Jones was connected to the university’s Citrus Experiment Station — the research unit that grew into UC Riverside itself. My mother never attended UCR, and as far as I know she had no interest in horticulture — but she collected widely and indiscriminately, and my best guess is that these came home from a garage sale or estate sale, destined for her postcard collection and never quite integrated into it.

That left me holding four pieces of someone else’s correspondence, tied to an institution with real historical weight in California agriculture, sitting in a box that had nothing to do with why they mattered.

I’ve written before about what to know before you donate photographs and documents to an archive, and this was a chance to actually do it rather than just recommend it. I tracked down the Rivera Library at UC Riverside, reached out to ask whether they’d be interested in postcards connected to the Citrus Experiment Station era, and got a yes. The postcards are in the mail as I write this.

There was no elaborate research project here — no name to trace through census records, no FAN Club to build. Just four postcards that belonged, historically, somewhere other than my mother’s collection, and a library willing to take them in.

That’s really the point of the donation advice I wrote earlier: not every item needs a dramatic story to be worth placing correctly. Sometimes it’s simply recognizing that an item has a natural home — a repository connected to the person, place, or institution it touches — and making the effort to get it there instead of letting it sit in a box because no one else claimed it.

The postcards from my mother’s collection are now on their way to a place where a researcher curious about Dr. W. W. Jones, the Citrus Experiment Station, or correspondence at UC Riverside in the late 1950s and early 1960s, might actually find them.

FEATURED IMAGE: Vanessa Wood, “4 Postcards,” photograph, 2026.