It's 1981. Roy Richardson is a manager at a Los Angeles computer company. A devout Mormon, he has a two-year-old son, with two daughters yet to be born. He has a little over ten years to live.
I was that two-year-old and Roy was my father. I grew up without him, knowing the outlines of his life but not the details. In 2006, at my mother's house, I found three boxes of details.
My father could never keep up a diary, but he bought over a thousand postcards between 1981 and 1991. On most of them he wrote notes to himself, reminders of what he'd done that day. Others he mailed to us from his business trips. A few he left blank—he just liked the pictures. This site is my attempt to build a picture of my father's life out of photographs taken by others.
To see a randomly selected postcard every day, follow @RoyPostcards on Twitter.
"Recognizing that my writings in this journal in recent years have been sparse, I must comment that my life has not been entirely undocumented. I have accumulated several hundred postcards — together with Frances, Leonard, Susanna, and Rachel — from our outings around town, our long-distance trips and my business trips. Many evenings in the hotel have found me writing postcards to my family and friends and also recording my own experiences on postcards. There are some I hope who will find them of some historical and biographical value — as well as lovely to look at."—From Roy's journal, 1985
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I've blurred out a few personal details. There are several postcards in the collection from other people; in most cases I didn't put those postcards up.
If you like this project, you might also like to see Roy's computer buttons.
This document (source) is part of Crummy, the webspace of Leonard Richardson (contact information). It was last modified on Friday, November 27 2015, 20:49:15 Nowhere Standard Time and last built on Friday, February 03 2023, 10:00:17 Nowhere Standard Time.
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